They were first home and the hamlet was in darkness, but the twilight was luminous over the fields and the sky right round to the north was still faintly pink. A cat rubbed itself against their legs and mewed; the pig in the sty woke and grunted a protest against the long day’s neglect. A light breeze rustled through the green corn and shivered the garden bushes, releasing the scent of stocks and roses and sun-baked grass and the grosser smells of cabbage beds and pigsties. It had been a great day—the greatest day they were ever likely to see, however long they lived, they were told; but it was over and they were home and home was best.

After the jubilee nothing ever seemed quite the same. The old Rector died and the farmer, who had seemed immovable excepting by death, had to retire to make way for the heir of the landowning nobleman who intended to farm the family estates himself. He brought with him the new self-binding reaping machine and women were no longer required in the harvest field. At the hamlet several new brides took possession of houses previously occupied by elderly people and brought new ideas into the place. The last of the bustles disappeared and leg-o’-mutton sleeves were “all the go.” The new Rector’s wife took her Mothers’ Meeting women for a trip to London. Babies were christened new names; Wanda was one, Gwendolyn another. The innkeeper’s wife got in cases of tinned salmon and Australian rabbit. The Sanitary Inspector appeared for the first time at the hamlet and shook his head over the pigsties and privies. Wages rose, prices soared, and new needs multiplied. People began to speak of “before the jubilee” much as we in the nineteen-twenties spoke of “before the war,” either as a golden time or as one of exploded ideas, according to the age of the speaker.

And all the time boys were being born or growing up in the parish, expecting to follow the plough all their lives, or, at most, to do a little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know them, and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that tiny community never came back again. A brass plate on the wall of the church immediately over the old end house seat is engraved with their names. A double column, five names long, then, last and alone, the name of Edmund.

OVER TO CANDLEFORD

16

As They Were

“Come the summer, we’ll borrow old Polly and the spring cart from the ‘Wagon and Horses’ and all go over to Candleford,” their father said, for the ten-millionth time, thought Laura. Although he had said it so often they had never been. They had not been anywhere farther than the market town for the Saturday shopping.