The gentry flitted across the scene like kingfishers crossing a flock of hedgerow sparrows. They saw them sweeping through the hamlet in their carriages, the ladies billowing in silks and satins, with tiny chenille-fringed parasols held at an angle to protect their complexions. Or riding to hounds in winter, the men in immaculate pink, the women sitting their side-saddles with hour-glass figures encased in skin-tight black habits. “Looks for all the world as if she’d been melted and poured into it, now don’t she?” On raw, misty mornings they would trot their horses through on their way to the Meet, calling to each other in high-pitched voices it was fun to imitate.

Later in the day they would often be seen galloping full-stretch over the fields and then the men at work there would drop their tools and climb on the five-barred gates for a better view, or stop their teams and straighten their backs at the plough-tail to cup their hands to their mouths and shout: “Tally-ho: A-gallop, a-gallop, a-lye, a-lye, Tally-ho.”

When the carriages passed through, many of the women would set down the buckets they were carrying and curtsy, and the boys would pull their forelocks and the girls bob their knees, as they had been taught to do at school. This was an awkward moment for Laura, because her father had said, while he had no objection to Edmund saluting any lady—though he hoped, for heaven’s sake, he would not do it by pulling his own hair, like pulling a bell-rope—he was determined that no daughter of his should bow the knee, excepting at “The Name” in church or to Queen Victoria, if ever she happened to pass that way. Their mother laughed. “When at Rome do as the Romans do,” she said.

“This is not Rome,” their father retorted. “It’s Lark Rise—the spot God made with the left-overs when He’d finished creating the rest of the earth.”

At that their mother tossed her head and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She had, as she said, no patience with some of his ideas.