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Chapters (44)
  1. Lark Rise to Candleford
  2. Copyright
  3. LARK RISE
  4. 1
  5. 2
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  19. OVER TO CANDLEFORD
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  34. CANDLEFORD GREEN
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The women were more fashion-minded than the men, but their efforts to keep up-to-date were confined to the ‘Sunday best’ which they seldom took from their boxes upstairs. For everyday wear, they contented themselves with a large, well-ironed white apron to cover their patches and darns. To go to the well, or from house to house in the hamlet, they threw a plaid woollen shawl over their shoulders, or, in bad weather, drew it up to cover their heads. Then, with a strong pair of pattens under their feet, they were ready for anything.

They were still much as their forefathers had been; but change was creeping in, if slowly. A weekly newspaper came into every house, either by purchase or borrowing, and although these were still written by educated men for the educated, and our hamlet intellects had sometimes to reach up a little for their ideas, ideas were slowly percolating.

Having to reach up for ideas came naturally to a generation brought up on the Bible. Their fathers had looked upon “the Word” as their one unfailing guide in life’s difficulties. It was their story book, their treasury of words and sayings, and, for those who could appreciate it, their one book of poetry. Many of the older people still believed every word in the Bible to be literally true. Others were not so sure; that tale of Jonah and the whale, for instance, took a good deal of swallowing. But the newspaper everybody believed in. “I seed it in the paper, so it must be true” was a saying calculated to clinch any argument.

17

A Hamlet Home

Laura arrived on this scene on a cold December morning when snow lay in deep drifts over the fields and blocked the roads. There were no fireplaces in cottage bedrooms such as her mother’s was, and the relays of hot bricks, baked in the oven and swathed in flannel, lost their warmth coming upstairs. “Oh, we were so cold, so cold,” her mother would say when telling the story, and Laura liked that “we.” It showed that even a tiny baby who had never been outside the room in which she was born was already a person.

Her parents’ life was not quite so hard as that of most of their neighbours, for her father was a stonemason and earned more money than the farm-workers, although in the eighteen-eighties a skilled craftsman, such as he was, received little more in wages than today’s unemployment pay.