A few of the older men were equally poor-spirited. One election day the children, coming home from school, met an old, semi-bedridden neighbour, riding, propped up with cushions, in a luxurious carriage to the polling station. A few days afterwards, when Laura had taken him some small delicacy from her mother, he whispered to her at parting: “Tell y’re dad I voted Liberal. He! He! They took th’ poor old hoss to th’ water, but he didn’t drink out o’ their trough. Not he!”

When Laura gave her father the message he did not seem as pleased as their neighbour had expected. He said he thought it was “a bit low down to roll up in anybody’s carriage to vote against them’; but her mother laughed and said: ‘Serves ‘em right for dragging the poor old hunks out of bed in that weather.”

Apart from politics, the hamlet people’s attitude towards those they called “the gentry” was peculiar. They took a pride in their rich and powerful country-house neighbours, especially when titled. The old Earl in the next parish was spoken of as “our Earl” and when the flag, flown from the tower of his mansion to show he was in residence, could be seen floating above tree-tops they would say: “I see our family’s at home again.”

They sometimes saw him pass through the hamlet in his carriage, an old, old man, sunk deep in cushions and half-buried in rugs, often too comatose to be aware of, or acknowledge, their curtsies. He had never spoken to them or given them anything, for they did not live in his cottages, and in the way of Christmas coals and blankets he had his own parish to attend to; but the men worked on his land, though not directly employed by him, and by some inherited instinct they felt he belonged to them.

For wealth without rank or birth they had small respect. When a rich retired hatter bought a neighbouring estate and set up as a country gentleman, the hamlet was scandalized. “Whoo’s he?” they said. “Only a shopkeeper pretending to be gentry. I ‘udn’t work for him, no, not if he paid me in gold!” One man who had been sent to clean out a well in his stable-yard and had seen him, said: “I’d a good mind to ask him to sell me a hat;” and that was repeated for weeks as a great joke. Laura was told in after years that their better-educated neighbours were almost as prejudiced; they did not call on the newly rich family. That was before the days when a golden key could open any door.