The National School for the parish had been built in the mother village, a mile and a half from the hamlet. Only about a dozen children lived there and more than three times that number lived at Lark Rise; but, as the Church was there and the Rectory and the Manor House, it far outweighed the hamlet in importance. Up and down the long, straight road between the two places, the hamlet children travelled in bands. No straggling was allowed. An inclination to walk alone, or in twos or threes, was looked upon as an unpleasant eccentricity.

Most of the children were clean and at least moderately tidy when they left home, although garments might be too large or too small or much patched. “Patch upon patch is better’n holes” was one of the hamlet mothers’ maxims. The girls wore large white or coloured print pinafores over their ankle-length frocks, and their hair was worn scraped back from the brow and tied on the crown or plaited into a tight pigtail. Laura appeared on the first morning with her hair pushed back with an Alice in Wonderland comb under a porkpie hat which had belonged to one of her cousins, but this style of headgear caused so much mirth that she begged that evening to be allowed to wear ‘a real hat’ and to have her hair plaited.

Her companions were strong, well-grown children between the ages of four and eleven. They ran and shouted and wrestled the whole way, or pushed each other over stone heaps or into ditches, or stopped to climb into the hedges, or to make sorties into fields for turnips or blackberries, or to chase the sheep, if the shepherd was not handy.

Every one of the stone heaps which dotted the grass margins at intervals for road-mending was somebody’s castle. “I’m the king of the castle. Get down, you dirty rascal!” was the cry of the first to reach and mount it, and he, or she, would hold it against all comers with kicks and blows. Loud cries of “You’re a liar!” “You’re another!” “You daren’t!” “Yes, I dare, then!” “Let’s see you do it!” punctuated even their most peaceful games. There was no “Sez you,” or “O.K., Chief,” for the pictures had not been invented, and the more civilizing wireless, with its Children’s Hour, was still farther in the future. Even compulsory education was comparatively new. They were an undiluted native product.