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with a second apron of sacking and a pair of Pattens in a large open basket upon her
arm. Charwomen, too, carried these baskets, ‘in case’, as they said—meaning in the
hope that something or other would be given them to put into them. They were
seldom disappointed.
All day on the two washdays, steam and the smell of soapsuds came in great
puffs from the window and door of the small, detached building known as the ‘wash-
house’, and the back yard was flooded with waste water flowing down the gutter to
the open drain, while the old washerwoman clattered about in her pattens, or stood at
her wooden washtub, scouring and rinsing and wringing and blueing, and Zillah, as
red as a turkeycock and in a fiendish temper, oversaw and helped with the work in
hand. Indoors, Laura washed up and got the meals. If Miss Lane wanted anything
cooked, she had to cook it herself, but cold food was the rule. A ham or half a ham
had usually been boiled a few days before.
Soon, sheets and pillow-cases and towels were billowing in the wind on a line
the whole length of the garden, while Miss Lane’s more intimate personal wear dried
modestly on a line by the henhouse, ‘out of the men’s sight’. All went well if the
weather happened to be fine. If not, very much the reverse. The old country saying
which referred to a disagreeable-looking man or woman: ‘He’—or she—‘looks about
as pleasant as a wet washday’ would have lost its full flavour of irony if used in these
days.
On the evening of the second washday, the washerwoman departed with three
shillings, wages for the two days, in her pocket, and in her basket whatever she had
been able to collect. The rest of the week was spent by the family in folding,
sprinkling, mangling, ironing and airing the clothes. The only pleasant thing about the
whole orgy of cleanliness was to see the piles of snowy linen, ironed and aired and
mended, with lavender bags in the folds, placed on the shelves of the linen closet and
to know that six whole weeks would pass before the next upheaval.
Laura’s modest stock of three of everything was, of course, inadequate for
such a period; so, before she had come there, it had been arranged that her washing
should be sent home to her mother every week. The clothes Laura sent home one
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week were returned by her mother the next, so Laura received a parcel from home
every Saturday. It had had a cross-country journey in two different carriers’ carts, but
it still seemed to smell of home.
It was her treat of the week to open it. She would bundle the clean clothes,
beautifully ironed and folded as they were, higgledy-piggledy upon her bed and seize
the little box or package she always found within containing a few little cakes her
mother had baked for her, or a cooked home-made sausage or two, or a tiny pot of
jam or jelly, or flowers from the home garden. There was always something.
But before she put the flowers in water or tasted a crumb of the food, she
would read her mother’s letter. Written in the delicate, pointed Italianate handwriting
her mother had been taught when a child by an old lady of ninety, the letter would
usually begin, ‘Dear Laura’. Only on special occasions would her mother write, ‘My
own dear’, for she was not demonstrative. After the beginning would come the
formula: ‘I hope this will find you still well and happy, as it leaves us all at home. I
hope you will like the few little things I enclose. I know you have got plenty and
better where you are, but you may like to taste the home food’, or ‘smell the home
flowers’.
Then followed the home news and news of the neighbours, all told in simple,
homely language, but with the tang of wit and occasional spice of malice which made
her conversation so racy. She always wrote four or five pages and often ended her
letters with ‘My pen has run away with me again’, but there never was a word too
much for Laura. She kept her mother’s letters to her for years and afterwards wished
she had kept them longer. They deserved a wider public than one young daughter.
At that time Laura had, as it were, one foot in each of two worlds. Behind her
lay her country childhood and country traditions, many of which were still current at
Candleford Green. Miss Lane’s and several similar establishments also still
flourished there; but new ideas and new ways were seeping in from the outer world
which were still unknown at Lark Rise, and with these Laura was becoming
acquainted through friends she was making of her own age.
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Some of these she came to know through talking to them over their postoffice
business; others through her relatives in Candleford town, or because they belonged
to families approved of by Miss Lane. They had most of them been brought up in
different circumstances from those of her own childhood and they spoke of ‘poor
people’ and ‘cottage people’ in a way which grated on Laura; but they were lively
and amusing and, on the whole, she enjoyed their company.
When she met one of these girls in the street, she would sometimes be invited
to ‘Come into the wigwam and have a palaver’, and they would go up carpeted stairs
into the crowded, upholstered drawing-room over the shop and exchange confidences.
Or the friend would play her latest ‘piece’ upon the piano for Laura and Laura would
sit and listen, or not listen, but just sit and take mental notes.
There was a piano in every drawing-room and there were palms in pots and
saddle-bag suites of furniture and hand-painted milking-stools and fire-screens, and
cushions and antimacassars in the latest art shades; but, beyond bound volumes of the
Quiver and the Sunday at Home and a few stray copies of popular novels, mostly of a
semi-religious character, there were no books to be seen. The one father who was a
reader remained faithful to those works of Charles Dickens which his parents had
taken in monthly parts. Most of the fathers of such families found sufficient reading
in their Daily Telegraph, and the mothers, on Sunday afternoons, dozed over
Queechy or The Wide Wide World. The more daring and up to date among the
daughters, who liked a thrill in their reading, devoured the novels of Ouida in secret,
hiding the book beneath the mattresses of their beds between whiles. For their public
reading they had the Girls’ Own Paper.
And that was in the ‘nineties, afterwards to be named—by a presumably more
innocent generation—the ‘Naughty Nineties’. The clever, witty, but, oh! so
outrageous! books of the new writers of the day were, no doubt, read in some of the
large country houses around, and they may even have found their way into rectories;
but no whisper of the stir they were making in the outer world of ideas had penetrated
to the ordinary country home. A little later, the trial of Oscar Wilde brought some
measure of awareness, for was it not said that he was ‘one of these new poets’? and it
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just showed what a rotten lot they were. Thank God, the speaker had always disliked
poetry.
The tragedy of Oscar Wilde did nothing to lessen their natural distrust of
intellect, but it did enlighten the younger generation in a less desirable manner. There
were vices, then, in the world one had not hit her to heard of—vices which, even now,
were only hinted at darkly, never described. Fathers for weeks kept the newspaper
locked up with their account books. Mothers, when appealed to for information,
shuddered and said in horrified accents: ‘Never let me hear that name pass your lips
again.’
Miss Lane, when asked outright what all this fuss was about, said: ‘All I
know is that it’s some law about two men living together, but you don’t want to
bother your head about things like that!’ ‘But what about Old Ben and Tom Ashley?’
Laura persisted, and was told that those two innocent old comrades had already had
their windows broken with stones after dark. People thought, after that, they would
leave the village, but they did not. Whoever heard of old soldiers running away? All
that happened was that Tom, who had formerly spent most of his time indoors, went
out more, and that Ben’s walk made him look more than ever as if he had a ram-rod
down his back. It was those who had thrown the stones who slunk round corners
when they saw Ben or Tom coming.
But although, until that time, not only out of the main stream of ideas but
unaware of its existence, before the decade was ended the Candleford Greenites had a
Yellow Book of their own in the form of the all-conquering weekly periodical called
Answers. Already its green counterpart, Tit-Bits, was taken by almost every family,
and the snippets of information culled from its pages were taken very seriously
indeed. Apparently it gave deep satisfaction to the majority of the younger people to
know how many years of an average life were spent in bed and how many months of
his life a man spent shaving and a woman doing her hair. ‘If all the sausages eaten at
breakfast in this country on one Sunday morning were stretched out singly, end to
end, how many miles do you suppose they would reach?’ one neighbour, newly
primed, would ask another. Or, in lighter mood, ‘What did the cyclist say to the
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farmer whose cockerel he had run over?’ and, only too often, the answer came pat,
for the neighbour had just read his copy of Tit-Bits. The title of Tit-Bits furnished a
catchword which could always be used with effect when an unfamiliar taste was
discovered or an unfamiliar opinion expressed. Then ‘Don’t try to be funny. We’ve
read about you in Tit-Bits!’ said scathingly was, in the slang of the day, ‘absolutely
the last word’.
The girls Laura saw most of at that time were tradesmen’s daughters, living at
home, employed only in keeping their fathers’ business books or in helping their
mothers with the lighter housework. These were known as the ‘home birds’; others
belonging to the same families were away from home, earning their own living as
shop assistants in one of the big London stores, or as school-teachers or nursery
governesses. One was in training as a nursing probationer in a London hospital and
another was book-keeper and receptionist at a boarding-house. Tradesmen’s
daughters no longer went into domestic service, unless one, after an apprenticeship to
dressmaking and a second apprenticeship to hairdressing, became a lady’s maid. Nor
did they associate much with the domestic staffs in the big houses, and this not
because of snobbishness, but because their lives and interests ran along different lines.
The village social system in which the first footman is paired off with the grocer’s
daughter and the second footman with the postoffice girl as a matter of etiquette
belongs to the world of fiction.
The home birds were not all of them content with light household duties and,
for pleasure, the choir practices and tea-drinkings and village concerts their mothers
in their time had found sufficient amusement. A few of the boldest among them were
already beginning to talk about their right to live their own lives as they wished.
According to them, their parents’ old-fashioned ideas were their main obstacle. ‘Pa’s
so old-fashioned. You’d think he had been born in the year dot,’ these would say.
‘And Mama’s not much better. She’d like us to talk prunes and prisms and be indoors
by ten o’clock and never so much as look at a fellow before he had shown her a
certificate of good character.’ Far from feeling under any obligation to those who had
brought them up and, as Laura in her inexperience thought, been so generous to them,
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they seemed to think their parents existed chiefly to give them whatever they
happened to wish for most at the moment—one of the new safety bicycles, or a
sealskin coat, or an outing to London. The parents, on their side, preached
circumspect behaviour, obedience, and gratitude as a daughter’s first duties, and
many clashes ensued.
‘I didn’t ask to be born, did I?’ one girl reported herself as saying to her father,
and his retort, ‘No; and if you had you wouldn’t have been if I had known as much
about you as I do now,’ was repeated by her as an instance of the ignorance and
brutality with which she had to contend.
‘Straining at the leash, I am. Straining at the leash,’ said Alma dramatically
when telling the story to Laura, and Laura, looking round the pretty bedroom and at
the new summer outfit, complete with white kid gloves and a parasol, laid out on the
bed for her admiring inspection, thought that, at least, the leash was a handsome one.
But she did not say so, for even she, brought up in a harder school, could understand
that it must be annoying to be treated as a child at twenty, and to be forbidden to do
this or do that because it was ‘not the thing’, and have to depend for every little thing
on a parent’s generosity.
But the rebellious daughter was the exception. Most of the girls Laura knew
were contented with their lot. They enjoyed helping in the house and making Mama
bring it up to date and giving tea-parties and playing the piano. Some of these were of
the type then called ‘sunbeams in the home’: good, affectionate, home-loving girls,
obviously created for marriage, and most of them did marry and, there can be no
doubt, made excellent wives for their own male counterparts.
Laura cannot be said to have been really popular with any of them. Her
Candleford town connections vouched for her to some extent, but her own personal
antecedents were too humble and her dress and accomplishments fell too short of
their own standards for her to rank entirely as one of themselves. Perhaps she was
most valued by them as the possessor of a ready ear for confidences and for what
they called ‘repartee’—a light, bantering form of conversation then much in fashion.
But Laura enjoyed their company, and it was good for her. She no longer looked, as
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the neighbours at home had sometimes said, as if she had all the weight of the world
on her shoulders.
Those were the days of Miss Lotty Collins’s all-conquering dance and song,
‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!’ and the words and tune swept the countryside like an
epidemic. The air that summer was alive with its strains. Ploughmen bawled it at the
plough-tail, harvesters sang it in the harvest field, workmen in villages painted the
outside of houses to its measure, errand boys whistled it and schoolchildren yelled it.
Even housewives caught the infection and would attempt a tired little imitation of the
high kick as they turned from the clothes-lines in their gardens singing ‘Ta-ra-ra-
boom-de-ay’.
Early in the morning, while dew still roughened the turf of the green, Laura’s
friend at the grocer’s, dusting the drawing-room, at sight of the keys of the open
piano, would drop her duster, sink down on the music stool, and from the open
window the familiar strain would be wafted:
Such a nice young girl, you see,
Just out in Society.
Everything I ought to be.
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
A blushing bud of innocence,
Pa declares a great expense.
The old maids say I have no sense,
But the boys agree I’m just immense,
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
Then the madness would seize her and she would pirouette about the room
and come down with such weight from the high kick that her father, honest tradesman,
would call urgently to her from the foot of the stairs to remember the drawing-room
was immediately over the shop and customers might come in any moment. But, even
he, having worked off his annoyance, would go back to his books or his scales
humming between his teeth the prevailing tune.
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During the day, when the master’s back was turned and the shop for the
moment was clear of customers, the young men behind the counter would gather up
their white aprons in their hands and kick and dance a parody.
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Were there such things as death
and want and grief and misery in that world? If so, youth possessed a charm to banish
them from its thoughts in ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’.
It would seem that the silly, light-hearted words of the song fitted the tune to
perfection; but they were often ‘improved’ upon. One version, sung by lounging
youths beneath the chestnut tree on the green, perhaps nearer the end of the long run
of the song, went:
Lotty Collins has no drawers.
Will you kindly lend her yours?
She is going far away
To sing Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
But that was sung with the intention of annoying any girl who might happen
to be passing. And she would be annoyed. Shocked, too, to hear such an intimate
undergarment mentioned in public, and little think that the garment, under that name
at least, would pass with the song.
Laura enjoyed life at Candleford Green. In summer the sun seemed to shine
perpetually and the winter flew past before she had done half the things she had saved
for the long evenings. She was young and she had gay new friends and nicer clothes
than she had ever had before and was growing up and could kick as high as anybody
to the tune of ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!’
But something within her remained unsatisfied. She had her hours of freedom.
Every other Sunday, if Miss Lane could spare her, which was not always, she would
dress with care and walk into Candleford town for tea with her relatives. She was
welcomed warmly, and the hours she spent with her favourite uncle and aunt were
pleasant hours, even though her cousins of her own age were away. She enjoyed the
Candleford Green village entertainments and the laughing, high-spirited company of
her village friends, and Miss Lane’s garden was lovely and green and secluded and
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she spent many happy hours there. But none of these pleasures seemed entirely to
satisfy her. She missed—missed badly and even pined for—her old freedom of the
fields.
Candleford Green was but a small village and there were fields and meadows
and woods all around it. As soon as Laura crossed the doorstep, she could see some
of these. But mere seeing from a distance did not satisfy her; she longed to go alone
far into the fields and hear the birds singing, the brooks tinkling, and the wind
rustling through the corn, as she had when a child. To smell things and touch things,
warm earth and flowers and grasses, and to stand and gaze where no one could see
her, drinking it all in.
She never spoke of this longing to any one. She accused herself of discontent
and told herself, ‘You can’t have everything,’ but the craving remained until,
unexpectedly, it was gratified in fullest measure and in a way which seemed to her to
be wholly delightful, though, on this latter point, very few of those she knew were
inclined to agree.
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Приложение 2
«Та-ра-ра-бумбия!»
Освоившись в новом окружении, Лора поняла, что счастливее, или, по
крайней мере, веселее, чем теперь, она была только в раннем детстве. Стал ли
тому причиной её юный возраст или изобилие еды в доме мисс Лэйн, или что-
то в воздухе в Кэндлфорд Грин, а может быть, подходящий для неё уклад жизни,
но румянец на щеках Лоры заиграл ярче прежнего. От переполнявших её
энергии и воодушевления Лоре казалось, что она могла бы не ходить, а
танцевать по дому и саду, и ни на минуту не почувствовать усталости.
Возможно, всё это отчасти объяснялось тем, что Лора теперь была
свободна от домашних хлопот. В своём доме ей приходилось заботиться о
младших братьях и сёстрах и помогать матери во всех её заботах. Теперь же она
была младшей среди взрослых, а хозяйка дома и вовсе относилась к ней как к
ребёнку. Мисс Лэйн порой называла её "своим цыплёночком" и баловала
прелестными безделушками, всегда без ошибки угадывая , что придётся Лоре
по вкусу. Старая служанка Зилла стала к Лоре снисходительней, когда поняла,
что теперь есть кому сновать вверх-вниз по лестнице с поручениями («Пощади
мои старые ноженьки!»), бежать во двор, чтобы спасти от внезапного ливня
бельё, развешанное для просушки, или пробираться, согнувшись в три погибели,
в курятник за свежими яйцами.
Впрочем, иногда Зилла нет-нет да и назовёт Лору «маленькой
глупышкой» или напомнит, что уж старый-то конь борозды не испортит, а
однажды в сердцах бросила: «Наша миссис ещё пожалеет, что взяла под крыло
эдакую-то принцессу!» ‒ но лишь потому, что Лора нечаянно наследила на
только что вымытом полу. В основном же Зилла была весьма любезна, и их
отношения можно было описать как вооружённый нейтралитет.
А вот с Мэттью о нейтралитете не было и речи. Как он сам говорил, если
уж ему кто по нраву, то так тому и быть, а если нет, то лучше у него на пути не
стоять и убраться подобру-поздорову. Симпатию к Лоре он выражал,