Village Centenary Read online

  Linda Moffat was to be one of the stars as Miss Richards, the first headmistress of Fairacre School. It was she who caned John Pratt in July 1882, and we had cast Patrick, who is small but with a good loud voice, as the youthful sinner. Mrs Moffat is a skilful dressmaker, and I felt sure that she would not only make Linda's costume superbly, but would be generous enough to lend a hand with the others if need be.

  I also rang Mrs Austen to sound her out about her contribution of an evacuee's memories to our performance. To my joy, she was most enthusiastic and promised to prepare a script which we could discuss.

  Altogether it was a satisfactory ending to the school year. There was a chance of another family coming to live in the village, as Mr Roberts had engaged a new shepherd who had three children. This was encouraging as it would mean an increase next term in my dangerously low numbers. The sun appeared again after the storm and, apart from the annoyance of the skylight non-activity, all appeared hopeful in my little world.

  The vicar called to wish the children a happy holiday, and added his usual rider about helping their mothers. This was followed by the ritual. 'The same to you, sir!' which is always considered the height of humour by my pupils.

  They dispersed boisterously into the summer sunshine, and as their voices died away down the lane, I wandered across to the school house, rejoicing in the long weeks of blissful freedom ahead.

  8 August

  My holiday plans were simple. The first few days had been spent in coping with neglected jobs such as weeding the border and washing the kitchen paintwork.

  I had made arrangements to spend a fortnight in Norfolk with an old friend, and meanwhile Miss Clare had accepted an invitation from me to spend a few days at Fairacre at the beginning of the month.

  The spare room lay in an unusual state of pristine splendour. The furniture gleamed from Mrs Pringle's ministrations. The feather bed was beautifully puffed up beneath a fresh chintz bedspread. On the table at the bedside was a posy of all the sweetest-smelling flowers I had been able to pick in the garden. Lavender, roses, pinks and a sprig or two of night-scented stock made a handsome nosegay in a little lustre jug which had once been my mother's.

  I had been invited to tea at Miss Clare's, and went over to fetch her with a buoyant heart. I always enjoy visiting that neat cottage, thatched by Dolly Clare's father when the family first went to live there. It had two downstairs rooms, both of good size, and two bedrooms above. A little bathroom had been added when main water had come, at long last, to Beech Green some years ago.

  The garden was large for a cottage. Miss Clare still kept the front one tidy and gay with flowers, but the larger part at the back was used as a vegetable plot by a young man in the village who was glad to have the produce for his large family. He kept Dolly supplied with all that she needed, so that it was an ideal arrangement.

  The best white cloth had been spread in my honour, and the thin ancient teaspoons of silver gleamed brightly. The best tea set, with a pretty pattern of pansies, was in evidence, and the usual plate of wafer-thin bread and butter and a splendid sponge cake, which I knew would be as light as a feather, showed that the mistress of the house had been busy.

  Beyond the lattice windowpane the downs shimmered in a blue heat haze. It was a tranquil spot and Dolly Clare had lived there from the age of six, first with her family, and then alone for a number of years. To her great joy, her lifelong friend Emily Davis had joined her for several years, and the two old ladies had lived in perfect harmony until Emily's death a few years earlier.

  Much had happened under this old thatched roof. The joys and griefs of a family, the sharing of a nation's wars, and always the relentless pressure of poverty. But it was a happy house; one felt it as soon as one crossed the threshold. Here was a haven, a quiet backwater where one could rest tranquilly away from the turbulent mainstream of life. This blessed peace, I well knew, stemmed mainly from the quiet spirit who lived there, but even without her presence one was conscious of a home which had been loved by many generations.

  'I have been given some nerine bulbs,' said Miss Clare, entering with the tea pot. 'Do you know anything about them?'

  'They say that if they like you they grow like weeds. If not, you'll never be able to rear them.'

  'We'll live in hope then. George Annett says they need lots of manure, but Bob Willet says the exact opposite! Lots of sandy soil at the foot of a south-facing wall, was his advice.'

  'Why not do that, and bung on lots of manure in the autumn? That way you are hedging your bets, I should think.'

  'I remember seeing them years ago in Devon, when a friend took me away for a few days at the October half-term. So many of the gardens had great clumps of these beautiful rose-pink heads. I've never felt I could afford to buy them, but now I've been given some I should grieve if I mistreated them.'

  I promised that we would look up the care of nerines in my new gardening book the minute we were home, and our conversation turned to her contribution to the centenary celebrations.

  'I am quite looking forward to it,' said Dolly, carefully folding a thin slice of bread and butter. 'I suppose I ought to feel nervous, but I'm not, you know. After all, most of those present will be old pupils of mine. And that particular period, in King Edward's time, was a very happy one for me. I was a pupil teacher for several years then at Fairacre School, and dear Emily was my constant companion. We were so lucky to have Mr Wardle as our headmaster. He was a cheerful soul, and always out to help us both.'

  'And you and Emily stayed together?'

  'Well, no. She found a post south of Caxley, and I can't tell you how I missed her. We met when we could and caught up with our news, and exchanged our views on teaching. And if we met in Caxley, we went window shopping. That's all we could afford.'

  Miss Clare laughed. 'We were very short of money. Everybody was. I don't suppose there was a single child at Fairacre School in those days who wasn't dressed in secondhand clothes. They were handed down from one child to the next, and gratefully received from any of the more well-to-do families. As for jumble sales, they were serious shopping expeditions then, not just an afternoon's spree in the village. I had a tweed cape cut down from a full-sized one of poor Miss Lilian's, which I wore for years.'

  Poor Miss Lilian, I remembered, had been the feeble-minded daughter of one of the leading families in Beech Green. It was a never-to-be-forgotten tragedy that she and her mother perished on the Titanic in 1912 as they crossed the Atlantic to consult an eminent American brain surgeon in the hope of effecting Lilian's recovery.

  'I think shortage of money was the chief worry then. There wasn't so much concern with health. As long as you could keep going and earn a bit, you tended to ignore minor aches and pains, and perhaps it was a good thing, although people often struggled on when really they should have gone to the doctor. But he needed paying, you see. It was all an uphill struggle, and I know many of the children came hungry to school. The older people could remember the rebellion of some of the agricultural workers when they smashed machinery, and shouted for bread. When I see the bonny children of today, and remember some of those in my early classes, I feel thankful that times have changed.'

  'You'll talk about this, I hope, when you give us your memories?'

  'Indeed I will,' said Miss Clare with spirit, 'for now I think too much is taken for granted, and thankfulness is becoming as dead as perseverance and truthfulness and a great many other fine old-fashioned virtues.'

  She sat back from the table and looked through the window at the tall hollyhocks outside. From her pensive expression I knew that her thoughts were years away.

  She took a deep breath, and gave me her sweet smile.

  'Well, shall we be going?'

  We cleared away, and Dolly went slowly round the house, closing windows and locking doors.

  Within half an hour we were travelling along the familiar lane which Dolly had traversed daily for many years, in fair weather and foul, until St. Patrick's church s
pire pierced the skyline, and we were back in Fairacre again and looking up 'Nerines' in my latest gardening book.

  Mr Willet turned up the next morning, balancing a pair of shears on the bars of his bicycle.

  'Promised I'd do that box edging,' he shouted through the kitchen window. 'All right to tackle it now? Got a wedding this afternoon.'

  'Hello, Bob,' said Miss Clare, appearing in the doorway.

  'Well, I'm blowed!' said Mr Willet beaming. 'And how be you keeping, Dolly? You looks younger than ever. Got some magic secret, have you?'

  Dolly Clare laughed. 'I don't say much about my aches and pains, Bob. Doesn't do any good, and bores people stiff.'

  'I tells everyone if I've got a finger ache,' replied Mr Willet robustly. 'Makes me feel a durn sight better when I've unloaded all my woes on to someone else.'

  She followed her old friend into the sunshine, and I watched them talking animatedly as Bob Willet surveyed the job to be tackled. They would have plenty of gossip to exchange, I guessed.

  Reg Thorn's business was closed for a fortnight's holiday, so that we were spared the racket of banging tools, the boys' transistor and their vigorous exchange of opinions over football and cricket matters.

  When I carried out the coffee cups some time later, the sun was so hot that we dragged my ancient deckchairs into the shade of the apple tree.

  'Funny how you can drink hot coffee winter and summer,' commented Mr Willet, drying his moustache on the back of his hand, 'and still it do you a power of good.'

  'They're a fine pair of shears,' observed Dolly, eyeing the shining blades resting on the grass by Bob's feet.

  'Yes, well, I likes my own tools. Miss Read here do have a pair of shears - so-called - but they does more harm than good, twizzling up the sappy bits and wrenching away at the twiggy bits like a host of rats 'ad been at work.'

  'Thanks,' I said.

  'No need to be sarky,' said Mr Willet amiably. 'Some knows how to look after tools, and some don't, that's all I'm saying.'

  He struggled from the deck chair.

  'I suppose I'd best get on. You women would keep me here all morning with your gossiping.'

  'Well—!' I began.

  'By the way, I see that young Simon in the village as I come up here. He staying with the Mawnes d'you know?'

  'I hadn't heard. How does he look?'

  'Much the same as ever - a long streak of nothin', and lookin' as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, the young varmint. When I think of our Snowy as he did in, I could give that boy a leathering and enjoy it!'

  Mr Willet's face grew puce at the remembrance of Simon's part in the death of Fairacre's albino robin not so long ago. I decided to change the subject.

  'Any chance of seeing you here tomorrow?'

  'Ah! I might manage that if I'm spared. This edging of yours will need a few hours on it, the state it's got into.'

  I picked up the tray, and left Dolly to watch her old friend at work.

  In the kitchen, putting the cups to soak, I wondered if Simon's parents had come to Fairacre to have a look at Joan Benson's house. I did not propose to mention this possibility to anyone, as I did not want to spread any rumours. However, no matter how prudently I held my tongue, there was no doubt in my mind that whatever was decided under the Mawnes' or the Bensons' roofs would very soon be common knowledge in our little community.

  Miss Clare was with me for a week, and the weather stayed sunny for all that time. We took picnic lunches up on the Downs, or down by the little brook at Springbourne, as it purled along beneath drooping willows on its way to join the Cax before the river flowed through Caxley. Everywhere we went held memories for Dolly and, like all old people, her early years were clearer in her mind than more recent ones.

  I found her recollections fascinating, and only wished I had a recording machine with me all the time. It certainly made me decide to get one ready for the centenary day when I could record her talk for future generations. Dolly's lifetime spanned the age-old rural life of hard work geared

  to the pace of man and horse, and modern life geared to the pace of cars, lorries and aircraft. Children of Dolly's generation were lucky to have travelled twenty miles from home. Many of them had never seen the sea, some sixty or seventy miles distant, nor travelled in a train, nor visited a town any larger than Caxley.

  Their grandchildren thought nothing of flying anywhere across the globe, of talking to relatives in New Zealand as they sat by their own firesides, and of buying the produce of the world set out temptingly at the village shop. Once Dolly and her contemporaries had gone, the way of life which had been known and expressed in poetry, prose and pictures for centuries would vanish. It was a sobering thought.

  But it was the small personal memories that I cherished as we took our drives around the countryside which Dolly knew so well.

  'That was where old Mrs Johns lived,' she said as we passed a tumbledown cottage with a collapsed roof of thatch. 'She wore a bustle, you know, till the end of her life. A funny little soul, who kept that place spotless.'

  'Ernie White was killed in that field,' she commented. 'A tractor tipped over and pinned the poor soul there for hours. People said it was a judgement for doing away with the horses.'

  She sighed.

  'And that's where Emily's Edgar lived. She should have been there by rights, but he married his nurse, you know, and my dear Emily never got over it, brave face though she showed to the world.'

  She showed me where she and Emily tobogganned as children, where she took her pupils to collect hazel nuts and frogspawn, and then holly to decorate St. Patrick's church at Christmas time. It was borne in upon me how closely the seasons were woven into the fabric of the country child's life in those days. They were out so much more than today's children. They walked everywhere. No school buses whisked them past beds of violets, wild strawberries, sprays of luscious blackberries, all known and treasured by their grandparents.

  One afternoon, I invited Mrs Austen to tea and it was a rare treat for me to listen to the war-time reminiscences of evacuee and teacher at Fairacre School in the early forties.

  'Everything was so different from our home and school at New Cross in south London,' said Mrs Austen. 'For one thing, I was used to an enormous three-storey building with infants on the ground floor, big girls on the next, and boys at the top. It was lovely to be mixed up together, such a few of us it seemed, in a dear little school like Fairacre's.'

  'You certainly settled down wonderfully,' commented Miss Clare.

  'I think I found the biggest differences, though, at Mrs Pratt's, where we were billeted. She couldn't have been kinder, and I kept in touch with her until she died, but there were some things which shook me as a child. No flush lavatory for one. And lighting lamps and candles, instead of switching on the electric light. I dreaded having to go down the garden to the privy in the dark. Mrs Pratt used to light a hurricane lamp for me, but it cast such shadows I was even more terrified.'

  'Was there no commode in your bedroom?' enquired Miss Clare with concern.

  'Well, yes - but I hated using it. It seemed so wrong to me. I'd never met such a thing, you see. And another thing that appalled me was the number of flies everywhere, and all taken for granted. At home, in London, my mother bustled a stray fly away as if it were poisonous - which it was, I always thought - but Mrs Pratt even had a paper ball hung up near the ceiling and called it the flies' playground.'

  'We had one too, I remember,' said Miss Clare.

  'There was another ball on the mantelpiece made of silver paper. We all collected every scrap of tin foil and it was carefully wrapped round the ball. It was an enormous weight. I can't think what happened to it eventually.'

  'It went to the hospital in Caxley,' Miss Clare told her. 'Still does, I believe, but now they like it flat.'

  'I was very fond of Mrs Pratt,' said Mrs Austen, 'but frightened of her old mother who lived down the road. Do you remember that little boy -1 forget his name - who lived
with her?'

  'I do indeed,' said Dolly. 'He was called Stephen, a foster-child, and really old Mrs Hall had no business to have him. She was far too frail and suffered from tuberculosis, and in any case much too ancient to take care of a young child. But it was difficult to find homes for those orphans, and I suppose the local authority thought it was suitable. In any case, the Halls needed the maintenance money, but I was glad when that child was moved elsewhere.'

  'So was I! I used to collect him to bring him along to school, and the smell in that house was ghastly. And the poor old thing was always coughing. She used to crouch on the rag rug in front of the fire with the ash pan pulled out, and spit horribly into the hot ashes. Sometimes she had no breath to speak to me, but just gazed at me with those watery blue eyes and motioned me to take Stephen out of the way. I did too, as quickly as I could.'

  'He went into the army eventually,' Dolly told her, 'and did very well. I still hear from him at Christmas, dear boy.'

  Her voice was warm with affection. Were there any of her pupils, I wondered, who failed to kindle a spark of remembered happiness in their old teacher? Even the malefactors, dealt with sternly in their youth, were now seen through the rosy haze of time. And why not?

  I took Dolly back to her cottage with the greatest reluctance, I had enjoyed her serene company so much. But she insisted that she had a number of little household jobs to do, and some bottles of fruit to prepare for the store cupboard, so that I left her looking happy in her shining kitchen with the cat for company.

  I went on to Bent to lunch with Amy. I found her house as welcoming and beautiful as Dolly Clare's, although three times the size, of course.

  'How do you manage to keep it so immaculate?' I cried. 'I've never seen a speck of dust or one dead flower in this place, all the years I've visited here.'