Mrs. Pringle of Fairacre Read Online Free PDF Page B

and buying almost all my Christmas presents there in one fell swoop.
    After that, a very nervous flower-arranger who was inaudible except to those of us in the front row, showed us
how to make 'The Best of our Late Blooms'. The response was lack-lustre, I felt, and only the knitters behind me, busy clicking their needles, really benefitted.
    But tea time was the real highlight. Despite the fact that it was past eight o'clock in the evening, we all fell upon home-made sponges, wedges of treacle tart, shortbread fingers, and squares of sticky gingerbread, as though we had not seen food for weeks.
    I met a host of cheerful women, several of them with children at the school, and many of them former pupils, and went home as a fully paid-up member of Fairacre's W.I.
    It will not surprise any newcomer to a village to know that I was also committed to supplying a contribution to the next month's tea table, and had agreed to stand in for the Treasurer when she had her baby.
    Of such stuff is village life made. And very nice, too.

CHAPTER 4
Mrs Willet Goes Farther
    One of the nicest women I met at our local Women's Institute was Alice Willet, wife of Bob. She had been at our school as a child, and had many memories of Fairacre folk including Maud Gordon when she visited her adopted uncle and aunt during the school holidays.
    'Mind you,' she said, 'I could never take to her. She was a year or two older than me, and bossy with it. I kept out of her way when she was around in Fairacre.'
    Some years later, it seems, Miss Parr, who lived at the largest house in Fairacre, was looking for a housemaid to replace her well-trained Mary who had been with her for over twenty years and had had the effrontery to get married.
    Miss Parr was a great power in the village. She had, in fact, been the most venerable of the school governors who had appointed me to the headship of Fairacre School, and so I was particularly interested in her history.
    Her family, it appears, came from Lancashire where innumerable cotton mills had brought them much wealth in the last century. Hard-headed and shrewd, the money had been invested, not only in enlarging the mills, but in
divers other money-making ventures. Miss Parr had inherited a fortune, as well as the commonsense of her forbears, and lived in style in the Queen Anne house in Fairacre.
    She employed a head gardener and an under-gardener, and a chauffeur to look after her limousine. Indoors, a cook and a housemaid coped with most of the chores, although a succession of what Miss Parr termed 'village women' came in to help with 'the rough' and the laundry work.
    Those she employed spoke well of her, and stayed in her service. She was not lavish in her payments but they were paid on the dot, and in those hard times one was lucky to have a job at all. Also, when the garden was producing more than one lone lady and her staff could consume, the gardeners and the daily helpers could take home this welcome largesse to their families.
    'She kept a sharp eye on things, of course,' said Mrs Willet. 'I mean, her people had made their money by looking after the pennies, and she took after them. And when she found old Biddy Stamper had helped herself to a bunch of grapes and some peaches from the hot-house, and was trying to smuggle them out with the washing, she got the sack there and then, and never set foot in the house again.'
    Mrs Willet nodded her approval before continuing. 'Well, when Mary left, Mrs Pringle's auntie, Mrs Baker, she went up to Miss Parr's to see if she could put in a word for her Maud. Mrs Baker was one of the women that helped with the ironing each week, so she knew the house and all that. Miss Parr thought a lot of her. She was a dab hand with the ironing, and could use a goffering iron.'
    'I've never heard of such a thing!' I exclaimed.
    'Oh, it was what you used to crimp the edges of things. Mary's afternoon caps had to be goffered, and some collars
too that she wore. I believe some people