The Day Gone By Read Online Free PDF

Jean sedately.
    We duly showered Minnie and Constance with this beautiful confetti. They thought it was fun — country girls didn’t have ‘hairdo’s’ in those days: though Constance did enquire whatever the mistress was going to say, for it was ‘regular all over: no gettin’ rid of it.’ She still had some when she bathed me that evening. I can’t speak for Minnie.
    Every first of May, the village children used to black their faces, dress up in such gaudy finery as they could get hold of - the general effect was sort of gipsyfied - and come round with a maypole. This they set up in the front drive and danced round it, singing
    â€˜First of May,
Sooty-bob day;
Give me a penny I’ll go away,
All round the ’ouse.’
    As I suppose this must be a genuine folk rhyme, I may as well give the air. (It’s not in Cecil Sharp.)

    From my mother they used to get perhaps twopence or threepence. They couldn’t, however, expect anything from my father. It was begging. His ideas had been formed well before the days of Cecil Sharp, and the preservation of charming old customs hadn’t been thought of - or not in Martock, anyway.
    The carol singers used to come, too. There was no organized carol-singing. Several groups of three or four village children would come during the season (not more than three or four; that would have made the ‘split’ too small). Their repertoire was small, too. ‘Good King Wenceslas’, ‘Nowell’, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and ‘O come all ye faithful’ were about the size of it. In those days you never heard ‘We Three Kings’ or the partridge in a pear tree. Music in schools has come on a lot since then, of course. Once, I remember, in an Uncle Ernest-like spasm of excessive liberality, I had to be physically restrained from going to the front door and giving the carol singers half-a-crown which someone (Aunt Lilian, I think) had given me early for Christmas. They were quite right to restrain me. It was, in purchasing power, a very considerable sum. It might have been appropriate, perhaps, from the head of a household - though it would have been devilish generous — but from a little boy it would have been downright embarrassing and could only have led the village children to dislike me for a little beast who had all that money to waste.
    I suppose it may have been something to do with my own delight in singing. I loved it. I was brought up to love it. My mother sang to me as a matter of course. She sang to me in the bath or in bed or while I was getting dressed. (Constance and she used to share these jobs, for Constance was also a housemaid, with appropriate duties.) If I happened to be ill in bed, she would sing while I was convalescent. Here’s one of her songs.
    â€˜Johnny used to grind the coffee mill
    And mix up the sugar with the sand.
    When the shop was shut, at the corner pub,
    Drinks all round he’d stand.
    He grinds a different mill just now
    And he’s breaking up a lot of stone:
    And all because the poor boy mixed up
    His master’s money with his own.’
    Here’s the air.

    She told me that when she was a nurse the medical students used to come round outside the wards with banjos and boaters (just like Uncle Ernest) and that that was one of their favourite songs.
    â€˜Oh, and Sister used to get so cross!
“Will
you girls come away from that window and get on with your
work?”
and “Johnny used to
grind
the coffee mill” coming up from outside . . .’
    I wasn’t altogether clear what the song meant, but it was one I loved and used to ask for again and again.
    My mother sang traditional songs, too. (Not folk songs. Real folk songs have never been popular songs, of course. I quote from the Introduction to the
Penguin Book of English Folk Songs:
‘An old Suffolk labourer with a fine folk song repertory and a delicate, rather