Free The Town House by Norah Lofts Page B

but it had its compensations. As Kate had said, we got into the country and it was in the country that food was plentiful and cheap.
    When I joined Master Webster’s teamsters it was winter and we were not collecting the dirty fleeces from farms and sheep runs, we were carrying the picked-over wool down to Bywater.
    Bywater was a small port, much smaller, we understood, than Dunwich or Yarmouth, but it had obtained, during the reign of the great King Edward the Third, one priceless privilege. It was allowed to export a certain amount of wool, in defiance of all the rules governing the Staple. This was because at some critical moment during the King’s wars with France, this small town’s fishing fleet had chanced to be in harbour, and had been able to offer the King eighteen vessels for the transport of troops to France, shortly before the great battle of Crécy. The privilege of being able to export wool freely, was its reward.
    The Bywater people often laughed and joked about the privilege, saying that when King Edward granted them the favour, the limit he had set on their export had been far in excess of all the wool shornin East Anglia, for Norfolk and Suffolk were not then reckoned to be sheep-rearing districts. The favour was, they said, ‘like giving a one-legged man permission to dance a jig’. But things had changed since then; sheep runs had been established on many a ploughland and in my time Bywater exported every bale of wool the licence allowed.
    Ships that set sail laden with wool, returned with other commodities and there were goods to be found in Bywater that could be obtained nowhere nearer than London. On the very first journey I made to Bywater we were stopped by an innkeeper at Nettleton. His little daughter was ill and he wanted an orange for her. She had once eaten an orange and all through her fever had craved another. I was lucky and found four and when I delivered them into his hands on the return he almost wept with gratitude. He took me and my fellow-driver, a lively little hunchback called Crooky, into his house and gave us each a mug of his best October ale. Then he asked which would we rather have, sixpence apiece or our pick out of his store-room. Crooky, who had no family and was a drinking man, chose the sixpence. I went to the store-room and stared about at more stacked-up food than I had ever seen in my life.
    ‘You mean I can have anything?’
    ‘Anything you can carry. Could you have seen the little wench’s face when I put the thing into her hands! Take what you like and call me still your debtor.’
    I chose a great ham, which, sliced into pieces by any of the keen knives in Cooks Lane and sold piecemeal, would have been worth four shillings.
    ‘And I’d sooner give you that,’ said the innkeeper, when I had made my choice, ‘than the sixpence yon fellow took. The pig it came off fed on the scrapings of the plates, and drunk the wash-up water, and the smoking was done by the fire that we cook on. So it cost me nowt.’
    That was my first experience as a doer of errands. Others followed. Not all the people we obliged were so deeply grateful and wildly generous, but I always remembered a farmer’s wife who had broken her needle. She lived a long way from the road we travelled and had twice walked the five miles and stood a whole morning in the biting wind to catch us on our way down to Bywater. She gave us the errand, and the money for two needles and asked us when we should be returning. We told her, and when we came clattering along, the unladen ponies trotting and thinking of their own stable, there she was, with two grey geese on long leads of plaited rushes.
    She said, in a shamefaced way,‘Would you take these in payment? The needles had to be paid for in coin, and I have no more, nor shall till the calves are sold. But they’re good geese, right fat.’
    ‘A goose, for carrying a needle!’ I said, in astonishment. ‘Payment enough and over.’
    ‘But I can’t