Flora Thompson : Lark Rise to Candleford

Richard Mabey : Dreams of the Good Life. The Life of Flora Thompson and the creation of Lark Rise to Candleford

Flora Thompson is best known – perhaps only known – for her trilogy of books about life in the Victorian countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford. It’s the semi-fictionalised story of a poor but ambitious girl called Laura (a version of her younger self) growing up and making do in a small Oxfordshire village at the end of the 19th century. The book has retained a strong appeal to the persistent British fascination with all things rural, and stands in a long and eclectic tradition – stretching from Chaucer to Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield – in which affection for the countryside seems an essential and inextinguishable part of our national identity.

For those who have only seen the successful BBC television first shown in 2008 should know that the adaptation is very different from the original and that it was not filmed around the real 21st century Juniper Hill (the hamlet on which Lark Rise is modelled) which is not visually inviting and dominated by intense arable farming, but in the Avon hills around Bath which are, however unintentionally, much closer to the landscape of the rural dream! The book was written retrospectively four decades after the events in the book when the author was living 200 miles west of her Oxfordshire birthplace.

Central to the BBC series was Laura’s work as a letter-carrier at the local Post Office but in Lark Rise to Candleford this occurs only towards the very end of the book. Richard Mabey, one of our leading nature writers describes what happened in his short biography of Flora Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life:

She (Laura) might well have become stuck in this lowly clerical job (at the Post Office), perhaps made it her life. But one day Mrs Macey, the letter-carrier, has a family-crisis, and Laura is commandeered to deliver the post. It is a day of deep frozen snow, and Flora has to walk out through it to Sir Timothy’s mansion. The sense of privilege at that moment, and the feeling of first –footing in a landscape transformed into two dimensions by the snow and a soft, low ‘feather-bed’ sky imprinted itself on her…….Laura delivered the mail regularly after that, and the experience, while it made her work more rewarding, more importantly widened her horizons and increased her confidence.

This is the description of that first walk as a letter-carrier in Lark Rise to Candleford itself:

As soon as Laura left the village behind, she ran, kicking up the snow and sliding along the puddles, and managed to reach Farmer Stebbing’s house only a little later than the time appointed for the delivery of his letters in the ordinary way by the post-office authorities. Then across the park to Sir Timothy’s mansion and on to his head gardener’s house and the home farm and half a dozen cottages, and her letters were disposed of.

Laura never forgot that morning’s walk. Fifty years later she could recall it in detail. Snow had fallen a few days earlier, then had frozen, and on the hard crust yet more snow had fallen and lay like soft, feathery down, fleecing the surface of the level open spaces of the park and softening the outlines of hillocks and fences. Against it the dark branches and twigs of the tree stood out, lacelike. The sky was low and grey and soft-looking as a feather – bed.

Flora Thompson’s book’s appeal comes from her commemoration of the virtues of traditional village life at a moment of radical change. But her own story is about her escape from this culture , and a persistent hunger to become a different kind of person, a professional writer.