Writing about a person as private as Flora Thompson, who lived most of her life some way outside the chattering world of mainstream literature, raises particular problems for a biographer. The usual reference sources are meagre in the extreme. Little of her correspondence survives, and her life – even when she had become a professional writer – passed almost unremarked by her literary contemporaries. So I am hugely grateful to those early researchers and writers who did the hard graft of burrowing in archives and record offices to put together the outlines of Flora’s life: Margaret Lane, whose essay of 1957 was the first short biographical sketch; Gillian Lindsay for her more exhaustive study in 1990, written when there were still people alive with personal memories of Flora Thompson; Christine Bloxham, who has uncovered fascinating details about Flora’s family and relatives; John Owen Smith, editor and publisher, who has done so much to bring Flora’s unpublished manuscripts and unanthologized journals into book form; and Ruth Collette Hoffman, for her rigorous analysis and categorization of the whole body of Flora’s work (full details of their books are in the Sources section at the end of the book).
Special thanks are due to the late Anne Mallinson, who first introduced me to Flora Thompson’s work back in the 1970s, and who was a pioneer in championing Flora’s work; and to Adam Freudenheim, late of Penguin, who originally commissioned this biography. Friends and colleagues who have provided source material, insights, wisdom and companionship on field-trips, include Ronald Blythe, Jon Cook, Gill Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Leo Mellor, the late Richard Simon, Sean Street and Gavin Weightman. Thanks also to the Bodleian Library, the Oxfordshire County Record Office and the Castle Museum, Buckingham. My agent Vivien Green and my publisher/editor at Penguin, Helen Conford, kept faith with the book and helped to re-set the book’s compass after a rather erratic first draft. Jane Robertson’s copy-editing was diligent beyond the call of duty, especially with my fallible transcriptions, and Stephen Ryan was a meticulous proof-reader. Polly, as always, endured the trials of being a writer’s partner with immense patience and kept my confidence afloat at those inevitable times when I imagined the book to be in danger of sinking.
Most of all I must thank three people: Alexandra Harris for her insightful remarks about cultural life in the inter-war years and, in the gentlest of ways, for pointing out instances of thoughtless male bias in the writing; Rose Tremain for a stray remark she made about the business of characterization in fiction, which she won’t remember but which opened up a whole new perspective on Flora’s work; and finally to Richard Holmes for his support and wise counsel throughout the writing of the book, and at the end for an act of extraordinary friendship and generosity: turning a somewhat muddled, apologetic first draft into a real narrative by an act of literary origami. He refolded my material into a different shape with the loss of only a few of my original pages. Any remaining infelicities are mine alone, and to him and Rose this book is dedicated.
For permission to use copyright material, I am enormously grateful to John Owen Smith and Gillian Lindsay for allowing me to use freely material from their books; to the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin, for permission to use extracts from documents in their Flora Thompson archives and for making them available to me in digital form; to Elizabeth Swaffield and the Flora Thompson Estate for permission to quote from copyright material; and to the Oxford University Press for permission to use extracts from Lark Rise to Candleford. The extract from ‘The South Country’ from Complete Verse by Hilaire Belloc (Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1970) is reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser and Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Hilaire Belloc.
The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing north-east corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Lark Rise because of the great number of skylarks which made the surrounding fields their springboard and nested on the bare earth between the rows of green corn … To a child it seemed that it must always have been so; but the ploughing and sowing and reaping were recent innovations. Old men could remember when the Rise, covered with juniper bushes, stood in the midst of a furzy heath – common land, which had come under the plough after the passing of the Inclosure Acts.
Lark Rise to Candleford
Flora Thompson’s life and work is a story of the relationship between people and place, and the two still refract each other even when her story is told in quite new ways.
In 2010, in the early stages of researching this book, I happened to stay the night in a farmhouse B&B in the folded limestone country near Bath. It was a balmy Saturday evening in September and, taking an amble around the farm, I came across something very curious, marooned in the yard. It had the look of a decrepit settlement, a recently abandoned village, a rural Mary Celeste. There were two rows of cottages facing each other, with a dusty track between them. The walls seemed to be made of stucco, not local Bath stone, and were stained with yellow lichen. There were clean curtains in the windows. The gardens were in good order, with sweet peas in flower and rows of fat cabbages. It was a vision of an English village as idyllic as a Helen Allingham painting – except there was not a soul to be seen. I edged round the back of the cottages and realized they were two-dimensional. They had that element much prized by householders, façade, but nothing behind. The walls were shored-up plasterboard, painted with stone-coloured acrylic. The lichens were a clever piece of distressing, applied (with considerable botanical exactitude, I should add) by a paint-spray. And it dawned on me that I was wandering through some kind of reproduction, a simulacrum, though of what I hadn’t the slightest idea.
Next morning, the proprietor – the farmer’s wife – was happy to explain. It was one of the sets for the television production of Lark Rise to Candleford. The BBC had leased the space at the back of the farm for the duration of the series. She was full of admiration for the set-designers, who, she said, had once been hired to conjure up an Arabian Nights fantasy for the wedding party of a rich sheikh. No wonder they had made such a convincing job of a humble Victorian hamlet. To tell the truth, the facsimile looked rather more authentic ‘resting’ between series in the autumn sunshine than it did blazed yellow by floodlights and hoed free of weeds on the television screen.
The farmer had also leased to the BBC a large field adjacent to the mock village, so that a rough road could be made through the crops, which could in turn be sown and cut according to the filming schedule. The production team had not been so historically smart here, and had omitted to sow the poppies and cornflowers that would have adorned any nineteenth-century wheatfield. But that seemed a minor environmental anachronism compared to the huge geographical disjunction* involved in moving the action to Wessex.
There were good practical reasons why the production team chose this site rather than the real (and still extant) settlements in north Oxfordshire where Lark Rise is set. Some kind of semi-permanent set had to be built. It would have been impossible to occupy and de-modernize for four years not just an entire village but parts of a nearby market town (a facsimile of this, plus interiors, had been built in a farm a mile away from the ersatz Lark Rise). But deciding to base the sets in a quite different landscape from arable Oxfordshire necessarily involved cultural judgements as well as production practicalities. The countryside around the real twenty-first-century Juniper Hill (the hamlet on which Lark Rise is modelled) is not visually inviting, and superficially not at all like the idyllic landscapes of our pastoral imagination. It’s cut across by pylons and telephone wires and made hazy by the constant drone of road traffic. The fields are flat and hedgeless, and dominated by intensive arable farming. There is no woodland, and barely a scrap of accessible unfarmed green space. The furzy common covered with juniper bushes that gave the original hamlet its name is as lost a domain as it was at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Avon hills chosen by the BBC are, however unintentionally, much closer to the landscape of the rural dream. They have grand vistas, rich pastures, and woods big enough for pheasants and poachers. They have a multitude of green hideaways and look-outs, spots where characters can sit under the trees and chat. Through the camera lens they presented a benign setting which seemed perennially fertile both for the growing of crops and the nurturing of close and neighbourly relations.
The industrial agriculture of Juniper Hill today offers no such topographical freedoms. It was not much better when Flora was living there. There was no remaining common land, and the villagers worked on low wages on other men’s acres. The essential identity of ‘Lark Rise’ – the mutually supportive, inward-looking community, the wagon-circle of subsistence – was in part a reaction against a niggardly, ungenerous environment, not a product of abundance and availability. In one sense, the television set was a mirage, allowing the stories to be played out in the arcadia of our national imagination, not in the kind of landscape where they would have carried more conviction. But it provided a salutary lesson in cultural preconceptions, and I for one had been briefly fooled into thinking I was in an authentic relic of the Victorian countryside. Was the fabricated hamlet a replica of what was already a fake? Had Flora Thompson been as adept with her paint-spray as the designer, creating an artful, two-dimensional deception that has continually bewitched us because it is what we expect – what we need – to keep our dreams alive?
There is now just a single juniper bush growing in Juniper Hill. It crouches in the front garden of a private house that until the 1990s was still the hamlet’s pub, the Fox Inn. Before that it was part of a colony of the shrubs, unusual or extensive enough to lend their name to the settlement that grew up around them. The first page of Lark Rise describes how a ‘Rise, covered with juniper bushes, stood in the midst of a furzy heath’, and a contemporary local historian, J. C. Blomfield, confirms this. ‘On some ground [close-by], the low evergreen bushy shrub, known as the Common Juniper, grew in abundance. Its hard wood was useful fuel, and its spicy berries may have been beneficial as medicines. Hence this spot came to be known in recent times as Juniper Hill.’
Blomfield sidesteps the shrub’s medicinal potency. It had a long-standing reputation as an abortifacient, and up until the mid-1990s juniper pills were still being advertised as ‘The Ladies’ Friend’ in women’s magazines. But it wasn’t juniper’s handy pharmacological properties that led to the settlement being established amongst the bushes. Juniper is a species that in southern England is almost exclusively confined to chalky soils. What the shrubs indicated, growing conspicuously on a swell of ground in an otherwise unpromisingly infertile waste, was a patch of mineral-rich, well-drained soil. They were a signal as clear as palm trees in a desert: here was a good spot for a garden and a house, and maybe a few wells. The settlement of Juniper Hill wasn’t just named for its juniper bushes; it sprang from the same basic resource as they did.
That Flora Thompson spent her childhood in this comparatively fertile corner of what had once been pure heathland, is among the more important circumstantial influences on her life and work. That it was no longer a common was as significant as the fact that it once had been, and within living memory. The inhabitants of Juniper Hill during Flora’s time there remembered the folk-ways of the people who had once used the area as common land (for grazing cattle and gathering fuel, for example). But most common rights were extinguished by the enclosure of the heath in 1869, as was the physical heath itself. And by the 1880s, when Flora was a child, the old privileges were chiefly rehearsed as shadow-play, rituals of memory, or small hobbyist contributions to the domestic economy. In the main, the villagers were experiencing the rigours of uncertain, wage-dependent labour in the middle of a serious agricultural depression, and that lent the details of their lives a different kind of urgency. The tensions between ‘old romance’ and the challenges of modernization, and between fatalism and mutual help, are what give Lark Rise its energy as a story. They may also have been part of the reason Flora Thompson got out of the area as fast and as unrepentantly as she did.
The cottage in which Flora lived for the first fifteen years of her life was on the southern edge of the hamlet, and was called – providentially, for someone whose life was destined to be lived on the margins – ‘The End House’. It’s still possible to stand at the bottom of what would have been her garden and gaze out over an arable fieldscape looking much as it must have done in her day – except that in the distance now, on the far side of the Oxford road, are the futuristic domes and masts of the Croughton wireless station, the modern descendant of the telegraph machines Flora would one day operate in her work as a Post Office assistant.
But back in the mid eighteenth century this view would still have been over an uninterrupted expanse of heather and furze, and it was in this landscape that the first shoots of Juniper Hill arose. ‘Cotsford Heath’ is marked on a 1797 map as an area of rough common land north-west of the village of Cotsford (known as Cottisford today, and fictionalized as ‘Fordlow’ in Lark Rise). The heath was used by the villagers for grazing, gathering gorse and juniper for fuel, and foraging for herbs and flowers for food and medicine. The hamlet had its origins in two ‘poor’s houses’ built in 1754 by the overseers of the poor, who later added two more cottages.
Flora’s account is more glamorized. She has the foundations of the hamlet, semi-fictionalized as ‘Lark Rise’, laid by six freeholders, who built their own houses using materials close at hand in a way that had been used for vernacular buildings for hundreds of years. ‘The walls were of furze branches closely pressed together and daubed with a mixture of mud and mortar,’ and later they were improved, given thatched roofs, coats of whitewash and diamond-paned windows. Flora may have been ignorant of the true beginnings of the hamlet, but could equally well have been rounding off the facts to suit the image of the community she wanted to present. But her description fits the creation of the second wave of dwellings in Juniper Hill. Over the next fifty years, more than thirty houses – all, save four, unauthorized self-builds by squatters on the open common – were established in the hamlet.
This did not go down well with the gentry. The enclosure of common land by parliamentary enactment was in full swing at this time, and in 1847, the local landowners, Eton College and the Tusmore Park estate (just south of Juniper Hill), made a formal application to enclose the heath and convert it into private agricultural land. The response by the people of Juniper Hill was prompt and physical. They tore down the enclosure notices from Cottisford church door. They drove the surveyors off the common and dumped their tape measures and theodolites in the scrub. Later they dealt out similar rough justice to two magistrates and a constable who had come to try and enforce the survey. The authorities responded by issuing threats to the squatters, alluding sinisterly to the parallel ‘Irish’ troubles, and doubtless remembering the much more serious violence that had occurred during the enclosure of Otmoor, just ten miles away.* The hamlet resisted for six years, during which time what was called the Juniper Hill ‘Mob’ would not allow even a spade to be dug into the heath. But eventually the landowners’ patience ran out and they instituted proceedings at court. Some of the squatters reluctantly settled. In August 1853, a gang of twenty hired mercenaries, armed with pick-axes, threatened to demolish the homes of the remainder, forcing them to compromise too. The deal was that they could harvest their crops that summer, and have fourteen-year leases of their cottages. After that term the properties would revert to the landowners.
And so Juniper Hill metamorphosed into a curious kind of post-enclosure village. The cottages were leased out by the Tusmore Park estate and Eton College (though the latter seems not to have insisted on the agreed reversion after fourteen years). The male farm-workers became wage-labourers, chiefly at Manor Farm, Cottisford, and were no longer able to supplement their earnings from the beneficence of the heath. The land was ploughed, divided up into individual fields, and lost many of its ancient pathways. One of these fields is figured on an 1898 sale plan in the Bodleian Library and has the name of ‘Lark Rise’, and just to its north-west is the squarish block marking the house where Flora Thompson, then Flora Timms, spent her childhood.