1/2/2024 0 Comments Lark rise to candleford cast![]() She was born the daughter of a builder's labourer in a tiny, poverty-racked hamlet, rose out of her class by working in the postal service (what a gift for a future author, to be a modern Mercury) and ended up as a professional writer in Dartmouth. Thompson's whole life was a kind of social migration. Lark Rise is never really nostalgic, but it is about yearning. We've been through that rite of passage, and many more, and in our world-weariness over a century later find it both enchanting and incredible that the world could seem so new-minted, and be so available to a child. Part of the book's appeal is that we can't quite believe it either. These sophisticated girls initiate Laura into boy-talk, but she is more taken with the material wonders of the town, the wax dummies in the dressmakers' shops, the fishmonger's "where a whole salmon reposed on a bed of green reeds with ice sprinkled over (ice in August! They would never believe it at home)". Going to Candleford, eh? "Keep puttin' one foot in front o' t'other an' you'll be there before dark." When they do reach the outskirts of the town, "they saw what must have looked like a girls' school out for a walk advancing between the hedgerows towards them." It was a relief party, consisting of their cousins and their schoolfriends, bearing tea. The children are intoxicated by the sense of freedom on this first unaccompanied adventure and relish every moment: the late summer flowers, the gathering swallows (already easy with telegraph wires), the gaudy sticks of seaside rock from a village shop, the unfamiliar wagons and farmers met on the road. The mist is still rising from the stooks, but the fields are already full of gleaners, gathering stray wheat-ears in a practice that would be extinct in two decades. ![]() The children leave at seven in the morning, the 11-year-old Laura in a green smock, her younger brother in an "ex-Sunday" white sailor suit, and both sporting fashionable "Zulu hats" plaited out of rushes. And along their eight-mile route, emblems of the old world and the new click together like knitting needles. Every sight, sound and smell has a burning intensity, as if being experienced for the first time. It is high summer, and the expedition that she and her brother Edwin (Edmund in the book) make is like an odyssey out of arcadia into an undiscovered country. One of Thompson's skills as a writer is to make even the most minutely detailed anecdote work as an allegory, and there is a beautifully crafted episode in Over to Candleford where the young Flora (or Laura, as she is dubbed) makes this journey between hamlet and upwardly mobile market town, quite literally, on foot. But brought together under that felicitously condensed title in 1945, they become something more: an account of a social journey, a rite of passage between the ancient, oral, self-sufficient culture of the traditional countryside and the new world of the commuter village, the rural suburb. Candleford Green (1943) is partly modelled on the village (Fringford) where she had her first job, as an assistant in the post office. ![]() ![]() Over to Candleford (1941) is a more close-focused study of her own family and her relatives in the nearby market town (based chiefly on Buckingham). Lark Rise (1939) is a part-lyrical, part-documentary portrait of the tiny hamlet, Juniper Hill, where she was born. Thompson's saga is a trilogy, originally published as three separate, but linked, narratives. There is still a Harvest Home and a village Feast Day, but stalls stocked with factory-made sweets are arriving. The telegraph is dissolving the barriers of time and space between settlements. The village teenagers leave to work in the big houses, as before, but come home with unsettling new ideas. But the old cyclical rhythms are beginning to break up. Flora Thompson's account of life in rural Oxfordshire in the last decades of the 19th century portrays an entire culture still governed by the rising and setting of the sun. Lark Rise to Candleford: the whole pulse of rural life seems distilled into those few words, from the sky-bound bird at daybreak to the last light of a cottage evening. It's one of those rare book titles that are as evocative as a scent from childhood. ![]()
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