Lark Rise ascending

Flora Thompson’s evocative trilogy captures the ‘threadbare idyll’ of a countryside on the cusp of dramatic change, says Matthew Dennison, as he looks back on a world of rustic wonder, 80 years after the third book was written

- Matthew Dennison

EIGHTY years ago, a wartime bestseller set in the world of ‘the old, sturdy, independent type of farm labourer’ earned for its author Flora Thompson what she described without relish as ‘the bubble reputation’. Candleford Green (1943), as did its predecessors Lark Rise (1939) and Over to Candleford (1941)— published in a single volume as Lark Rise to Candleford since 1945—celebrated ‘an open-air life’ in which ‘there were no bought pleasures’ and ‘people were poorer but happier’.

By 1943, Thompson was an old woman (she died four years later, in 1947, at the age of 70). Throughout her life, she had longed to write. ‘I cannot remember the time when I did not wish and mean to write,’ she informed readers. In three volumes, she gathered together memories of her childhood in an Oxfordshire hamlet in the 1880s, ending her story in the following decade, when ‘Queen Victoria had her Diamond Jubilee and “Peace and Plenty” was the country’s watchword’, and her pleasure lay not in the books’ reception or commercial success, but in the act of writing and remembering. With hindsight, Thompson realised regretfully, she had grown up in a world poised ‘at the beginning of a new era, the era of machinery and scientific discovery’, when England’s farming changed forever: an end of an epoch in the history of rural communities. In wartime Britain, her partly fictionalised memoirs prompted deep wells of nostalgia. They earned for Thompson an enduring place among British Nature writers and fulfilled the gypsy prophecy made to the books’ heroine, her