Extract from the introduction by Margaret lane to A Country Calendar in the Observer Magazine, 21 October 1979 – A Country Calendar was first published 25 October 1979.

A village genius

Flora Thompson died in 1947 at the age of 70, a writer who had produced a minor classic in the last years of her life, and about whom little else is generally known. Her work is in a genre of its own. ‘Lark Rise’, ‘Over to Candleford’, and ‘Candleford Green’, which first appeared singly and are now published together under the title ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, are not really novels, though fiction plays a part in them here and there. Nor are they autobiography pure and simple, for the personal element is evasive and oblique. They are better described, perhaps, as social history; though that, again, is a misleading name to give. They are more intimate, more personal, more alive than social history is usually allowed to be, for Flora Thompson dwells on the humble details which social historians either do not know, or else leave out. They are a simple yet infinitely detailed record of the life of the poor as it was lived in an obscure Oxfordshire hamlet in the 1880s and 1890s, all remembered from a child’s experience, all faithfully set down, all true. It is precious as a record of something that has perished, though neither far away nor long ago, as well as for its literary quality, and for the fact that Flora Thompson herself was a cottage child, born in poverty, who wrote with a touch of genius of the life she knew, when ‘people were poorer and had not the comforts, amusements or knowledge we have today; but they were happier…. They knew the now lost secret of being happy on little.’

It was never her intention to write the story of her own life, and though much can be gathered from her work about her childhood and youth, the rest is obscure and has never been recorded. In its way it is a moving and remarkable story, and should perhaps be set down before all circumstances are forgotten. It is a story which happily illustrates the unquenchable vigour of those strange gifts which are sometimes bestowed in the most unlikely places, and which in her case developed without education or encouragement and blossomed into fulfilment in old age. Flora Thompson wrote her long masterpiece in the last 10 years of her life, between the ages of 60 and 70; in itself an extraordinary achievement. But when her history is known it will be seen that the whole of her life was a preparation, instinctive at first but eventually conscious and directed, to this end.

She was born Flora Jane Timms on 5 December 1876, eldest child in the large family of a stonemason who had settled as a young man in the hamlet of Juniper Hill, near Brackley, during the 1870s – a huddle of “grey stone boxes with thatched or slated lids of the kind then thought good enough to house a farm labourer’s family”.

What made her different from the other children who shared her experiences, but who found nothing in them significant or remarkable, was her marvellously deep focus of observation. The annals of the poor are rarely written; they have no archives. Country churchyards are full of the bones of men and women who have lived her life and found nothing to say about it. To Flora Thompson, even in childhood, every circumstance of the life around her was portentous. ‘She sometimes wished she could make the earth and stones speak and tell her about all the dead people who had trodden upon them.’ Memory stored what eye and ear drank in, and she was haunted by a desire to fashion something, though it took her a lifetime to know what that something was. ‘To be born in poverty,’ she wrote when she was nearly 70, ‘is a terrible handicap to a writer. I often say to myself that it has taken one lifetime for me to prepare to make a start. If human life lasted 200 years I might hope to accomplish something.

What she did achieve was in a genre of its own, since it is rare to find a creative mind of her quality at work on the bedrock level. She was able to write the annals of the poor because she was one of them, and because one of those strange accidents of genius which can never be explained had given her the equipment she needed.

When reading ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, so rich in detail of sight, sound, and smell that one has the illusion of remembering the very hedgerows for oneself, it is strange to realise that these deep impressions were absorbed by Flora Thompson before she was 14, that being the age when she left home to earn her living. It had been supposed that she would go into service at 12 or 13, as all the hamlet girls did, and her mother had planned to get her a place under one of the nurses she knew from her own days in service. But the child’s unusual thirst for reading, and the peculiarity of her always wanting scraps of paper to write on, made her mother doubtful of her suitability as a nursemaid, and she decided to place her with another old acquaintance, the postmistress of Fringford, who was willing to take her as junior assistant. So Flora, as she has related in ‘Candleford Green’, was driven by her father in the innkeeper’s cart over the eight miles of country roads to the neighbouring village, and began her adult life as a post-office clerk.

Flora learnt the post-office business from the bottom, selling stamps, sorting letters, working the sacred telegraph machine (which was kept under a sort of velvet tea-cosy), and for one long and happy spell acting as letter-carrier, covering miles on foot through fields and lanes.

This quiet, orderly and privately studious life (for she was now more than ever an obsessive reader) continued until Flora was nearly 20, when she felt an urge to see something more of the world. So, after taking short holiday-relief engagements in various country post offices, she applied for the job of post-office assistant in the Hampshire village of Grayshott, and here, in a world totally different from the one she had known, spent the next three years, until her marriage. She was grown up now, and independent: it was the period of the Boer War, and life in the village of Grayshott was rapidly changing. What had once been a primitive area of common land, heath and hill, thinly populated by squatters in ramshackle cottages and frequented by ‘lawless folk’ – notably the ‘Hindhead Gang, who had a reputation for sheep-stealing and highway robbery – was now becoming known as a beauty spot and health resort. Since there was now a railway service between London and Haslemere the area was popular with doctors, writers, and avant garde intellectuals, and the place was becoming civilised. In 1898, the year after Flora arrived in the village, new sanitary by-laws were passed, setting standards for privies and cesspools, and Grayshott acquired its first resident police constable.

On her own at last, Flora was able now for the first time to read widely, and embarked on the long haphazard self-education which she afterwards described as having been accomplished on borrowed books, free libraries, and the threepenny and sixpenny boxes of secondhand shops. Here, too, she had her first enthralling glimpse of real writers, for the ‘Surrey highlands’ had been recently discovered by the intelligentsia, and there being no post office at that time in Hindhead, the celebrities who frequented the neighbourhood bought their stamps and sent their telegrams from Grayshott. Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, Richard le Gallienne, and others had taken houses in the neighbourhood, and Bernard Shaw, lately married, had rented a furnished house in Grayshott itself.

Exploration of the wild and beautiful area of heath, hill, and forest in which she now found herself became a passion. She walked alone, taking her lunch in her pocket on free days and covering distances that to a later generation, brought up on bicycles and motor cars, would have seemed incredible: 18 or 20 miles was nothing unusual.

When she was 24, however, this independent single life came to an end, for she met John Thompson, a young post-office clerk from Aldershot, and as soon as he was transferred to the main post office in Bournemouth they were married.

At the time it must have seemed a sensible step, and at first the marriage was happy enough in a humdrum way, but the world of the white-collar working class was alien to Flora and she was dismayed by its narrowness and prejudice. Her love of reading was now condemned as a waste of time, her attempts at writing sneered at.

A daughter and son, Winifred and Basil, were born during the 13 Bournemouth years, and when they were no longer babies and she could contrive a little leisure from children and housework Flora began to write again, as secretly as she could because of her husband’s disapproval. Her first attempt was an essay on Jane Austen which she entered for a competition in a women’s paper, and which, to her astonishment, was awarded the prize. Encouraged, she sent an article, then a short story, to the same paper, and both were accepted. The payment for each was only a few shillings, but the effect of this small success was morally important: if her eccentricities were paid for they would be tolerated. ‘I had earned the right to use my scanty leisure as I wished.’ But the discovery that she could earn a pound or two by writing delayed for many years her development as a writer, for she determined to earn a good education for her children, and set herself to the manufacture of ‘small, sugared love stories,’ which, however artificial she knew them to be, were saleable.

In her 60s, after the publication of ‘Lark Rise’ and its two successors, Flora Thompson wrote an account of her three years in Grayshott, which she disguised as ‘Heatherley’. The book did not altogether please her; the magic of childhood and the old country life were missing, and she decided not to offer it to her publisher. Instead, she went back to the Oxfordshire countryside of her childhood and wove into it a fictional tale, ‘Still Glides the Stream’, which was published shortly after her death. But ‘Heatherley’, despite her dissatisfaction, has its value, and now at last reveals much that was hitherto unknown about Flora’s response to life, her creative gift, her sensitive experience.


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