Lark Rise, Flora Thompson [most life changing books .TXT] 📗

>literally build England, the England that Laura at Candleford Green saw

in articulo mortis. Uncle Tom is a townsman, but his spiritual brother

of the fields was the yeoman. Farm and workshop both were husbanded as a

responsible stewardship and according to inalienable first principles.

For both, yeoman and master-craftsman, the holding of property was the

guarantee of economic freedom and a dutiful right. Home, as the centre

alike of the family and of industry and the nucleus of neighbourliness,

was the ruling concept for them both. Over to Candleford devotes

special pains to the portraiture of Uncle Tom and his household. The

interaction between his social value to the life of the little town and

his personal integrity, his pride in his work and virile personality are

described with the intent of revealing good living and the good life as

an historical unity of the older England. In a line, Laura looking back

and seeing herself, the other Laura, reading to Uncle Tom in his

workshop-cum-home, sums up his end, both as a symbol and a

living-figure. If he were alive now, she says, he would be the manager

of a chain-store.

 

In Candleford Green, the same parable of the past is spoken, with a

difference. Dorcas Lane, the post-mistress, and her household-workshop

with Matthew the foreman of the farriery, the smithy and the

wheelwright’s shop and the journeymen sitting below the salt at Miss

Lane’s table, other symbols of ‘an age-old discipline’, these have an

obvious affinity with Uncle Tom and his little commonwealth. She too

has her willow-pattern plate and other bygones. But this household seems

embalmed, a show-piece, and we feel it would be a blunder to speak of

Old Sally’s and Uncle Tom’s possessions as ‘bygones’. Dorcas’s

‘modernism’, her sceptical outlook and partiality for reading Darwin

lends point to the sense of preservation, not use.

 

In Candleford Green, again, Mr. Coulsdon, the Vicar, and Sir Timothy,

the Squire, are held momentarily in the light before they too pass into

limbo. But both of them cast a shadow, however soft the illumination of

Laura’s lamp. They are Victorianized, and it was Victoria’s reign that,

partly through their agency, but mainly by the growth of the industrial

town and the industrial mentality, ended the self-sufficient England of

peasant and craftsman. The supreme value of Flora Thompson’s

presentation is that she makes us see the passing of this England, not

as a milestone along the road of inevitable progress, but as the

attempted murder of something timeless in and quintessential to the

spirit of man. A design for living has become unravelled, and there can

be no substitute, because, however imperfect the pattern, it was part of

the essential constitution of human nature. The fatal flaw of the modern

theory of progress is that it is untrue to historical reality. The

frustrations and convulsions of our own time are the effect of aiming

this mortal blow at the core of man’s integral nature, which can be

perverted, but not destroyed.

 

In Lark Rise especially, we receive an unforgettable impression of the

transitional state between the old stable, work-pleasure England and the

modern world. World because non-differentiation is the mark of it, and

all modern industrial States have a common likeness such as that of

Manchester to Stalingrad, Paris to Buenos Aires. The society of _Lark

Rise_ is one of landlabourers’ families—only they are now all landless.

They have lost that which made them what they are in Part I of the

trilogy; and the whole point of it is that the reader is given a picture

of a peasant class which is still a peasantry in everything but the one

thing that makes it so—the holding of land and stock. Here, the

labourers are dispropertied, though they still have gardens; here, they

are wage-earners only, keeping their families on ten shillings a week,

though in 1540 their forefathers in another village not a score of miles

from Lark Rise, and exactly the same class as that from which they were

descended, paid the lord of the manor �46,000 as copyholders to be free

of all dues and services to him. Lark Rise in the ‘eighties of last

century, admittedly but a hamlet, could certainly not have collected

46,000 farthings.

 

Though pauperized, they were still craftsmanly men: the day of an

emptied countryside harvested by machines and chemicals and of mass,

mobile, skill-less labour in the towns serving the combine at the

assembly line was yet to come. It is significant that Lark Rise still

called the older generation ‘master’ not ‘mister’. Though landless, they

still kept the cottage pig, which served a social no less than a

material need. The women still went leazing in the stubble fields and

fed their families the winter through on whole-grain bread baked by

themselves, not yet bleached and a broken reed instead of the staff of

life. The hedgerows were still utilized for wines and jellies, the

gardens for fresh vegetables and herbs. They even made mead and ‘yarb

(yarrow) beer’. Of Candleford Green our author writes:

 

‘The community was largely self-supporting. Every household grew its own

vegetables, produced its new-laid eggs and cured its own bacon. Jams and

jellies, wines and pickles, were made at home as a matter of course.

Most gardens had a row of beehives. In the houses of the well-to-do

there was an abundance of such foods, and even the poor enjoyed a rough

plenty.’

 

The last words are true of the hamlet of Lark Rise. Because they were

still an organic community, subsisting on the food, however scanty and

monotonous, they raised themselves, they enjoyed good health and so, in

spite of grinding poverty, no money to spend on amusements and hardly

any for necessities, happiness. They still sang out-of-doors and kept

May Day and Harvest Home. The songs were travesties of the traditional

ones, but their blurred echoes and the remnants of the old salty country

speech had not yet died and left the fields to their modern silence. The

songs came from their own lips, not out of a box.

 

Charity (in the old sense) survived, and what Laura’s mother called the

‘seemliness’ of a too industrious life. Yet the tradition of the old

order was crumbling fast. What suffered most visibly was the inborn

aesthetic faculty, once a common possession of all countrymen. Almanacs

for samplers, the ‘Present from Brighton’ for willow-pattern, novelettes

for the Bible, Richardson and travel books, coarse, machined embroidery

for point-lace, cheap shoddy for oak and mahogany. The instalment system

was beginning. The manor and the rectory ever since the Enclosures were

felt to be against the people. The more amenable of these were now

regarded as ‘the deserving poor’ and Cobbett’s ‘the commons of England’

had become ‘the lower orders’. When Laura’s mother was outraged at

Edmund, her son, wanting to go on the land, the end was in sight. The

end of what? Of a self-sufficient country England living by the land,

cultivating it by husbandry and associating liberty with the small

property. It was not poverty that broke it—that was a secondary cause.

It was not even imported cheap and foodless foods. It was that the

Industrial Revolution and the Enclosures between them demolished the

structure and the pattern of country life. Their traces long lingered

like those of old ploughed fields on grassland in the rays of the

setting sun. But they have been all but effaced today, and now we plough

and sow and reap an empty land: One thing only can ever re-people it-the

restoration of the peasantry. But that industrialism does not

understand. Catastrophe alone can teach it to understand.

 

It has been Flora Thompson’s mission to represent this great tragic epic

obliquely, and by the medium of humdrum but highly individualized

country people living their ordinary lives in their own homes. As I said

at the opening of this Introduction, she has conveyed it at just the

right time—namely, when the triumphs of industrial progress are

beginning to be seen for what they are. Or, as a recent correspondent to

The Times expressed it, ‘peace and beauty must inevitably give way to

progress’. She has conveyed this profound tragedy through so delicate a

mastery, with so beguiling an air and by so tender an elegy, that what

she has to tell is ‘felt along the heart’ rather than as a spectacular

eclipse. I regard this as an achievement in literature that will outlive

her own life. Or, as the gipsy said who told Laura’s fortune at

Candleford Green—‘You are going to be loved by people you’ve never seen

and never will see.’

 

H. J. MASSINGHAM

 

Reddings, Long Crendon, Bucks.

 

August 1944

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION LARK RISE

I. POOR PEOPLE’S HOUSES

II. A HAMLET CHILDHOOD

III. MEN AFIELD

IV. AT THE ‘WAGON AND HORSES’

V. SURVIVALS

VI. THE BESIEGED GENERATION

VII. CALLERS

VIII. ‘THE BOX’

IX. COUNTRY PLAYTIME

X. DAUGHTERS OF THE HAMLET

XI. SCHOOL

XII. HER MAJESTY’S INSPECTOR

XIII. MAY DAY

XIV. TO CHURCH ON SUNDAY

XV. HARVEST HOME

LARK RISE I

Poor People’s Houses

 

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.

 

All around, from every quarter, the stiff, clayey soil of the arable

fields crept up; bare, brown and windswept for eight months out of the

twelve. Spring brought a flush of green wheat and there were violets

under the hedges and pussy-willows out beside the brook at the bottom of

the ‘Hundred Acres’; but only for a few weeks in later summer had the

landscape real beauty. Then the ripened cornfields rippled up to the

doorsteps of the cottages and the hamlet became an island in a sea of

dark gold.

 

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. Some of the ancients still occupied

cottages on land which had been ceded to their fathers as ‘squatters’

rights’, and probably all the small plots upon which the houses stood

had originally been so ceded. In the eighteen-eighties the hamlet

consisted of about thirty cottages and an inn, not built in rows, but

dotted down anywhere within a more or less circular group. A deeply

rutted cart track surrounded the whole, and separate houses or groups of

houses were connected by a network of pathways. Going from one part of

the hamlet to another was called ‘going round the Rise’, and the plural

of ‘house’ was not ‘houses’, but ‘housen’. The only shop was a small

general one kept in the back kitchen of the inn. The church and school

were in the mother village, a mile and a half away.

 

A road flattened the circle at one point. It had been cut when the heath

was enclosed, for convenience in fieldwork and to connect the main

Oxford road with the mother village and a series of other villages

beyond. From the hamlet it led on the one hand to church and school, and

on the other to the main road, or the turnpike, as it was still called,

and so to the market town where the Saturday shopping was done. It

brought little traffic past the hamlet. An occasional farm wagon, piled

with sacks or square-cut bundles of hay; a farmer on horseback or in his

gig; the baker’s little old white-tilted van; a string of blanketed

hunters with grooms, exercising in the early