Lark Rise to Candleford (2 page)

On the bottom layer once rested all England. In the perfect
economy of a few deft and happy strokes,
Lark Rise
reveals it as
surviving principally in two households, those of Queenie, the lace-maker and bee-mistress,
and 'Old Sally', whose grandfather, the eggler, had by his rheumatism to 'give
up giving'. The old open fields community of co-operative self-help destroyed
by the Enclosures is caught in the words. Old Sally is so closely identified
with her house and furniture, its two-feet-thick walls making a snuggery for
the gate-legged table, the dresser with its pewter and willow-pattern ware and
the grandfather's clock, that they can no more be prised apart than the snail
from its shell. In remembering the Rise when it was common land, Sally was
carrying in her mind the England of small properties based on the land, the
England whose native land belonged to its own people, not to a State
masquerading as such, not even to the manorial lords who exacted services, but
not from a landless proletariat. Still less to big business whose
latifundia
are the modern plan. Sally is self-supporting peasant England, the bedrock of
all, solid as her furniture, enduring as her walls, the last of the longest of
all lines.

Moving on to Candleford, we find in Uncle Tom, the cobbler
with his apprentices, the representative of the master-craftsman who did quite 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 country-side 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

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
morning; and a carriage with gentry out paying calls in the afternoon were
about the sum of it. No motors, no buses, and only one of the old
penny-farthing high bicycles at rare intervals. People still rushed to their
cottage doors to see one of the latter come past.

A few of the houses had thatched roofs, whitewashed outer
walls and diamond-paned windows, but the majority were just stone or brick
boxes with blue-slated roofs. The older houses were relics of pre-enclosure days
and were still occupied by descendants of the original squatters, themselves at
that time elderly people. One old couple owned a donkey and cart, which they
used to carry their vegetables, eggs, and honey to the market town and
sometimes hired out at sixpence a day to their neighbours. One house was
occupied by a retired farm bailiff, who was reported to have 'well feathered
his own nest' during his years of stewardship. Another aged man owned and
worked upon about an acre of land. These, the innkeeper, and one other man, a
stonemason who walked the three miles to and from his work in the town every
day, were the only ones not employed as agricultural labourers.

Some of the cottages had two bedrooms, others only one, in
which case it had to be divided by a screen or curtain to accommodate parents and
children. Often the big boys of a family slept downstairs, or were put out to
sleep in the second bedroom of an elderly couple whose own children were out in
the world. Except at holiday times, there were no big girls to provide for, as
they were all out in service. Still, it was often a tight fit, for children
swarmed, eight, ten, or even more in some families, and although they were
seldom all at home together, the eldest often being married before the youngest
was born, beds and shakedowns were often so closely packed that the inmates had
to climb over one bed to get into another.