Had Flora Thompson been as adept with her paint spray as the designer, creating an artful two-dimensional deception that has continually bewitched us because it is what we expect to keep our dream alive? Well, you can see where this is going as metaphor, can’t you? The idyllic façade, removed from the reality of rural squalor? And Mabey duly drives his point home:
The next day the farmer’s wife explained that this was one of the sets for the BBC production of Lark Rise to Candleford - a long way from the Oxfordshire, where the book was set and where Flora Timms (as she then was) grew up, but ‘much closer to the rural dream’. It was a vision of an English village as idyllic as a Helen Allingham painting … I edged round the back and realised they were two dimensional … a façade but nothing behind. The gardens were in good order, with sweet peas in flower and rows of fat cabbages. Something very curious … There were two rows of cottages facing each other, with a dusty track between them …There were clean curtains in the windows. There her eyes are opened to wider horizons.When Richard Mabey was researching this biography of Flora Thompson, author of Lark Rise to Candleford, he happened to stay at a farmhouse B&B near Bath. Laura attends the village school and leaves at the age of fourteen to work for the postmistress of the village of Candleford.
Whilst much is to be admired and cherished about her community, when she looks back on it as an adult she doesn’t shy away from describing hardship too. An intelligent and enquiring child, she is always attentive to the way of life around her – the lives of a farming community and nature as it transforms through the seasons, their working lives together and their celebrations. Laura Timms spends her childhood in a country hamlet called Lark Rise. This edition contains all three books – Lark Rise, Over to Candleford and Candleford Green, with an introduction by Bill Gallagher, screenwriter of the hugely popular BBC television adaptation.
These beautiful hardbacks make perfect gifts for book lovers, or wonderful additions to your own collection. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. Lark Rise to Candleford captures a piece of social history in this ever popular fictional account of an English rural upbringing between the wars.
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