Lark Rise - Flora Thompson (read more books .TXT) 📗
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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 RISEI. 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 IPoor 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
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