EIGHTY years ago, a wartime bestseller set in the world of ‘the old, sturdy, independent type of farm labourer’ earned for its author Flora Thompson what she described without relish as ‘the bubble reputation’. Candleford Green (1943), as did its predecessors Lark Rise (1939) and Over to Candleford (1941)—published in a single volume as Lark Rise to Candleford since 1945—celebrated ‘an open-air life’ in which ‘there were no bought pleasures’ and ‘people were poorer but happier’.
By 1943, Thompson was an old woman (she died four years later, in 1947, at the age of 70). Throughout her life, she had longed to write. ‘I cannot remember the time when I did not wish and mean to write,’ she informed readers. In three volumes, she gathered together memories of her childhood in an Oxfordshire hamlet in the 1880s, ending her story in the following decade, when ‘Queen Victoria had her Diamond Jubilee and “Peace and Plenty” was the country’s watchword’, and her Laura, that: ‘You are going to be loved by people you’ve never seen and never will see.’ None felt more strongly than Thompson herself the attraction of her threadbare idyll rooted in a setting lamented by one character as ‘the poverty-strickenest place on earth’. For her, by contrast, the hamlet of her birth was ‘as teeming with interest and activity as a molehill’, an assessment since shared by generations of readers.
