Where is the real candleford

He later became a farm labourer and then a soldier. He was killed at the Somme in The series was a massive undertaking for the BBC, with the villages of both Lark Rise and Candleford created specifically for the programme on farmland in near Corsham in Wiltshire.

The Interior scenes were shot in a warehouse on an industrial estate, in Yate, South Gloucestershire. Chavenage House in Gloucestershire doubled as the manor house. Despite impressive ratings and praise from the critics, the series was shelved in By signing up to our newsletter you accept the terms and conditions and confirm that you have had the opportunity to read our privacy policy.

But as biography it encounters exactly the same problems as its predecessors, which is that this very private woman left not much in the way of information about her life other than the pointers in her work, notably her underrated account of her time as a post-office assistant in Hampshire, Heatherley. What about her siblings, other than her beloved brother Edwin, some of whom died in childhood? What was her husband like? A sergeant-major type, according to one friend, though Mabey is kinder about him than most.

Which of course it was, but the fiction of it being fiction did at least allow her a bit of licence, to compound characters, say. Massingham, who wrote the original, highly influential introduction. One version of Lark Rise was lavishly illustrated: a savage passage about the eviction of an old major was undermined on the opposite page by an idyllic cottage scene by Helen Allingham. It sums up the misrepresentation of Flora Thompson. As for the notion that she fell victim to the folklore cult of the time, she sent it up in one account of her childhood May Day celebrations, which were ruthlessly reinvented, she said, by a visiting aesthete:.

She observed her human environment as she did nature: closely, wonderingly, compassionately. Small wonder Richard Mabey, a fine naturalist himself, likes her. Text settings. Thompson's admiring notice won the prize. Macfie wrote her a grateful letter, and they remained close friends until his death in His unstinting support was one of the most important factors in encouraging her towards a more personal mode of writing.

She was to get her opportunity soon. In , her husband was promoted to his first sub-postmastership, and the family moved to Liphook, in east Hampshire, only three miles from their previous post in Grayshott. It was a bad year for Thompson. Her beloved brother Edwin was killed in action, breaking her last emotional link with her childhood in Juniper Hill. She was exhausted by wartime duties, and for a while she couldn't write at all.

But when the war ended, her energies revived. Her earnings meant that she could just afford to send her children to day schools, and suddenly she had some freedom again, to wander the hills around Liphook and rekindle her passion for nature relished in solitude.

Within a short while she'd begun writing the first prototypes for the scenes in Lark Rise. She had persuaded the editors of the Catholic Fireside she was not a catholic herself, but the magazine had published some of her stories to run a series called "Out of Doors in These columns are ostensibly a kind of rural diary, with notes on natural history, folklore, weather and a few local characters.

The real stuff of the countryside. But the setting is far from real. Out of a desire to give her imagination more play, or perhaps a lingering feeling of inadequacy, Thompson invents a fictitious self, more intellectual, more romantically situated. In , she and her family were crammed into a small house next to the post office in the centre of Liphook.

But her alter ego is living alone in an ancient cottage deep in the New Forest, accompanied by a dog called Boojie. She's visited by actresses and poets. In October, "I am already making my winter plans. I have taken down the Dante, and placed it with the Italian dictionary upon the little table by the hearth. After two years, the column popular with the magazine's readers was retitled "The Peverel Papers" and the scene has shifted to the great chalk hills west of Liphook. There is no such local place as Peverel though there were Peverells back in Juniper Hill , and "the mere snail-shell of a place But the details of the local countryside are evocative and precise.

This is charged territory. The poet Edward Thomas - killed in the war in the same year as Thompson's brother - had lived at Steep, just a few miles to the south-west. Selborne, mother lode of the pioneering nature writer Gilbert White, was a five-mile walk away. Peverel was a habitat as different as you could imagine from the bland Midlands fieldscape of her birthplace, a labyrinth of hanging beechwoods, soaring downland, acid bogs.

Yet it stimulated her into her first writings about her childhood. Lark Rise characters such as Sally and Queenie make their first appearance. Conversations that Thompson's new incarnation - "The Hermit of Peverel" - had with Gypsies and shepherds were reworked when she came to recount similar characters in Lark Rise, and it is anyone's guess which is the true original. Much of the material in "The Peverel Papers" is devoted to natural history, and her debt to White - whose writings she refers to often - is obvious.

Her notes are acute, empathetic, exquisitely written. She writes of the protective architecture of the skylark's nest, of the ancient names of wild flowers, of the ravishing lustre of a kingfisher's wing - "a living light rather than a colour".

The bird reappears as a metaphor in Lark Rise, where "The gentry flitted across the scene like kingfishers crossing a flock of hedgerow sparrows. But her ecologically precise account of the part played by mosses in the build-up of vegetation can't be read neutrally by anyone who is aware of Thompson's appetite for seeing parallels between human and natural life: "each small tuft drawing its sustenance from the air, dying and leaving behind it the residue of its decay, until soil enough had collected for higher vegetable life to flourish in Servi, or labourers, the great botanist Linnaeus called the mosses The Catholic Fireside columns covered six years and a quarter of a million words, and during their course Thompson started a reading and writing circle, called "The Peverel Society".

Then, in , John Thompson was transferred to Dartmouth. She stayed behind to sell the house, and spent a year alone with the children and the countryside she loved, without postal work to bother about or a husband to sneer at her.

Once she had moved to Dartmouth, her writing stagnated, and it was before The Lady published an extended essay on "Old Queenie", which would eventually form part of a chapter in Lark Rise. A few months later, the chapter now titled "May Day" was accepted by the Fortnightly Review. These essays were enthusiastically received, and Thompson was encouraged to send them and several similar pieces to Oxford University Press. The publisher, Sir Henry Milford, recognised their quality and originality, and urged her to expand them into a book.

This was the kind of recognition she had yearned for all her life, and she completed the manuscript of Lark Rise, the first part of the trilogy, in 11 months.

It was published on the eve of war in Lark Rise to Candleford is remarkable for its celebratory realism. It neither romanticises poverty nor underplays it. Thompson gazes back at the goings-on in her home country with the same loving attention that White paid to his house crickets and swallows, noticing everything but judging nothing. No detail is insignificant. She records women's underwear, men's drinking habits, children's games; illness, casual beauty, timeless harvest homes, and the arrival of "furniture on instalment".

She recalls with equal dispassion - and wit - the year-old Laura's unperturbed witnessing of a cow and bull in flagrante "the sight did not warp her nature", the post-Freudian Thompson adds and the hamlet's serving up of "rough music" outside an adulterer's cottage. Human difference and frailty - the lone bachelors, the idiots, Queenie who talks to her bees - are accepted and nurtured.

Only disloyalty and unkindness receive the scourge of the hamlet's collective conscience. Thompson's narrative teems with stories of human warmth and ingenuity, but is too skilfully assembled, too sympathetically wry, to be simply archival.

The men use soot as toothpaste; Laura borrows her dad's toothbrush to spread dye on her hair. The houses are decorated with pictures cut out of the newspapers "The Tay Bridge Disaster", "Our Political Leaders" - and the privy walls are chalked with health and sanitary maxims.

She's especially acute in her observations of clothing, a weather vane not just of the villagers' canniness in making do and sharing, but of their aspirations, and sense of the world beyond Lark Rise.

When bustles arrived new fashions, she reckoned, came to the hamlet a year after they hit Candleford , she remembers style-mad farm women making them from old cushions and wearing them to feed the pigs. The contents of Lark Rise are a kind of superior gossip, the activity which, in John Berger's words, gives a village the means to make "a living portrait of itself". Yet the more you read this exhaustive record, the less it seems to be happenstance, or casual.

This lexicon of recycled clothes and eked-out puddings and pub songs going back to the Middle Ages is the vocabulary through which the people of Lark Rise transact their lives. Thompson uses the metaphor of living "close to the bone". The villagers "were getting very near the bone from which their country ancestors had fed.