Secrets of Candleford: the real Flora Thompson

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. Ambling around, he found

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. The gardens were in good order, with sweet peas in flower and rows of fat cabbages. 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 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’. 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:

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?

This, then, is the premise — I might say, the straw doll — that the author sets up to give Dreams of the Good Life a polemical basis: did Flora Thompson give her celebrated account of rural life in the 1880s a retrospective spin when she wrote it as a woman in her sixties on the cusp of and during the second world war? Others have made the same point; the academic Barbara English has suggested that

she constructed a past which never really existed … Lark Rise resembles those memories of childhood where the sun shone all summer, and there was always snow at Christmas.