A Lark Rise Christmas

Christmas Day Passed Very Quietly

Christmas Day passed very quietly. The men had a holiday from work and the children from school and the churchgoers attended special Christmas services. Mothers who had young children would buy them an orange each and a handful of nuts; but, except at the end house and the inn, there was no hanging up of stockings, and those who had no kind elder sister or aunt in service to send them parcels got no Christmas presents.

Still, they did manage to make a little festival of it. Every year the farmer killed an ox for the purpose and gave each of his men a joint of beef, which duly appeared on the Christmas dinner-table together with plum pudding - not Christmas pudding, but suet duff with a good sprinkling of raisins. Ivy and other evergreens (it was not holly country) were hung from the ceiling and over the pictures; a bottle of homemade wine was uncorked, a good fire was made up, and, with doors and windows closed against the keen, wintry weather, they all settled down by their own firesides for a kind of super-Sunday. There was little visiting of neighbours and there were no family reunions, for the girls in service could not be spared at that season, and the few boys who had gone out in the world were mostly serving abroad in the Army.

There were still bands of mummers in some of the larger villages, and village choirs went carol-singing about the countryside; but none of these came to the hamlet, for they knew the collection to be expected there would not make it worth their while. A few families, sitting by their own firesides, would sing carols and songs; that, and more and better food and a better fire that usual, made up their Christmas cheer.

-From, Lark Rise To Candleford by Flora Thompson

Flora Thompson. 1876 - 1947

The eldest daughter of Albert and Emma Timms,Flora Jane Thompson was born in the tiny Oxfordshire hamlet of Juniper Hill, near Brackley, on 5th December 1876. She attended school in the neighbouring village of Cottisford. After leaving school at fourteen, and moving away from home, for the first time, she worked as a post-office clerk at the Fringford post-office. After four years she left Fringford, and took a number of short holiday-relief engagements in various rural post-offices, then applied for and got the job of assistant at the Grayshott post-office, in Hampshire. There, in due course, she met her future husband John Thompson,himself a post-office-clerk who later became a postmaster. In 1903 John Thompson was transferred to the main post-office in Bournemouth, he and Flora were married and began life together in this large sea-side town. Flora was then twenty-six.
The Thompsons remained in Bournemouth for thirteen years, during which time their two elder children, Winifred and Basil, were born. In 1916 they moved to Liphook in Hampshire, and a younger son, Peter was born a year later. They lived in Liphook for twelve years, until another, and final posting for John Thompson took them, in 1928, to Dartmouth, where they remained until his retirement in 1940. In the early years she supplemented their meagre income with journalism, writing nature essays for The Catholic Fireside, the Daily News, The Lady, and other papers, and in 1921 she published a volume of verse, Bog-myrtle and peat. She is remembered for her autobiographical trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), published originally as Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943), works which evoke through the childhood memories and youth of third-person 'Laura' a vanished world of agricultural customs and rural culture. There is a selection of works by Margaret Lane, A Country Calendar and other writings (1979), with a biographical introduction.
Flora Thompson died on 21 May 1947, and was buried in Dartmouth.

The Oxford Companion to English Literature.

© Margaret Drabble and Oxford University Press. 1995.

The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in........

The First Page from Lark Rise To Candleford

Lark Rise

Poor 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 every 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 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 Inclosures 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 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 the convenience in fieldwork and to connect the main Oxford roaed with the mother village and a series of 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-tiled van; a string of blanketed hunters with grooms, exercising in the early morning; and only one of the old penny-farthing high bicycles at rare intervals. People still rushed to their cottage doors to see one of the latter come past.
A few of the houses had thatched roofs, whitewashed outer walls and diamond-paned windows, but the majority were just stone or brick boxes with blue-slated roofs. The older houses were relics of pre-enclosure days and were still occupied by descendants of the original squatters, themselves at that time elderly people. One old couple owned a donkey and cart, which they used to carry their vegetables, eggs, and honey to the market town and sometimes hired out ar sixpence a day to their neighbours. One house was occupied by a retired farm ballif, who was reported to have 'well feathered his own nest' during his years of stewardship. Another aged man owned and worked upon an acre of land. These, the innkeeper, and one other man, a stonemason who walked the three miles to and from his work in the town every day, were the only ones not employed as agricultural labourers.

A Christmas Mummers Play

Ivy

Plum Duff

(suet pudding)

Charisma CDS 4020 (LP, UK, 1980)

The Girl I Left Behind Me

Lemady/Arise And Pick A Posy

All Of A Row

Tommy Toes

John Dory

Witch Elder

All Of A Row (Reprise)

Abroad For Pleasure

The Day Thou Gavest

Battle Of The Somme

The Grand Circle Dance

Speed The Plough

Snow Falls

Cart Music

The Holly And The Ivy

Postman's Knock

Hunt Music

Scarlet And The Blue

Dare To Be A Daniel

Jacob's Well

Jacob's Well (Reprise)

The Albion Band:

Pete Bullock: keyboards;
Bill Caddick: vocals, triangle;
Ashley Hutchings: bass guitar, vocals;
Doug Morter: electric guitar;
John Tams: vocals, melodeon;

Graeme Taylor: electric guitar, vocals

with

Martin Carthy: vocals;
Shirley Collins: vocals;
Howard Evans: trumpet, flugelhorn;
Michael Gregory: drums;
John Kirkpatrick: vocals, button accordion, concertina, melodeon;
Brian Protheroe: vocals, keyboards;
Steve Saunders: trombone, euphonium, tuba;
Martin Simpson: banjo;

The Original Cast:

Laura: Valerie Whittington

Pumpkin: Brian Protheroe

Boamer: Bill Caddick

Jerry Parrish: John Tams

The Vicar: Brian Protheroe

Edmund Timms: Paul Davies-Prowles

Albert, Laura's Father: Brian Protheroe

Thomas Brown, Postman: Martin Carthy

John, Laura's Husband: Brian Protheroe

Keith Dewhurst transformed the

three books into two plays,

both put on at the

National Theatre, London and

directed by

Bill Bryden and Sebastian Graham-Jones:

Lark Rise in March 1978, and

Candleford in November 1979.

A Poem by Flora Thompson

This Earthly Paradise

I DESIRE no heaven of gold harps,
Give me the harps of earth--
Pine trees with red gold on their stems,
The music of the west wind in their branches!

When I am old,
Give me for heaven a little house set on a heath;
The blue hills behind; the blue sea before.
The brick floors scoured crimson, the flagstones like snow;
The brass taps and candlesticks like gold,
And there, in my soft grey gown between the holly-hocks,
Upon a day of days I would welcome an old poet;
And pour him tea, and walk on the heath, and talk the sun down;
And then by the wood fire he should read me the poems
of his passionate youth,
And make new ones praising friendship above love!

Friends of Flora Thompson

A web page sponsored by

present-day residents of

Cottisford (Fordlow) and

Juniper Hill (Lark Rise)

who share with many

people round the world

a warm affection for

Flora Thompson as

revealed by her writings.

The Albion Christmas

Website

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