by Tom Fort
The defining event in the recent history before the arrival of Flora Thompson’s family in the 1870s had been the enclosure of the common land on which the village stood. By then the historic open fields had long since been hedged and taken into the ownership of a handful of made-good local farmers. But Juniper Hill itself and the heath around it had remained as common. This meant that as and when it was enclosed, the people would lose their rights to graze animals and take wood, and – much more alarming – would risk losing their homes, to which they had no legal title. The arrival of constables armed with pickaxes to eject the villagers and take possession of the cottages provoked a two-day standoff. Eventually a compromise was agreed with the would-be enclosers, Eton College, under which nominal rents for the cottages were agreed and Juniper Hill was allocated eight acres of allotments, a quarter of an acre per household.
By standing together the village had seen off the threat to its very existence, which must have done much to pull the little community together. It was also extremely isolated, geographically, economically and culturally. Apart from its pub, the Fox, it had no amenities or facilities: no church, no shop, not even a smithy; there was therefore very little reason for anyone from outside to visit. Thompson described it thus: ‘A huddle of grey stone walls and pale slated roofs with only the bushiness of a fruit tree or the dark line of a yew hedge to relieve its colourlessness. To a passer-by it must have appeared a lone and desolate place; but it had a warmth of its own, and a closer observer would have found it as seething with interest and activity as a molehill.’
Did she romanticise it? It’s worth recalling her purpose – as Richard Mabey observed astutely, she became a writer ‘by a gradual process of detachment from her roots and insinuation into a literary culture’. By leaving Juniper Hill to become an assistant to the postmistress at Fringford, a full three miles away, Thompson broke away from the norm, which was to become a domestic servant. Subsequently she moved much further away to work in other post offices, and eventually married a career postmaster and ended up living in Devon. When she revisited her childhood to write about it, she did so imaginatively only, and did not think twice about manipulating her material to serve that end. One example among many is the treatment of the postmistress in Fringford with whom Laura goes to live and work. In real life her name was Kezia Whitton and she was an enormous widow of nearly sixty. But in the book she is recast as Miss Dorcas Lane, ‘a little birdlike woman in her kingfisher silk dress with snapping black eyes, a longish nose and black hair plaited into a crown on the top of her head.’
Overall Richard Mabey is surely right that what he calls her ‘celebratory realism . . . neither romanticises poverty nor underplays it.’ Thompson herself wrote of Juniper Hill: ‘The people were poorer and had not the comforts, amusements and knowledge we have today, but they were happier . . . they knew the lost secret of being happy on a little.’ Who is to say she was wrong?
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‘The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing north-east corner of Oxfordshire.’
It still does, although there is rape as well as wheat, and even sheep, which there were not in Flora Thompson’s time. Having cycled in and out and around, I can bear witness to the gentleness of the rise. Imperceptible would be nearer the mark; the hill of Juniper Hill is no more than wishful thinking.
The situation is not much changed, nor is the shape and appearance of the settlement itself despite a few twentieth-century additions. A significant number of the original cottages survive in an altered form, including End House where the Timms family lived, now Lark Rise Cottage. It doesn’t look much like it did in Flora’s day, but it is still ‘a little apart, and turning its back on its neighbours as though about to run away into the fields.’ There are no listed buildings in Juniper Hill; in fact no buildings of any distinction at all, with the possible exception of the pub – the Waggon and Horses in the book – which is now a private house. Even so – presumably because of the Lark Rise connection – the village has had Conservation Area status conferred on it, which means that it will not be allowed to expand significantly into the foreseeable future.
It is compact and discreetly blended into its landscape, as if it would rather you didn’t know it was there. The countryside is flat, not pretty or picturesque, with no big views or surprises – just fields and copses and hedges (though not as many hedges as there used to be), quiet lanes, pale stone houses. When I came by in early summer the wheat was green but thickening, the yellow flowers of the rape pale and quite sparse. There was not a farm worker or a machine in motion to be seen, but that is to be expected these days. It is a pleasing, unexciting part of the country, far enough from London and Oxford and suburban sprawl to be genuinely rural.
It is arranged in a cluster off a very minor road that leads from Cottisford and Fringford north to meet the A43 trunk road. I spent a little while wandering around getting my bearings. With the closure of its pub in the 1990s, Juniper Hill lost its one remaining attraction for visitors – apart from the Lark Rise connection. There was a phone box, a post box, a green box containing salt to be spread in freezing weather and a noticeboard displaying the timetable for the nearest bus service – which does not serve the village – and something about roadworks on the M40. The long-established allotments are still on the edge of the village and were decently tended. Next to the allotments was a recreation ground but no sign of recent use. There had evidently been a football club once, but not for several seasons. The goalposts had been left beside a rusted metal shed in which, I assumed, the netting and line-marker had been stored.
Juniper Hill is too small to have a parish council and even when partnered by neighbouring Cottisford – Fordlow in the book – only warrants a lesser administrative body classified as a Parish Meeting. I met its chairman, who lives in one of the newish bungalows at the south-eastern edge of the village with his wife, who is Juniper Hill born and bred. They confirmed what I had already managed to work out for myself: that the life of the place, in the community sense, had steadily leaked away to the point at which it could hardly be said to exist at all. The closure of the pub had been a mortal blow; apparently the landlord had simply got tired of running it and decided to stop.
The one social event of the year was now the village party still held on the recreation ground. There was the odd coffee morning. That was it. There used to be a harvest supper and a fete at Cottisford down the road, but not for several years. Otherwise people just lived their lives in their homes and gardens, said good morning, discussed the weather and the prospects for a decent season on the allotments. The common cause that had once bound Juniper Hill together had disappeared so long ago that no one could properly recall what it was. Denied any opportunity to grow and become something different by its conservation status, it seems fated to remain little more than a kind of shrine to its one claim to fame.
Cottisford – the ‘mother’ village in Lark Rise – is much older and prettier than Juniper Hill, but no livelier. The school Flora and her beloved brother Edwin went to is on the crossroads at the eastern end of the straggle of dwellings that comprises the settlement. It shut down half a century ago, the supply of children having dried up, and in its much altered and smartened state no longer even looks like a school. The lane passes the Parish Clerk’s House (there is no parish clerk), Manor Farm – where the Juniper Hill men came on Friday evenings to collect their wages – the Rectory, and the gates to Cottisford House. Here, in Thompson’s day, the squire – Mr Bracewell in the book, Edwards Rousby in real life – lived with his family and considerable retinue of servants. Next to Cottisford House is the church where Flora and Edwin worshipped – ‘a tiny place about the size of a barn with nave and chancel really, no side aisles.’ Every Sunday morning the bells – ‘cracked, flat-toned’ – were heard across the fields, and the Juniper Hill churchgoers would start their familiar tramp along the lane. Once they had joined the squire and his contingent, the rector’s household, the f
armers and their families – all in the places determined by their social status, Juniper Hill people at the back – there were about thirty all told, filling the space.
The Church of St Mary the Virgin has not changed significantly. There are memorials to the Timms children and the rector of the time, the Reverend Charles Sawkins Harrison, who came to school each morning to teach Scripture and remind the children of the poor why God had ordered the world in the way he had. These days Holy Communion is celebrated there twice a month; the current owner of Cottisford House, who is one of the churchwardens, told me the average turnout was around twelve, ‘not bad, considering’. Cottisford, like Juniper Hill, has been designated a Conservation Area; since 1945 its housing stock has increased by a grand total of six semi-detached council homes.
I finished my cycling tour of Flora Thompson country in Fringford, where as a fourteen-year-old girl she had begun her working life in the post office run by Kezia Whitton. Fringford was the basis for the Candleford Green of the third volume of Lark Rise to Candleford, although it is much more a composite than Lark Rise or Fordlow, with elements taken from several other sources. Unlike them it has been spared the restraining hand of Cherwell District Council’s conservation officers, and has been allowed to grow and adapt to changing times. It has a population of about 600, a good-looking pub and an even better-looking cricket ground, a good solid red-brick village hall, a handsome church and a selection of pleasing old houses and cottages around The Green and along Main Street – of which Mrs Whitton’s post office and forge, with its steep, low thatched roof and honey-coloured rough stone walls, is one of the most pleasing.
It is inevitable, given the standard of modern housing design, that Fringford’s expansion should have cost it some of its old charm. As so often, the rot started in the 1960s – in Fringford’s case with the lamentable string of bungalows along Church Close, and an equally dispiriting collection of houses in horrible pale brick around St Michael’s Close. Subsequently the gaps which once gave the village its open, rustic look have been progressively filled. Some of the developments – Farriers Close, for instance, a cluster of big brick double-garage ‘executive-style homes’ – are more inept than others. But nothing I saw rose above the level of dull and derivative.
This is the deal that Fringford – in common with countless other villages – has made. It has surrendered a good deal of its historic distinctiveness, but – as its historian, Martin Greenwood, says in his splendid Fring ford Through the Ages – ‘it is smarter and more prosperous than it has ever been.’ The primary school, built in 1973, is ugly but thriving. The village hall offers a rich programme of film shows, karate, Pilates, whist drives, dance teaching, bingo and more besides. The cricket club may not be setting the Oxfordshire Cricket Association League alight with its results, but when it was offered the opportunity to buy the ground a few years ago, it rose gallantly and successfully to the challenge. Fringford could certainly do with a village shop and post office, but apart from that it is evidently in reasonable health.
If Flora Thompson could see it now she would doubtless recoil at the way it has grown. She would be astonished and dismayed by the disappearance of the shops and trades, and would mourn the life and social intercourse they generated. She would be equally astonished by the complete erasing of the agricultural society in which she grew up, and by the emptiness of the fields. But she would be pleased, one feels, that the grinding poverty and constriction of mental horizons that went with that life are endured no more. And she would probably rejoice that the rigid social hierarchy whose God-given rightness had been drummed daily into her young head by the rector had been dismantled.
‘Other days, other ways’, she wrote somewhere, wisely.
14
POET’S EYE
Slad, Gloucestershire
Without Laurie Lee and Cider with Rosie, no one would have paid Slad – the Gloucestershire village where the book is set – any close attention at all. Of itself it is just a small, straggling settlement of ordinary cottages and houses distributed haphazardly along a steep valley side with woods above and fields around. Its situation is very beautiful, but so is that of other villages in this beautiful part of the county. Without its famous chronicler, it would be no more notable than any of them.
That one slim book – read by millions, never not in print in the sixty years since its first publication, twice filmed, a staple of the school syllabus – extracted Slad from the run-of-the-mill forever. It bestowed special status on it. It could never again be just one more village that came into existence in a particular place for a particular purpose, which was to give the people who worked there somewhere to live, and was then left to its own quiet devices once the work no longer existed. It became the village of Cider with Rosie, immortalised and almost sanctified by a writer who had actually left it behind when he was hardly even a young man – but who, in his imagination, could never leave it, and eventually became defined and bound by it.
Slad Valley in 1910
There is a luminously lovely window commemorating the local hero in Slad Church, where he was notably disinclined to worship. The quotation engraved on the glass – ‘. . . bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers . . .’ – is highly characteristic: a poet’s words, distilled, jewelled, intensely and self-consciously literary. Through Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee became Slad’s spiritual curator. It was a post for life, from which he was unable to escape. Even twenty years after his death he holds it still.
In 2014 Slad celebrated the centenary of Lee’s birth with a week-long festival. There was a Grand Opening at the church, followed by a fancy-dress parade and ‘Village Fun Day’. There were readings and music in the Woolpack, the pub where he held court. There were exhibitions and dramatic realisations of scenes from Cider with Rosie, a programme of guided walks around the Slad Valley, a creative workshop for aspiring writers. And so on, the events spilling out of the village into its mother town, Stroud, at the bottom of the valley.
The following year the BBC screened its second dramatisation of the book. It was as one would expect: loving and lyrical, because the BBC is never more sure-footed than when breathing life into rustic dramas from bygone times. Unlike Lark Rise to Candleford, it was also faithful to its original. As in the previous adaptation, filming took place in the Slad Valley, as if it had not changed in a hundred years. The illusion of timelessness is supported from other quarters – Lee’s widow still lives in their house behind the Woolpack, and the pub is much as it was when he was sipping from his tankard.
By returning to live there in early middle age, and remaining there the rest of a longish life, Lee conspired with his readers to keep Slad locked up in the past he had created for it. Wittingly or unwittingly, he was reluctant to allow the village to move on. In an essay called ‘Harvest Festival’ – recently published for the first time in a collection made by his daughter Jessy – Lee recalled going back after a long interval. ‘The sloping fields and crested beechwoods were bathed in a rich sunlight more radiant than the airs of Greece . . . apples and pears dropped like gifts into my hands . . . the dear stone cottages shone like temples upon their hills and hollows . . .’
He had left as a young man, moved to London, fought in the Spanish Civil War (although how much fighting there was remains a matter of dispute), lived the metropolitan literary life, conducted numerous love affairs, had a decent career as a factual film scriptwriter, endeavoured without much success to be recognised as a significant poet. In his mid-forties Lee wrote Cider with Rosie, returning to Slad in his imagination and reinhabiting it. Then, for complex and mysterious reasons not fully explained even by his sympathetic biographer, Valerie Grove, he came back in the flesh to live out the rest of his life a stone’s throw from the cottage where he had grown up.
The immediate success of Cider with Rosie had made the move from London back to Gloucestershire possible. But, as Valerie Grove makes clear, the book’s ir
repressible popular appeal turned it into a kind of spiritual ball and chain for its creator. The two sequels – As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War – came out at very long intervals over the subsequent thirty years, and although critically acclaimed and big sellers in their own right, they suffered in comparison with Cider. Lee himself had always longed to be known as a poet, but the three volumes of verse he published between 1944 and 1955 failed to secure the esteem he craved, and after the move back to Slad he hardly wrote poetry again. Late in life he said that his poems ‘were written by someone I once was and who is now so distant to me that I scarcely recognise him any more.’ Has there been a more poignant valedictory to a lost creative impulse?
The critic Robert McCrum wrote in his review of Valerie Grove’s biography: ‘In his prime he was known as a poet who had written a book, but in the end he was known as a prose writer who had formerly written poems.’ During the extended coda of his life, Lee flitted back and forth between London and Gloucestershire as if never quite able to work out where he belonged. He was certainly not a countryman in the conventional sense. He observed the beauty of landscape and nature through his poet’s eye, but he did not participate in it. He had no interest in shooting or fishing, or indeed in sport of any kind. He was no naturalist, nor even a great walker. His habitual haunt was inside or outside the Woolpack, and the pictures show him nattily turned out in shirt and tie with scarf and double-breasted cashmere or mohair overcoat, soft silvered hair flopping modishly over his ears, his half of light ale held in his violinist’s long fingers.
Most accounts suggest that there was a gulf between the persona on display at the Woolpack or the Chelsea Arts Club – affable, chatty, humorously bibulous, gallant and flirtatious to women – and the private man. He was evidently difficult to live with, or be related to. His jealousy of his elder brother Jack – with whom he shared a bed in boyhood – is evident in Cider with Rosie. Jack became a successful film director and eventually went to live in Australia. In 1973, after many years apart, Laurie visited him there; but there was a falling-out, and thereafter Laurie cut his elder brother out of the rest of his life. ‘He was one for taking offence’ was Jack’s only recorded comment.