8/13/2019 Flora Thompson

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Flora Tompson’s life and work is a story of the relationship between people and place, and the two still re-

fract each other even when her story is told in quite new ways.

In 2010, in the early stages of researching this book, I happened to stay the night in a farmhouse B&B in

the folded limestone country near Bath. It was a balmy Saturday evening in September and, taking an amble

around the farm, I came across something very curious, marooned in the yard. It had the look of a decrepit

settlement, a recently abandoned village, a rural Mary Celeste. Tere were two rows of cottages facing each

other, with a dusty track between them. Te walls seemed to be made of stucco, not local Bath stone, and

were stained with yellow lichen. Tere were clean curtains in the windows. Te 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 – except there was not a soul to be seen. I edged round the back of the cottages and re-

alized they were two-dimensional. Tey had that element much prized by householders, façade, but nothing

behind. Te walls were shored-up plasterboard, painted with stone-coloured acrylic. Te lichens were a clever

piece of distressing, applied (with considerable botanical exactitude, I should add) by a paint-spray. And it

dawned on me that I was wandering through some kind of reproduction, a simulacrum, though of what I

hadn’t the slightest idea. Next morning, the proprietor – the farmer’s wife – was happy to explain. It was one

of the sets for the television production of Lark Rise to Candleford. Te BBC had leased the space at the back

of the farm for the duration of the series. She was full of admiration for the set-designers, who, she said, had

once been hired to conjure up an Arabian Nights fantasy for the wedding party of a rich sheikh. No wonder

they had made such a convincing job of a humble Victorian hamlet. o tell the truth, the facsimile looked

rather more authentic ‘resting’ between series in the autumn sunshine than it did blazed yellow by floodlights

and hoed free of weeds on the television screen.

Te farmer had also leased to the BBC a large field adjacent to the mock village, so that a rough road

could be made through the crops, which could in turn be sown and cut according to the filming schedule.

Te production team had not been so historically smart here, and had omitted to sow the poppies and corn-

flowers that would have adorned any nineteenth-century wheatfield. But that seemed a minor environmental

anachronism compared to the huge geographical disjunction involved in moving the action to Wessex.

Tere were good practical reasons why the production team chose this site rather than the real (and still

extant) settlements in north Oxfordshire where Lark Rise is set. Some kind of semi-permanent set had to be

built.