Country life
Benny Green
Still Glides the Stream Flora Thompson (Oxford University Paperbacks £1.50) Somewhere in the letters of Rupert Brooke there is a passage where he describes a dream of enjoying a previously undiscovered Gilbert and Sullivan opera; his delight is the very special kind which only dreams of wish-fulfilment can ever provide, of a pleasure placed out of bounds by reality and suddenly dropped in the dreamer's lap. At the time Brooke dreamed his impossible operatic dream, the Gilbert and Sullivan oeuvre was a closed system, which is what made the dream worth dreaming in the first place. Painters have dreamed of new colours and oceanographers of unsuspected inland seas; undoubtedly followers of literature often yearn for the disclosure of a fresh manuscript by their favourite writer. At which point devotees of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford can rejoice in the prospect of dashing out and purchasing a copy of Still Glides the Stream, first published posthumously in 1948 and long since buried in an obscurity so impenetrable that there must be a great many readers like myself whose pleasure in reading the Candleford trilogy was tempered by the belief that there was no more where that came from.
The Oxford University Press, which has done readers a service by publishing Still Glides the Stream at all, describe the book as 'cast in fictional form', and in the sense that the action, such as it is, takes place not through Flora Thompson's eyes in Candleford but through Charity Finch's in Restharrow, the fictional label is accurate enough. But Still Glides the Stream is not in the conventional sense a novel, any more than Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village, a book which it resembles somewhat in tone, is a novel. It is rather a sort of chronicle glimpsed through the gauze of recollection. The feeling grew while I was reading it that Miss Thompson had attempted to distance herself from the experience to the extent of achieving a creative projection of Candleford rather than Candleford itself, and had not quite succeeded. Whether it was this suspicion of failure which caused the book to remain unpublished until after her death I do not know, but if that is the case, and Miss Thompson thrust the manuscript in her bottom drawer in the same spirit that one wraps a half-knitted rug in camphor, then she was wrong, because whatever she hoped Still Glides the Stream might be, and whatever it turned out to be in the end, reading it is a perfect pleasure.
What appears at first to be a series of episodic reminiscences under the customary rural headings—the Flower Show, the Field Fires, St Valentine's Eve—very gradually reveals itself as a domestic cliffhanger whose tensions are no less compelling because of the modesty of the tone. It is around the time of Victoria's Golden Jubilee; in an Oxfordshire village a few young girls drift or scheme their way into matrimony; a few old folks die, a few young folks mourn them. A few new frocks are worn, and some puddings turn out a little better than others. It is the sort of world where the handsome cousin enlists and goes off to serve in India, and where the bailiff's widow genteelly sips her tea, 'her bonnet strings thrown back over her shoulders and her white handkerchief spread on her lap to keep any chance crumb from her Sunday skirt'. The scale of events is miniature, the emotional expression muted. Restharrow's idea of a grave scandal is a series of poison pen letters whose authorship is eventually revealed with exquisite tact and shrewdness, and whose guilty party, almost as though intent on proving that this is not a novel but real life, where the biter very often never gets bit at all, lives happy ever after, protected from the buffetings of fate by as likeable a noodle as ever fell for a pretty face.
What distinguishes Miss Thompson's chronicle from the usual run of nostalgic barnyard sentimentality is the streak of perception which runs through her prose, lending it a resilience which no doubt has a great deal to do with its survival value. In portraying a man who is nearly but not quite a village idiot, she says that 'his only peculiarity was his simple goodness'; and, remembering with crystal clarity what it was like to move as a child through a world of vanished rustic adults, she writes: 'Boring as Mrs Pocock's monologue might be supposed to be to a child, Charity had not found it boring, for it had gone in at one ear and out at the other.'
Of course, even as she writes, Miss Thompson is perfectly aware that what she is composing is a requiem for a departed morality; when one of the central characters dies, she writes of him that 'he was one of the last of the old country breed, poor in this world's goods, obscure in position ... but a man who stood out from his fellows in his complete mastery of all that pertains to the land'. There is no bleat of regret from Miss Thompson, and no crocodile tears to dampen the text ; she looks the decay of her own origins straight in the eye, and sets down her hedgerow recollections with an exactitude sometimes Tennysonian.
There is another Victorian literary lion whose ghostly roar echoes through the final pages. When Charity eventually marries a man older than herself, there is a kind of stoic modesty about the betrothal which is strongly evocative of the later lovers of Dickens, like Little Dorrit and Arthur Clenham, perhaps, who 'went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness'. And I am sure Miss Thompson would not have minded my using her publication as an excuse for asking the Oxford University Press, now that it has done the right thing by Miss Thompson, to do the same for Miss Thompson's urban cousin Molly Hughes, whose A London Family has remained neglected for far too long. In the meantime, all is as it should be in Miss Thompson's world, where childhood is secure, and the night-sounds are benignant as always: 'Outside in the snowy fields, a dog-fox barked sharply; an owl drifted across the window of their room. One of the horses in the stable shifted its hooves uneasily; then all was still but the stream, which stole, babbling and gurgling all night past the silent house with its sleeping inmates.'
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