THE EMPTY VILLAGE
David Lovibond finds no trace of
Flora Thompson in neat-as-ninepence Juniper Hill
ONE of the manifestations of middle age, or at least of my middle age, is the urge to make pilgrimages. Nothing Popish, mind you, or to do with abroad, but the fiftysomething's equivalent of Famous Five adventures by steam train to deepest Dorset or to a dark house on a Cornish hilltop. Somewhere with bookish connections and the blessed air of melancholy; somewhere remote from the great swaths of England designated somebody or other's 'Country' or 'Trail', and from the bogus reverence for birthplaces where no item is too commonplace to be put under glass with its little printed card — as in the Just William story where our hero charges a penny a time to visit his sleeping aunt Emily's bedroom and inspect the 'Fat Wild Woman's Hare', the Tat Wild Woman's Kome' and the Tat Wild Woman's Teeth'.
Somewhere like Juniper Hill, in fact. This tiny hamlet, buried in the miry flatlands of north Oxfordshire and so obscure that it doesn't appear on my Ordnance Road Atlas, was home to Flora Thompson, the author of Lark Rise to Candleford. Elsewhere in the county the tourist boards are making hay with 'The Inklings' (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis et al.) and Inspector Morse, but Cherwell District Council says, 'Not many people have heard of Flora Thompson' and have spared her the brown signs and brochures.
Born in 1876, the eldest of ten children, Flora spent decades producing nature essays for the Lady and volumes of verse with titles such as 'Bog Myrtle and Peat'. It was only in the final years before her death in 1947 that she turned to childhood memories, and found an original voice. The writer HI Massingham said that Flora carried 'in her mind the England of small properties, based on the land, the England whose native land belonged to its own people'. As a Tory sentimentalist, I was beguiled by her elegiac evocation of a vanishing rural culture, and her oblique story of the slow sundering of the immemorial bond between people and place. I wondered whether behind the old music of the names she had known — Cottisford and Juniper Hill, Fringford and Hinton-in-the-Hedges — some echo of the genius loci that had inspired her lingered on.
The problem, though, is that English road journeys are violently inimical to the contemplative life. I thought that a gentle 90mile drive from Wiltshire to the Oxfordshire/Northamptonshire borders would establish the right mood for dreamy veneration. But on a Tuesday afternoon in May the nondescript 'A' roads north of Swindon were either carparks or racetracks. Winston Smith may have thought that the countryside was the only place where he could be safe and unobserved. Well, not in 2002 he couldn't; even the remotest stretches have their burden of cameras flashing away profitably, and every lay-by has its watchful police car. The final approach to Juniper Hill — the Brackley Road described by Flora as almost deserted since the coming of the railways, from which I expected at least a sense of deepening seclusion — is in the process of becoming a dual carriageway. The village is barely a stone's throw from all this churning expansion, and my arrival was serenaded not by birdsong and bees, but by the drone of heavy traffic.
I looked for the primitive four-ale bar where Flora's father drank halfpenny beer and talked radical politics with the farm labourers. It was gone. So I parked under a Neighbourhood Watch sign, whereupon a woman with a notepad appeared from behind a wall and took down my number. Juniper Hill was not always so respectable. It began as an 18th-century settlement for the homeless poor, and even in the 1880s of Flora's schooldays its inhabitants were looked down on as gypsies or squatters. There were never more than 30 crowded, malodorous cottages (each with its occupied pigsty) in the village, and there are probably fewer now, though infinitely more decorous. A man in the garden of a tiny stone bothy with a shingle on the wall announcing it to be 'Little Nook' was hosing down his gravel, secure perhaps in the knowledge that chil dren were unlikely to disturb it. This has become a neat-as-ninepence place where sports-utility vehicles outnumber children, no one keeps a family pig, and no one says good afternoon to strangers.
Banbury museum told me that Flora's cottage has a plaque, and after an hour or so of futile peering and pondering an elderly couple who had watched my frequent circuits of their village with increasing alarm told me that the cottage's owners had let the hedge grow high and would not welcome visitors. It is notoriously difficult to maintain feelings of poignancy from a glimpse of chimneypots. Gratifying though it is that Juniper Hill has not capitalised on its Lark Rise connections, my heart pounded with indignation that one of the finest writers of the English rural vernacular was subject to so little community pride and public acknowledgment.
I turned away towards the lanes and field paths that Flora had taken to school in Cottisford, the 'mother' village a mile and a half distant. Lark Rise describes the women of Juniper Hill leazing' or gleaning the stubble fields for ears of corn that the horse-rake had missed. The children would feast on haws, sloes and crab-apples and all the other wild food that the hedgerows offered. Only the roadside hedges remain now, the verges thick with shattered sticks that the flailing machine has left. The fields are huge and shadowless, the green corn uniformly stitched in tramlines 20 feet wide. The particularity of Flora's countryside, so redolent of local attachment, which lent a kind of ownership to those whose generations shaped it, has long since been erased by the imperatives of modern farming. Banal and anonymous, what remains is empty of any meaning or resonance and as far removed from Lark Rise as the moon
I found Flora's school at the Cottisford crossroads. 'A small grey one-storied building.. . . It had a lobby with boys' and girls' earth closets, and a backyard with washbasins, although there was no water laid on.' The school is now a private house. At the age of 14 Flora went to work as a post-office assistant at Fringford Post Office and Forge, `Candleford Green' in the book. Fringford is close to the Oxford Road and has become a commuter village. Flora is entirely forgotten here; no trace of her working life survives, and the post office where she spent seven years is now subsumed into the mass of expensive private property.
Flora left Oxfordshire when she came of age in 1897, and never risked the potency of her recollections by returning. It was vanity to think that I could find glimmerings of a rural civilisation that was already passing from the country she remembered. There is no space now for the world of Lark Rise. England is closing in. There is scarcely a hilltop where the prospect is not of raw, new building and hardly a place where at night the sky is not stained with the glow of the advancing city; better by far to stay at home with my books and imagine how England was.
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