Thompson, Flora

(British, 1876–1947) Oxfordshire-born, Thompson went to work at 14, married a fellow post-office worker, and began writing essays and poems. Her autobiographical evocation of a country childhood, Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), was first published as three books: Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943). Here she fictionalizes herself as ‘Laura’, and tells, unsentimentally and with precise recollection, of growing up at Juniper Hill, the reality of life in a hamlet, ‘bare, brown and windswept for eight months out of twelve’, the hardships and pleasures of the farm labourers and their families, and visits to the nearby town, Candleford. She chronicles a vanished world of rural and seasonal customs in the late nineteenth century. Go on to read the posthumously published Still Glides the Stream (1948) in which she again fictionalizes her childhood experience.

Laurie Lee, H. E. Bates GC