'Lark Rise is fiction.'

Well Ralphie as has been mentioned in another thread the TV version certainly is!

However the book of memoirs written by Flora Thompson , a slip of a girl working in a village post office having left school at 13, was not

'In Lark Rise, Over to Candleford and Candleford Green, Flora describes her childhood in the impoverished farming community of Juniper Hill in the remote corner where Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire meet.

She writes with such warmth, freshness and unsentimental clarity that you can smell the bread baking in cottage kitchens and hear the laughter of children playing by the brook.

BUT you can also smell the stink of privies and feel the pangs of near-constant hunger, for this is no misty-eyed account of a lost rural paradise.
Life was harsh, deprived and primitive. It was common for a family of 10 to live in a two-bedroom cottage with no running water

Then, virtually all the men worked on farms for a mere 10 shillings a week, which pauperised them and their families.
They ate what they could grow in gardens and allotments, keeping a pig and hens for meat.

"Poverty's no disgrace, but 'tis a great inconvenience" was a favourite saying that occurs frequently in the book.'

From 'Literary landscapes'

There are more objective archive records from Thatcham, another rural community in Berkshire during the same period as the Larkrise memoirs

The Newbury Weekly News correspondent reported:
"A pitiful wail reaches me from Ashmore Green where many men with large families are out of work, some of whom have been making a tour round (to find work) but without result. Though the people hear of soup being given away in this parish (Thatcham), none of it reaches the hamlet; in fact, a humorist friend says, they are worse off than their neighbours, who get Cold Ash daily; the Ashmore Green people get the cold shoulder, and that over the left", (N.W.N., 8.1.1891). Although a good deal of charity was being distributed, many people still suffered unnoticed through no fault of their own.


Life in Thatcham at the end of the nineteenth-century was still hard, and there were people in the twentieth-century who could look back and remember the village in the 1890s.
One of these people was George Rutter, who wrote a series of articles for the Newbury Weekly News in the 1950s; he remembered the hard times:
"Many are old enough to recall the poverty, distress end malnutrition . . .", he wrote, "so obvious to philanthropic minds that efforts were made to feed and clothe the more necessitous cases. There are memories of soup kitchens and food canteens. . .".

Rutter describes the lives of the inhabitants of the village in the 1890s.
The women of Thatcham ". . . were hard-working and self-sacrificing, knowing how to provide meals for many stomachs with but a few pence, scrupulously clean and never having any leisure from this full-time job of chores, cooking and mending...
The public house was an additional headache to many women of that day. Beer was cheap but even so money for it could be ill-afforded out of the house-hold budget . . .".

For others life was even harder: "There was also a weekly queue in the Broadway, rather a sad one, a gathering of the old and poor, who waited outside the registrar-cum-relieving officer's home on Friday mornings, in all weathers, for the weekly dole of a shilling and perhaps an order for bread".

Extracted from Thatcham Historical Society

Not what people want to sit down and 'escape' with on Sunday evening