Snippety snip from Shimrod:

>Watching 'LRTC' I got this sinking feeling that the old world of rural England is now, more or less, forgotten. I'm sure that someone will remind me that it was nasty, brutal and smelly (I've no doubt that it was!) but there was something rather admirable about it - particularly the labouring folk who worked so hard for pitiful wages and, if we think of them at all now, are dismissed as 'yokels' or 'bumpkins'. Their 'Old World' (by which I mean their inner lives, rather than their material circumstances) has been swept away - much like the once beautiful English countryside has been swept away<

Forgive me ... but no anaesthetic, no dentistry, no antibiotics; no minimum wage, no employee protection, walking to & from work and indeed working in all conditions, doffing one's hat to gentry; washing a family's clothes in the pot by hand & mangle; early & lingering death from pleurisy, TB and childhoods blighted by polio; near-starvation conditions every January; marriage at 14, first child at 15 & giving birth to aunts & uncles at the same time as becoming a grandmother ...

Flora Thompson's books are a brilliant view into a world that has indeed gone, but she makes it absolutely clear that even as late as the 1880s the people she was writing about were little more than serfs.

Fee x