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NO.72
FALL/WINTER2023

Our Guest Historian Reads Lark Rise

Introducing the first essay in a new occasional feature, food in fiction, in which our Guest Historian finds food, feasts, fact and fancy in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise.

rabbits Flora Thompson published Lark Rise in 1939 when she was in her sixties. The book was followed by Over to Candleford in 1941 and Candleford Green in 1943. Together these three volumes comprise the trilogy From Lark Rise to Candleford, which has become recognised in Britain as a classic for its evocation of English rural life in the last years of the nineteenth century and a window on a vanished world. From Lark Rise to Candleford has been placed on school curricula and adapted for the stage. More recently it has come to the attention of a much wider audience through BBC television’s freewheeling and saccharine adaptations.

Lark Rise was the name Thompson gave to the hamlet (Juniper Hill) in which Laura Timms, her alter ego, grew up. It was a scattering of about thirty cottages and an inn located close to the Oxfordshire-Northamptonshire border, around 19 miles from Oxford. In the 1880s, the decade covered by the first volume of the trilogy, Lark Rise was a small, unprepossessing and isolated settlement populated mainly by agricultural labourers and their families:

“The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing northeast corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Lark Rise because of the great number of skylarks which made the surrounding fields their springboard and nested on the bare earth between the rows of green corn.” (Lark 1; see B. English 7-34)

Laura’s father, a stonemason, offered a less romantic appraisal. He saw Lark Rise as “the spot God made with the leftovers when He’d finished creating the rest of the earth.” (Lark 252)

Girl cutting bread. In common with those in most rural communities, hamlet houses had no running water and no sanitation beyond an outhouse or ‘garden closet.’ Neither did they have lighting other than that supplied by candles, paraffin and daylight. Lark Rise residents had few possessions and fewer luxuries but, Thompson maintains, they did not pity themselves. They were poor but generally had enough to eat, notwithstanding that most families were large. But sufficient could still be short commons; in one “terribly poor” family a mother and daughter fried one rasher of bacon for their lunch each day. They took it in turns to have the rasher, the other having to be content with dipping her bread in the fat. (Lark 161)

Since finding sufficient was a preoccupation of all, the raising and consumption of food feature prominently in Lark Rise, the volume that covers Laura’s childhood. The food of hamlet folk was “rough.” (Lark 5) Breakfast was bread and lard (Lark 39), sometimes with the addition of mustard for the men, or a smear of treacle or sprinkle of sugar for children. Milk was “a rare luxury” and butter “too costly for general use.” (Lark 17) Margarine, or butterine as it was known, was available in the 1880s but little used since most people preferred lard. (Lark 16)

Some cottagers kept bees and therefore had honey and, perhaps, mead; many made their own wine, jam and jelly from elderberries, blackberries or other wild fruits. If they were hungry during the day, farm workers would munch on a slice of turnip or take a bite of cattle cake. Boys started work in the fields young and their mothers generally saw that they had “a bit of summat” to peck on between meals. This might be half a cold pancake or the remains of a roly-poly. A farm worker’s lunch comprised cold tea from tin bottles and, for the lucky ones, bread with a little bacon. The less fortunate had more bread and lard, supplemented, perhaps, with a little cheese. But even these modest rations were more generous than the meagre fare consumed by women at home, especially when they had just given birth when water gruel, dry toast and weak tea were thought an adequate diet. Once the parson’s daughter had called by with a jug of veal broth and a large sago pudding, the patient was deemed sufficiently recovered to resume a normal diet--along with a half-pint of stout a day for those who could afford it. (Lark 125-26)

Garden Lark Risers regarded a kitchen garden or allotment as essential. Every cottager grew large quantities of vegetables and reared at least one pig. Pigs were important members of the family (until slaughtered) and households did much to care for their pigs and fatten them to the utmost. Children scoured the countryside for greenery and snails to feed them and, if necessary, men would forego their daily half pint of beer to keep the pig in food. At a time when fresh meat was a luxury--usually seen in the form of “six pennyworth of pieces” for a meat pudding--a pig could provide bacon for an entire winter or even longer. (Lark 10-11)Pigs were killed by travelling butchers or pig stickers who generally did their slaughtering as an evening sideline after they had finished their unrelated day jobs. The slaughter could be a noisy, bloody business, sometimes made noisier when the pig got away, prompting a cross-country chase to recapture it. Butchering the pig was a communal occasion that attracted a crowd of spectators, few of whom evinced any sympathy for the doomed animal.

Once dead, the pig was bled and singed. The gristly outer coverings of the toes were removed and flung to the children who sucked and chewed them, burnt and filthy though they were. For the adults beer flowed and pig’s fry was eaten straight from the cooking pan. Then came the serious business of butchering the carcass and distributing the meat. Some joints went to neighbours who had previously shared out their own pig; other cuts might have been mortgaged to the baker or miller in return for pig food in hard times, but everybody received something. Over the ensuing days hams and bacon were salted, chitterlings cleaned, lard dried and hog’s pudding made. It was a busy time but also a cheerful one.

Pig

The Sunday following was the occasion of the pig feast when relatives who lived within walking distance would come for dinner (in Lark Rise neighbours were never invited for a meal). Not every cottage had an oven but there was always access to a neighbour’s bread oven which would be loaded with pork joints, potatoes, batter puddings, pork pies and sometimes cakes, then left to bake without interference. Four different kinds of vegetable were cooked as an accompaniment along with a meat pudding that was eaten alone before the joint was served. On normal Sundays a sweet roly-poly was prepared as a first course in order to take “the edge off the appetite.” But at a pig feast no one wanted a sweet pudding: “that could be had any day, and who wanted sweet things when there was plenty of meat to be had!” (Lark 13)

Such days of ‘glorious plenty’ occurred only once or twice a year. The routine weekly challenge was to feed a large family on 10 shillings (50 pence or 75 cents) per week. This challenge was met mainly by making use of the abundant garden vegetables: Potatoes, peas, broad beans, runner beans, cauliflowers, onions, cabbage, kale, lettuce, radishes and herbs. Potatoes were the key, for enough needed to be grown to last the year. Their peelings went to the pig and, in turn, pig muck fertilised the vegetable garden. Men tended the vegetables while women cared for the herb garden in which among the thyme, parsley, sage and lavender might be found peppermint (for tea) and yarrow (for beer).

Laura’s mother cooked “plain and wholesome food.” (Lark 223) But for everyone bread, rosemary-flavoured lard and green vegetables were the staple fare, supplemented, perhaps, with a little bacon. Toast was a family favourite and cold, boiled, streaky bacon on toast made “a dish so delicious it deserves to be more widely popular.” (Lark 108) Autumn provided an opportunity to supplement the quotidian diet with foraged mushrooms, sloes, crab apples, rosehips, haws and elderberry. Laura’s mother did not approve of her children trailing around wet meadows and spoiling boot leather in search of a little free food: “Six shillingsworth of good shoe-leather gone for sixpen’orth of mushrooms.” (Lark 231)

Foragers Foraging, for watercress, cowslips (for tea) and snails (again, for the pig), was not just an autumn affair. On their way to school in the “mother village,” 1