Lark Rise by Flora Thompson

 

I didn't get along with this book, I wound up constantly torn between being overemotional and extremely annoyed. This is a thinly-veiled autobiographical account of a childhood in an English hamlet of the sort that got swept away by industrialisation, world wars and general societal changes. Most of it focuses on the 1880s and is wonderfully detailed about country life. On the one hand, it's a great record of day-to-day rural living at the time; customs, dialect, traditions, morals, values, work, pay, expectations, worldview, etc. I found this aspect very appealing because I spent several summers when I was very young in a profoundly rural area which seems to have had much in common in its way of life with the time Thompson describes (mostly farm labour, no running water, close proximity with animals, intimate understanding of nature). However, Thompson's writing is pretty weak and her tone is utterly unbearable. She condescends to her readers (phrases like 'how hard those little two-year-old fists could hit out!' ought never to be read by human eyes in my opinion), and there's a ridiculous argument running throughout that yes, the people were poor, but they worked hard and therefore had no mental or psychological troubles. There's a continual undercurrent of 'back in my day, we had to walk twenty miles to and from school, uphill both ways, and it never did us any harm!' At the same time, Thompson laments that she (in the guise of the sort-of main character Laura) is not allowed to read and learn on her own due to the narrow-mindedness of the community. Clearly, the idealised life of 'good honest labour' and the lack of understanding towards the child who is 'different' go hand-in-hand, but Thompson somehow conveniently ignores the fact, and goes on mourning the loss of this simpler way of life. I was actually embarrassed to be reading several parts of it and very quickly concluded that the problematic parts far outbalances any interesting information.