Snippets of an Age Gone By

I was charmed by this little cottage in Kensington Gardens while walking the other day. I have no idea what it is, but my guess is that it at one time housed the gardener. It really has nothing to do with this post except that it's a cottage...though considerably nicer than the ones mentioned in the book I'm about to share with you...

I finally finished reading Lark Rise to Candleford, which I picked up after watching two seasons of the television adaptation (wrong way around, I know). To call it well-written or a pleasant read wouldn't do it justice. I really did have the sense that I was getting a privileged look back through the looking-glass of time and peering in the window of a cottage in the English countryside of the 1880s and 1890s. Before I return the book to the library today (because it is long overdue) I want to share some passages with you that particularly struck me.

"These tea-drinkings were never premeditated. One neighbor would drop in, then another, and another would be beckoned to from the doorway or fetched in to settle some disputed point....As they settled around the room to enjoy their cup of tea, some would have babies at the breast or toddlers playing 'bo-peep' with their aprons, and others would have sewing or knitting in their hands....This tea-drinking time was the women's hour" (108-9).

"And all the time boys were being born or growing up in the parish, expecting to follow the plough all their lives, or, at most, to do a little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know them, and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that tiny community never came back again" (247).

"She liked her cousins' house, too. It was old, with little flights of steps going up or down in unexpected places. Aunt Ann's parlour had a piano across one corner and a a soft green carpet the colour of faded moss. The windows were wide open and there was a delicious scent of wallflowers and tea and cake and cobbler's wax" (316).

"Nearer at hand were the trees and bushes and wild-flower patches beside the path she had trodden daily. The pond where the yellow brandyball waterlillies grew, the little birch thicket where the long-tailed [birds] had congregated, the boathouse where she had sheltered from the thunderstorm and seend the rain plash like leaden bullets into the leaden water, and the hillock beyond from which she had seen the perfect rainbow. She was never to see any of these again, but she was to carry a mental picture of them, to be recalled at will, through the changing scenes of a lifetime" (537).

Thompson, Flora. Lark Rise to Candleford: A Trilogy. 1945. Penguin Books: London, 1973.