Country girl who went to Oxford (From The Oxford Times)

Country girl who went to Oxford

8:30am Thursday 19th January 2012 in Music / Books By Maggie Hartford

From the Shires to the Spires (Wychwood Press, £9.99) is the second instalment of the story of Mildred Masheder (nee Clinkard) and her journey from a farm in the once isolated village of Elsfield to Oxford University, via a scholarship to Milham Ford School.

First she had to get rid of her broad Oxfordshire accent, for which she had already been teased at the grammar school, then based near The Plain in East Oxford. Now 94, the author describes vividly how awkward it would have been, as an undergraduate, to meet her father’s friend, who was a servant at Christ Church. Then there is Auntie Mabel, the mirror image of Dawn French in TV’s Lark Rise to Candleford, arriving by cart at Oxford Covered Market to sell the produce from her smallholding.

The author says: “The two worlds rarely overlapped, but when they did, it could cause me real embarrassment. I suppose I had become a snob.” Subtitled Growing Up Under the Shadow of War, it is the sequel to Carrier’s Cart to Oxford, the story of her village childhood.