2:20pm Monday 26th July 2010
By Reg Little
Never mind walking in the footsteps of Flora Thompson, this felt more like going “round The Rise” with Oxfordshire’s favourite Victorian country girl strolling alongside.
“That’s where you used to go to school,” somebody would call out to the fair-skinned 26-year-old, fanning herself as she walked across the countryside between Juniper Hill and Fringford.
“That’s where you lived before you moved to the post office,” another walker would cry, as if addressing the ghost of the woman, known to generations for the semi-autobiographical trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford, recalling her life in the north Oxfordshire rural community, where she grew up in the late 19th century.
“You were seriously poor then,” she was informed. “No wonder you went on about your childhood being ‘harsh and restricted’.”
Later there would be an eerie moment as this elegant young woman was invited to read the brass plaque in the church that bore the name of ‘her brother’ E Timms, who had perished at The Somme in 1916.
The actress Olivia Hallinan visibly shivered at that moment in church.
Up until the time she sat, by chance, in the very same church pew in Cottisford Church that Flora Thompson always sat on, Miss Hallinan had remained remarkably composed.
“That felt strange, really weird,” she exclaimed, slipping on a pair of sunglasses as she stepped back out into the brilliant sunshine.
A few seconds earlier she had paused to write in the church visitors’ book: “It is amazing to be here. It has brought Flora’s world to life.”
Bringing Flora and her world to life is exactly what this young actress has been doing for millions of television viewers in the BBC series Lark Rise to Candleford.
For three years she has been playing Laura Timmins (not Timms, as the family is known in the books), the character who is clearly Flora Thompson herself, first portraying the central character as a 16-year-old taking the big step of leaving her parents and four siblings behind in Lark Rise to work for Dorcas Lane at the Post Office in Candleford, which appears to be an amalgam of Bicester, Brackley and Buckingham.
“I hadn’t read the books before. But as soon as I was offered the part I did, and thought they were so vivid and detailed,” she recalled. “It was useful to get that insight into growing up in a small hamlet and all their struggles.”
Since then Flora Thompson has taken over much of Miss Hallinan’s life, with the fourth series to be screened in January, yet until this month she had never been to Oxfordshire to visit the places where the real Flora had lived and grown up.
The actress is in fact the second Lark Rise star to have travelled to rural Oxfordshire to pay homage to their literary heroine in recent weeks.
Only the week before Linda Bassett, the actress who plays Flora’s redoubtable neighbour Queenie in the BBC TV adaptation, unveiled a plaque at St Michael and All Angels Church, in Fringford, near the post office where the novelist had worked.
The local historian Martin Greenwood and other Flora supporters raised £2,750 for the Welsh blue slate plaque, to ensure that there was finally something in the village to say that Flora Thompson had lived there.
Miss Hallinan had been invited to view Lark Rise country as a guest of the Living Literature Society.
If it meant that the actress undertook her visit with a group of 20 diehard Lark Rise fans, all eager to know the inside story about Laura’s various romantic attachments, it also meant she was accompanied by Mr Greenwood, the author of the guide book In Flora’s Footsteps.
Mr Greenwood, a retired accountant, became fascinated with Flora Thompson and the real people and places featured in her books after moving to Fringford more than 20 years ago.
Interest in the walks he devised took off following the first BBC series in 2008.
But even he began to confuse Olivia with Flora, soon after meeting up with the actress on Juniper Hill, the hamlet where Flora Jane Timms was born in 1876.
“This is the view you would have had from your cottage,” he told her. “And that’s the path you would have taken to school.”
The television series is filmed in Neston Park, in Wiltshire, and in studios in Bristol, but the real Lark Rise exceeded the actress’s expectations.
“I find it quite magical. I really wish I had come here three years ago when I first took on the role of Laura. I always knew that it was here, that the places were real, but I didn’t know how unchanged it would be.
“It has also made me realise what an incredible job the set-makers have done in recreating the villages.”
We arrived at the End House, Flora’s childhood home, dating from the 1820s, where she had lived for the first 14 years of her life, to find a real-life drama going on.
It is now home to Judith Harvey and her husband Malcolm, who once taught Lark Rise to Candleford to 15-year-old boys in a Manchester school.
But we learnt that the couple had been forced to move out after an oil leak in the centre of the house.
Oil seeped into one of the original walls which they are now faced with having to take down. But they cheerfully showed the actress around the garden before Mr Greenwood reminded us of the altogether more serious problems of the earlier occupants of the property.
“I think the phrase ‘poverty’s no disgrace, but ‘tis a great inconvenience’, conveys perfectly the nature of life in Lark Rise. The hamlet had been created for the poor who were not wanted by the middle class of Cottisford. Poverty was part of daily life.
“And the phrase also illustrates the genius of Flora Thompson’s writing.”
The harshness of life is hardly to the fore in the cheery Sunday night television drama, viewed as the perfect Sunday night antidote to the winter blues, attracting six million viewers a week.
“You have to wonder about Dawn French being in the series,” said Mr Greenwood. “People were actually close to starving.”
Flora’s real-life neighbour, Eliza Massey, who lived on the lane in front of the End House, in a cottage still called Queenie’s, was to end her days in Bicester Workhouse in 1902, aged 81.
We continued in the author’s steps across the fields to Cottisford, where Flora Timms, as she was then, would have escorted her little brother to school.
“She was worried that he might be bullied if they walked with the others on the road,” explained Mr Greenwood.
In the event, he was well able to take care of himself, later becoming a Great War soldier in the Canadian army, with his loss devastating his devoted sister.
There would be further heartbreak for the writer when her youngest child, Peter, who joined the Merchant Navy, was killed when his ship was torpedoed in the Second World War.
On our way to the famous post office, Miss Hallinan, who until Lark Rise was best known for youth programmes, assessed the show’s attraction.
“People like to be transported to the past. It deals with dilemmas and family issues that are just as real as they were then. People like the simplicity of it.
“I think people had to grow up so much quicker back then, you had to support your family and that was that. Laura grew up in Lark Rise, but her mother always knew she didn’t really belong there. Her mother sees she can do more with her life. She initially didn’t want to go there but she realises what an opportunity she has got. She wants to make her parents proud of her. Laura is determined but at the same time very loyal.”
It is a quality she says she shares with her character.
“I automatically put a bit of myself in any character. But I’m a city girl from London. I got the acting bug from my mother, who ran a drama school.”
Flora began working as a post office assistant at Fringford Post Office at the age of 14.
The post office and forge still stand near the village green, with the property now owned by Anthony Flack, a wine consultant, and his wife, Anne.
The post office that plays such a prominent part in the television series is far smaller than the actress had imagined.
“It is now our dining room,” chuckled Mr Flack.
When Flora left this place she went on to marry John Thompson, a junior post office clerk in Bournemouth, with whom she had three children. In 1928 he was promoted to postmaster in Dartmouth.
From the 1920s she had been writing sketches of her childhood but Lark Rise, named after the biggest field near her childhood home, was only published in 1939 by the Oxford University Press.
They finally appeared as a trilogy in 1945, just two years before her death.
It will be some time yet before Laura, like Flora, must turn her back on Lark Rise, with filming shortly to begin on a new series in August.
But Miss Hallinan is in no rush to leave, having, in a real sense, only just discovered it.
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