Sweet Silver song of the Lark SPECTRUM * I? - . .i - I' , " i A sweet and gentle rural memoir is on the verge of becoming a moneyspinning exercise in merchandising. Shirley Lowe charts the making of Lark Rise to Candleford into a bandwagon for everything from dolls and cosmetics to bedspreads "Oh, Laura! What a dunce you are," Miss Holmes, the village schoolmis- tress used to say to nine-year-old Flora Thompson when she couldn't do her sums. Miss Holmes was wrong. Flora, during the last years of her life, wrote three semi-autobiographical books about her Victorian childhood in rural Oxfordshire which, published in one volume, became Lark Rise to Candle- ford, the source and inspiration of a continuously expanding industry in nostalgia. The hardback version of the book was published in 1939 and has been in print ever since. It went into paperback and sold 373.000 copies. Keith Dew- burst turned it into two plays for the National, it has been produced as a record, bought up for a film and planned as a television series. This month the lavishly illustrated, ab- ridged version of Flora Thompson's classic, bound beguilingly in country- kerchief red and white cloth, notched up sales of 200,000 copies, making it a serious contender for the coveted Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady Christmas success spot. Next year, Lark Rise rolls on to become a major merchandising project worth millions of pounds to stores and to the manufacturers of sheets and stationery and anything else that can be commercially glossed with the homespun charm and simple virtues of Mrs Thompson's lost world. Flora Thompson was born in 1876 and lived with her parents and nine brothers and sisters (six of whom died in childhood) in the crowded end cottage of a hamlet called Juniper Hill in Oxfordshire - "A huddle of grey stone boxes with thatched or slated lids of the kind then thought good enough to house a farm labourer's family." In her books Juniper Hill is renamed Lark Rise, Flora calls herself Laura and Fringford, the nearby village where 14- year-old Laura is apprenticed to the postmistress, is known as Candleford Green. The area is now bounded by American Air Force bases and unpictu- resque A roads. Flora married John Thompson, a young post office clerk, when she was 24; because he despised her reading and writing as a waste of time, she -vrote secret, sugared love stories and nature notes and poetry for women's magazines to pay for her children's upbringing. It was not until she was 61 that she began her masterpiece, a child's minutely observed view of the life of the poor in a remote Oxfordshire hamlet during the 1880s and 1890s, when the English countryside was on the brink of inevitable change. The rise and rise of Lark Rise: Top, designer Nicholas Thirkell, who has ways of making you read. Above left, the marketing team and, right, the book itself. Photographs by Suresh Karadia. She recorded a world of simple pleasures and pastimes: the children playing dancing games and peg-tops, the men working long hours in the fields for 10 shillings a week and enjoying a sing-song in the pub in,the evenings, the women scubbing, clean- ing, cooking, caring for animals and children and managing to make'a meal out of a scraping of lard seasoned with sweet rosemary. "They knew the now- lost secret of being happy on little," recalled Mrs Thompson, before her death in 1947. The Morning Star, reviewing the National Theatre's highly successful "promenade" version of Lark Rise at the Cottesloe - the audience had to step smartly back as the villagers swept towards them with scythes - saw it differently, as "the harsh reality of rural poverty and the close, supportive but sometimes claustrophobic atmos- phere of village life." Either way, Flora is in tune with our current collective nostalgia for rural simplicity, the romantic evocation in memoirs and reprints and television serials and supermarkets of a bygone era when Mrs Bridges knew her place, every bedroom was sprigged in Laura Ashley cotton, and jam pots were topped with red and white checked cambric. Her philosophy, embodying such back-stiffening maxims as "Pay your way and fear nobody" and "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well", is the very stuff of those Victorian values so admired by Mrs Thatcher. Ever since Rowena Stott came upon her great-aunt Edith's diary and Michael Joseph published it in a faithful facsimile as Th7e Country Diary of an Edwvardian Lady, the publishing world has been searching for an equally satisfactory money-maker. It was published in 1977, has sold more than 2!/2 million copies in hardback, been translated into 13 different languages and appeared on the best-sciler list in every country it has been printed, the most bought and least rcad bok of our time. Just over a year ago, fashion consultant Nigel French and his assistant, Pauline Deppe, bought the merchandising rights of Country Diary, and, after;just one full year of licensing and trading, Edith Holden's poppies and cornflowers are ablaze on more than three hundred items, from 32p postcards to ?3,000 kitchens - even the Japanese have made her English country-garden flowers look wanly oriental on a tea service - and the 30 licensees have achieved ?28m in retail sales. Since a merchandising company normally takes between 5 and 10 per cent of the profit of everything sold and as the publisher and the author's estate (or whoever holds the rights to the book) stand to get around 50 per cent of that, you can see why publishing houses have been urging their editors to clear the attics and seek out granny's old flower paintings. Over at Century, a new house started 18 months ago by Anthony Cheetham and a small breakaway group from Macdo- nalds, they have been on the treasure hunt, too, and come up with six plastic bags full of a meticulously detailed diary of a Victorian journey up the Nile as well as some fine granny paintings from a grand house in Gloucestershire. Nevertheless, Antho- ny Cheetham thought it might be clevercr to approach the problem from the oposite ditection: to get the best text possible and then illustrate it. And Lark Rise is, as he says, one of the best books ever written about childhood. He passed the project over to Julian Shuckburgh of Shuckburgh Reynolds, one of the small packaging houses which specia'lize in producing the sort of lavishly-illustrated books publishers can no longeru cope with themselves, without a large, skilled staff. Shuck- burgh, brought up in Oxfordshire and bred on Flora Thompson, jumped at the idea "I saw at once how we could do it." He cut the 200,000 or so words in the book back to 90,000, leaving most of Flora's childhood intact - "It scared tne to death to do it" - and called in designer Nicholas Thirkell who, in turn, brought in picture researcher Jenny de Gex. She hunted out old photographs, a superb collec- tion of Victorian paintings (15,000 portfolios at ?9.95 each, containing a set of these paintings used as illus- trations in the book, have already sold out) and, toughest of all, managed to gather flowers in mid-winter for the pressed flowers that decorate each page of the book. While it's easy enough to see how Edith Holden's flora can be printed on sheets and cups and such, Lark Rise to Candleford is a book of words rather than a diary of pictures, so how do you cash in on the description of the lives of simple people before their traditions wert swept away by the machine age? How do you commercialize an era? The answer is in the presentation. "My brief was a difficult but exciting one", says Nicholas Thirkell. "It was 'create another Country Diary best-sel- ler'. Usually a publisher says: "Oh, we can only afford two-colour and we'll be doing a small run to start with .. .' but here I was invited to go for broke." He chose the tactile appeal of old- fashioned cloth for the cover, made the inside look a little like a cottager's scrapbook and, trying to think of an idea that symbolized the countryside and had a good graphic look for the bookshops, came up with the country- man's red and white polka-dot scarf. "I put the whole thing together in about six weeks and it was an absolute labour of love." The finished book is a visual treat and, looking at it, one might almost say, as indeed the Lark Rise Merchan- dise Company brochure does: "What could be more natural than that this masterpiece should form the centte- piece of an extensive range of quality products?" Debenhams will launch Lark Rise in July, giving them a two-month lead on other retailers. Manufacturers are queueing up for the privilege of recreating furniture in harmony with the stone and thatch of Mrs Thomp- son's humble cottage, of making wholesome smocks in simple calico and drill, of preparing herbal cosmetics in the correctly "natural" way and turning out cakes and preserves to look and taste as though the villagers of Lark Rise had been up all night baking thenmL Debenhams are excited by the project: in the second half of 1984 they estimate the promotion should gener- ate between ?3m and ?4m of turnover. The first Lark Rise products will be unveiled at the Birmingham Gifts Fair in February and plans are well advanced for the US market. This is only the beginning of the Lark Rise nostalgia industry. Next year Anthony Cheetham will be bringing out a series of children's books - followed by a range of dolls - in which plucky little Laura surmounts all sorts of difficulties ("There were times when I thought, 'Oh, no, we can't do that,"' he says, "but then I decided we mustn't start treating Lark Rise with too much reverence. . ."). "Although she was a poor child I hope she can be made into a lovable doll," Desmond Preston says. The money side is complicated. Oxford University Press, Flora Thompson's original publishers, who hold the rights (Century have bought the abridged illustrated rights only), get 50p of every book sold this year and a percentage increase next. They also get, a small proportion of the merchandise profits (some of which they pass on to Flora Thompson's only surviving relative, a grand-daughter in Australia) and the right to veto anything of which they disapprove, from a biscuit tin to a bedspread. The Lark Rise Merchandise Company, who do all the work of exploiting the book, get 50 per cent of the merchandising royalties and Ox- ford University Press, Century, Shuck- burgh Reynolds, and Nicholas Thirkell split the rcst. The same team of Cheetham, Shuckburgh, Thirkell and de Gex are now at work on a companion volume to The Illustrated Lark Rise to Candleford. It is Tihe Illustrated Cider wvith Rosie, so anyone who doesn't care to emulate the humble world of a poor Victorian hamlet should wait for a year or so when a mood may be created fox living rather more prosperously, like Laurie Lee did a century later, in his picturesque Cotswolds valley. Sweet-- silver song of the ; :Lark