I had a nice surprise last week. Radio 4 Extra have been mining their archives. They invited listeners to nominate programmes which deserved another airing. The 1999 dramatisation of K.M.Peyton’s Flambards was chosen. That unforgettable story meant a lot to me when I was growing up.
Down Memory Lane
I was brought up in an old house on the wrong side of a village. It felt like we were right out on the edge of civilisation. On my first day at grammar school, I was proved right. All the others in my class came from the nice side of the village, or on the outskirts of Bath. They lived in new houses, or beautifully maintained historic ones. If I invited anyone home, it was never long before they likened out house to either The Addams Family home or (later, and more worryingly) The Bates Motel.
An Unforgettable Story
I escaped into writing, and reading. When I discovered Flambards by K.M.Peyton, it really struck a chord. I was all at sea in the strange new world of secondary education. Christina Parsons, the heroine of Flambards, was an innocent sent to live with the Russells, a hunting household. She had to either sink, or swim while the Russell’s old house, Flambards, decayed around her. Christina’s words, Flambards, you are dying always came back to me whenever another piece fell off my home.
Today, Flambards would be categorised as Young Adult fiction. I found it in our school library, but as fox hunting was banned in England and Wales in 2004 I doubt it will be in many school libraries these days. That’s a shame. K.M Peyton captured the problems of coming of age and first love so well. What Oscar Wilde called the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable is an inescapable part of the story, but it was a part of English culture in those days and shows how brutal life in the country could be.
It’s been a long time since I last read Flambards, but the radio drama seemed to stick very closely to the story as I remember it. Have a listen, and tell me what you think.
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