twentieth century villages

Change in the village was published in 1912. George Bourne was a man of socialist good will. He thought exhaustively about the hundreds of Acts over hundreds of years that enclosed common land away from the peasant. He made an argument in five parts.

           I      The Village

II     The Present Time

III     The Altered Circumstances

IV     The Resulting Needs

V     The Forward Movement

People whose lives were dependent on the common land where they could graze a cow or a donkey, cut their firing, their reeds for lamps, must now buy their livelihood from an employer and lose their relationship with the land.

In the nineteen sixties Ronald Blythe interviewed people where he lived in rural east suffolk to make a portrait of a village he called Akenfield. He talked to farm labourers, gardeners, farriers, wheelwrights, teachers, old families and recent incomers, some of them drawn to east suffolk for unknown reasons. I liked the teacher who came to realise that what he wanted to teach was how to find out what is most valuable in yourself and how to keep it alive. 

Ronald Blythe lived and worked at Bottengoms Farm in Wormingford until his death, following the opinion expressed in The View in Winter that the elderly should remain in their own homes whenever possible. He never learned to drive and did not use a computer.

Akenfield on google summons a Stephen King story/film/play about a small, remote village in nineteenth century Pennsylvania that lives in fear of nameless humanoid creatures, "Those We Do Not Speak Of", that inhabit the surrounding woods.

Where was the village supposed to take place? People ask. Google as ever, on the money. 

This is The Forward Movement.

I've read three books lately about English villages in the twentieth century, all of which I've read before. This must be because I've been trying to write about where I live. In fact there is little connection between these villages in the early and mid-twentieth century and the place I live in Ireland, except that Akenfield, written by Robert Blythe in the nineteen sixties, overlaps with my growing up in Essex. So what am I doing? Bolstering my nerve for understanding where I live now?

native denizens

Who are the fellows who cut the hay, nowadays. George Ewart Evans, writing about a Suffolk village more than a hundred years ago, knew who cut the hay, what their tools were called. 

James at the gravel pit up the road showed us boulders, and chatted a little. Eighty per cent of the ornamental gravel they sold was imported, he said. The local boulders we chose would be prized in Galway. The gravel of my childhood on the east coast of England, was exotic in Cork. Very yellow, very clean and fresh. That's how you know this is a rich country, I said, when people prize stones from another town, another country, more than their own. I hadn't thought about that, said James. Varieties of gravel around the cornus contraversa variegata in the visitor carpark confused the shrub so it became invisible. This is very mediated landscape. Earth and stones unearthed, displayed. Meanwhile out in the boulder zone goat willow showed through, some bird's foot trefoil. The mud was caked and cracked like Africa. 

Why were we choosing boulders, you might ask. Who cuts the hay around here. The zero grazing machine, that's who. That's why we were choosing boulders.

George Bourne — another George — in his 1912 book Change in the Village, said:

.... how attached he must have grown — I mean how closely linked — to his own countryside. He did not merely 'reside' in it; he was part of it, and it was part of him. He fitted into it as one of its native denizens, like the hedgehogs and the thrushes. All that happened to it mattered to him. I feel a forlornness in country places, as if all their best significance were gone.

People cannot talk about themselves in their place any more. The ground is too unstable. You can't stop progress, as the energetic lying husband says in the film Muriel's Wedding.

In the School chapter of Ask the Fellows Who cut the Hay I lingered on this, coming full circle on where I lost track of arithmetic:

How many furlongs, rods, yards, feet and inches and Barleycorns will reach round the earth, supposing it according to the best calculation to be 25,020 miles? The boy, in a page of working, threw a girdle of 4,755 million Barleycorns round the earth.

running in the family

The other night I plucked a book from the shelves in the dark: Michael Ondaatje's running in the family was in my hand. A childhood in Ceylon, family as riotous as was manageable in prose, albeit poetic prose. In the poetry is the managing. Snakes run through the house. The cobra that settled on the radio was not shot because the radio was the only source of music in the house. The snakes ate the hens' eggs, so hundreds of ping pong balls were introduced in the nesting boxes, which disabled the snakes for a while. Mervyn Ondaatje, Michael's father, ended up keeping hens. As did the mother of Marguerite Duras. Last dance of a falling family. 

Michael Ondaatje found everywhere stories and people in Ceylon when he went back after twenty some years, he found roads and food, trains and verandahs. In and around Maldon, Essex, where I grew up, I found the places I went to get away from stories and people: salt marshes, old allotments, disused railways. Between the chickens and the cacti and succulent society, I came to like Mervyn Ondaatje.

He kept journals about every one of the four hundred varieties of cactus and succulents—some of which he had never seen, others of which he had smuggled into the country via a friend. Important days were those when certain water plants arrived from islands in the Pacific.

Inside Jacob's Room

Afternoon up at the pond with Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room after a conversation with D by the bonfire the other day about Fahrenheit 451 & which book we'd choose to learn, to be. After a long pause D said Wuthering Heights, though she didn't want to be Wuthering Heights, either. I said I could imagine being something by Virginia Woolf, many years after the dream in which I talked to her about writing & she said it would be all right. I already am something by Virginia Woolf.

Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a blind mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart — her sinful, tanned heart — for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast.

Virginia Woolf is the model observer, passionate & dispassionate, questioning & confirming, full of doubt and assumption. Making firm and letting go. Jacob is a carrier more than a character. No one interacts except in these paragraphs. Jacob's room is Virginia's room also. And mine.