My village in southern Surrey was many years past the era of rural idyll. The centuries of ‘idyll’ were in any case a period of ignorance, disease, servitude, bone-numbing cold, relentless hard work, perinatal death and extreme penury. People died not of old age, but of being worn out. The idyllic moments must have been all the more precious, and all the more memorable, for their rarity. What was really special about those times was that everyone knew everyone else. Villages were proper communities, with all that that entails in terms of social support. These days, although a small core of sociable and helpful types is always to be found, village families often live in complete isolation from each other, buttonholed by their television and computer screens, and getting in their cars to go and see their friends elsewhere. There are people in villages today who don’t know their neighbours at all, and would rather go shopping than to the village fete. Psychologically speaking, they are townies.
The villages of these islands were transformed progressively by the mechanisation of farming, rural de-industrialisation, the train, the bicycle and the motor car. In our village we no longer had just a few families who had intermarried for generations. The youngsters grew up and left, as I did, and families moved in not least because it was on the Portsmouth line to London. Every morning bowler-hatted, pinstriped gentlemen with their furled umbrellas strode to the station up New Road, all of them looking like Major Thompson. In the early 1950s my village won the Best Kept Village competition, a sure sign that it was no longer a functioning place of work, but had become simply a lovely spot to live in. The lord of the manor wasn’t some bluff old gentleman with a hunter and two Labradors, but an expert on Handel. There was no farrier, no blacksmith, no limeburner, no wheelwright, no cartwright, no bodger making chair parts in the woods. The butchers, bakers, grocers, cobblers, confectioners and saddlers had all gone. There was a Malthouse Lane, but the malthouse had become a farm. You still found hops growing in the hedgerows. No one kept a pig in their yard with the intention of cutting its throat in the autumn, and no one was obliged to live off rabbits. Poachers no longer poached out of necessity, because you could get very cheap chicken in the new Godalming Waitrose. The glass trade that had made nearby Chiddingfold world-famous had long since collapsed, on a whim of King James I. In Chilworth the vast gunpowder factories had disappeared after the Great War, and the ironmakers had vanished some time in the late eighteenth century, although there is plenty of ironstone left. The only specialist manufacturers in the area made walking sticks. I remember just two old men who had the proper Surrey accent, which has probably gone altogether by now. They used the strong postvocalic R that you still find in Dorset. There was ‘for’ard’ for ‘forward’, ‘to’n’ for ‘to him or them’, ‘hosses’ for ‘horses’, ‘they’ for ‘them’, ‘twas’ for ‘it was’, ‘mos’ for ‘most’, ‘ye’ for ‘you’ in the accusative, ‘they was’ for ‘they were’, ‘ha’ for ‘had’ when using the pluperfect. There were a few dialect words still left, and, according to Eric Parker, ‘Joe Bassetts’ had been the name for cockchafer grubs. I imagine that the dialect never was studied systematically, and is now almost lost for ever. At the beginning of the twentieth century, George Bourne noted down the speech of his gardener, Bettesworth, and anyone who is curious to know how Surrey spoke should take a look at his Bettesworth Book, and Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer. I worked for some months with a gardener who talked exactly like him.
There was a coal merchant and a brick factory. There was still a village shop, and a village pond, and a cricket green. There was still a rectory with a proper rector in it. There was still a pub, whose ceiling was decorated with a collection of chamber pots, and which to this day advertises its fare as ‘warm beer, lousy food’. They had a dog called Beulah, who had rounded canine teeth because his hobby was collecting large pebbles. Most reassuringly, there was still an affable village policeman who got about on a bicycle, and a permanently suntanned village postman who kept his boots polished like the old soldier he was and wore clips around the bottom of his trousers.
In one corner of the green was a scrapyard and travelling fair run by a family who were referred to as ‘the gypsies’. There was a time when it was proposed to set up another gypsy site at a place called Cuckoo Corner, and our gypsies joined in the protest against it, on the grounds that the new gypsies would probably be a lower class of gypsy who would give them all a bad name. Ours had a small pack of genial Alsatians that were almost unrecognisable as any breed because of their caking of mud and oil. Without the scrapyard I would never have managed to keep my Morris Minor going. They had a cleaning machine so powerful that it took the paint off my motorcycle. At the top of the hill was a school for delicate children. It was run by nuns whose suicidal driving was widely notorious. It had originally been built as a private house by a famous astronomer, who added an observatory, and was the first person in the village to have a car. There were still some small farms. One year I worked on the potato harvest, driving a tractor and trailer alongside the harvester. I had an accident with it, of course. I once helped to dismantle a chicken battery, and fell into the fragrant slurry pit at one end. My shoes were not allowed in the house thereafter, and neither were my trousers after I had worked on a pig farm.
Below the convent was common land, containing a sandpit which must have been the remains of a small quarry and steep paths which were ideal for tobogganing. I have lovely memories of racing my mother and the dog down the hill, whooping with delight. My mother had huge furry mittens that I used to press to my cheek, and sometimes she went out on our walks with a trowel and a small sack so that she could collect the horse droppings for her roses. In those days the common was deep in flourishing bracken, which was ideal for hideouts. It was also ideal for courting couples, but it has now been reverted to heath by a new generation of eco-purists. Beyond, through a pinewood, was Sweetwater Lake, ringed by rhododendrons, still and silent, where I poached in vain for the rumoured trout, until I was caught by Colonel Redhead, who let me off because I had a proper fishing rod and hadn’t broken off any branches. Behind the gypsies’ scrapyard, extending all the way to Chiddingfold, was the Hurst, a very old wood full of mysterious pools and hummocks. It had a disused road that reminded me of Kipling’s poem, except that it has never disappeared.
And now I begin to realise why, despite my better judgement, I cannot help looking back on it all as a rural idyll. The old social structure had gone, along with the old trades, but the countryside was intact. Because we had an inflexible family rule that the dog must be walked daily, I was out in the woods and fields every single day that I was at home. I discovered all sorts of secret places that will remain secret. I know where the bluebells and kingcups are. There is a sandpit where, infected yet baulked by the spirit of Wordsworth, I wrote my first bad poems while the dog sighed with boredom next to me. The Hurst was muddy and bewildering, but I got to know every inch of it. I know where the wild strawberries are.
Initially I decided to call this village Notwithstanding because for a long time I felt that it had not withstood. I was quite wrong about that. I had been disgusted by someone telling me not to throw sticks into the pond for the dog because it might frighten the ducks, and by some newcomer protesting about the calling of cockerels in the morning, and so I had begun to think that all was lost.