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MOVING TO THE COUNTRY
THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.
I NEVER wanted to move to the country in the first place — it was all my husband’s idea. So when a helpful new neighbour informed me that, in order to survive, ‘one simply has to buckle down to village life’ I wanted to hightail it back to London and chain myself to a sooty lamp-post.
But here we still are, nearly a quarter of a century later, pigs in muck. And why? Because I buckled down. That neighbour was right. And with every garden fete and saved church roof, you feel ever more at home.
If there’s one writer who understands the sociological implications of buckling down, it’s the splendid Barbara Pym. Her genteel yet beady ladies all swarm around bric-a-brac stalls and vestries with varying degrees of personal success.
In A Few Green Leaves, anthropolo- gist Emma takes on her mother’s Oxfordshire cottage and casts her eye on all the characters and events of her new community — especially the church and, most especially, its rector, who just happens to be single . . .
The eponymous heroine of Mavis Cheek’s Mrs Fytton’s Country Life moves to Somerset with an unusual motive: not to start a new life, but to ruin her ex-husband’s.
Angela loves the house, and the chickens and the bees. But really, she’s there because Ian has appointed a new Mrs Fytton, and had a baby and left her with their ghastly kids.
Her plan is built on the truth that all teenagers hate the country, and all second marriages struggle if those teenagers have to move in. It’s just a matter of time before Ian comes crawling down the M4.
Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer is more sinister fare. It’s set in 1964, and based on the true story of Patricia Highsmith’s move to a Suffolk cottage. And naturally, as it’s Highsmith, there’s a stalker, a murder and the decapitation of a pet rabbit called Bunnikins. You see, country life isn’t all love and laughs. Sometimes, you just have to buckle up and get the hell out.