Home Truths Sophia Waugh
Sophia Waugh: Home Truths
Those of us who live in the country are proud, sometimes aggressively proud, of our status. We love to mock the Notting Hillers who spend hundreds of pounds on country accessories which sit in pristine splendour in their hallways. Barnes dwellers who stride along by the river wearing Hunter boots and carrying ski poles make us snigger with scorn.
But let’s be honest, a little bit of this is because we are worried we are missing out. We may have proper mud, big dogs and fresh air. We may be able to pick flowers from the hedges or from our own gardens rather than spend a fortune at Moyses Stevens. But do we actually have enough to talk about?
So when a cultural event looms on our horizons, my word we get excited. Just such an occasion cheered us all up in the middle of gloomy February. The local independent bookshop held a celebration of 27 years of existence. An odd number, but it was more to do with the owner’s sixtieth birthday, which his wife wanted to celebrate but he wanted to keep under wraps. The great and the good of the area put on tidy clothes and gathered together to cheer on the bookshop and all it represented.
And what a motley crew we were. Pretty middle class, but still fairly motley. Ex-headmasters, vicars, schoolteachers, writers, judo and yoga instructors, a few hippies who have found their way west, all gathered in a bookshop drinking wine and glorying in our stab at culture. Because we were something, weren’t we? We were people who read, who cared about books, who had patronised the shop over the years, congratulating ourselves on walking that tiny bit further to avoid Waterstones or W H Smith. We were not the people of the land, or people who lived off the land, but we were part of something local, something fine.
It reminded me of my childhood when a theatre was built in the town, and the middle classes went crazy. Lady volunteers made quiches for interval snacks, and their student children worked in the bar. Local painters and potters exhibited their works in the foyer. Never mind that the theatre was tiny, the quiches leathery and most of the shows amateur, there was and is something unifying about small-town culture.
And this particular bookshop keeper is a shining light of all that is marvellous about that. Not only has he run the bookshop, surviving the double blows of chain stores and Kindles, but he has created a literary festival, at which real, proper writers appear. He has launched an arts newspaper that goes from strength to strength. He has half- persuaded, half-bullied other businesses to back the festival, to host events, to hold a steady torch for the arts in this dark, rainy corner of the world. The bookshop has undergone various facelifts: first it began to include secondhand books and then it shelved secondhand and new together, so buyers felt they had the best of both worlds.
The more I think about the evening, the more I realise what a triumph it was. So much more than a sum of its parts, it gave us all an excuse to take off our (properly dirty) wellies and scrub up into a resemblance of the people we once were or thought we would become. Intelligent, interested, cultured people who also happen to live small-town life to the full. Lucky people. Even in February.