There’s no panicking in my village – just courtesy and a sense of stoical compliance
The Covid-19 outbreak is yanking even wider the gap between the metropolitan media and l’Angleterre profonde.
In the shires, we scan the headlines with a kind of puzzled concern. Emergency powers? Troops on standby? Empty shelves?
The shelves in these parts are as full as ever. People queue good-naturedly outside the village shop so that there are not more than six of us inside it at any one moment. Raj, who runs it, was already one of the most popular men in the village even before he started free home deliveries for people in isolation.
At the same time, the villagers are unfussily looking out for each other. When I offered to add a neighbour to the paper round which I have just started for people in self-isolation, he replied: “Terrifically kind of you, Daniel, but you’re the sixth person to ask.” The predominant emotion is not fear of contagion, but mild irritation at the disruption.
Vicki Woods, the fashion writer and quondam Telegraph columnist, liked to write about the mood in (as she always put it) “the Hampshire-Berkshire borders”. I lived in London in those days, and saw her column as a rustic rebuke to our New Labour elites. Vicki used to put all sorts of common-sense opinions into the mouth of “my neighbour the headhunter’s wife”, and I wondered whether this sensible-sounding lady was a composite or a caricature.
Now, I live in the same village as
Vicki – who is as glamorous as ever, though she no longer writes columns. I have learnt that the headhunter’s wife is a flesh-and-blood woman, whose sturdy views are completely mainstream outside our cities. Vicki, I have come to realise, was speaking to and for the mass of Telegraph readers.
These are the people you want around you in a crisis. They grumble constantly about the government, but are the first in line when a call goes out for volunteers. They moan about the level of taxation, but are meticulously honest in their personal finances. They have little time for welfarism, but a lot of time for charity. They love the country in both senses, their concept of nationhood being rooted in landscape.
The distance between their perception of the coronavirus and the tone of most commentators is vast. Yes, they understand that there is a crisis and, yes, they accept that it requires measures that would normally be unconscionable. They are, by and large, exasperatedly complying with the guidelines. But they are more worried about the damage to the economy than about the disease itself.
At what may be our last church service for a while (there has not been such a cessation since 1208) two sentiments predominated in a congregation whose members were disproportionately in at-risk categories. One was gentle regret at how much fuss was being made. “Ask anyone of my age, dear,” a lady in her nineties told me. “We’re not bothered about an extra year or two, we’re much more worried about our grandchildren.” The other was a hope that our leaders would keep a sense of proportion.
The vicar – an enormously kind and humble man, if a tad religious for an Anglican – wrote to the PM to thank him for sticking to the scientific advice, rather than responding to transient public moods. One of our great village matriarchs, a big Boris fan, texted me to say: “If I am forced rather than advised to spend months on my own, I shall never vote for this Government again.” Boris, who used to sit for a rural Oxfordshire seat, knows this tribe intimately, which is partly why he has lifted his party to a record-breaking 52 per cent in the opinion polls. There may be shrill calls in the media – and, even more so, on social media – for crackdowns, but the PM understands the temper of his countrymen. Frenchmen or
Italians might accept a rule that forbids them to leave home without written permission, but it would be counterproductive here.
Advise British people to avoid mass gatherings and they will do their bit. Forbid such gatherings by law and all their bloody-mindedness will come out. For as long as I have known him, Boris has loathed bans and restrictions. He once joked that his hero was the mayor in Jaws who had faced down the health and safety fanatics and kept the beaches open – a bad call in practice, he conceded, but the right thing in principle.
From the beginning, Boris has done his best to act proportionately – proportionately, that is, to the identified threat level, not to the media clamour. He takes the view that, if you give people responsibility, they will act responsibly. And, as a rule, they do. The local walking group here, for example, has cancelled its AGM, but is carrying on with its rambles across the downs on grounds that “walking is a healthy activity and we are intelligent, responsible human beings”. Quite.
Responsibility means more than self-control. As well as seeking to minimise the contagion, people grasp their duty to their neighbours. Fliers have been posted through letterboxes offering help. A kind of unofficial food bank is being set up. These initiatives are cheering everyone up. Just as people who lived through wars often say that they miss the sense of solidarity and purpose engendered by a conflict (without missing the war itself, obviously), so a crisis of this kind simplifies and purifies.
Three weeks ago, I had my share of prosaic worries and stresses: appointments to book, flights to reserve, speeches to write. Now life has an easy straightforwardness. Though I am suddenly worse off financially, I whistle as I do my morning paper round (mainly carrying
Telegraphs, naturally). I phone people I have been meaning to catch up with for yonks. I play long board games with the children. Sometimes, high on the downs, we just sit and listen to the fax machine purr of the larks.
The headlines seem to belong to a different world. London has never felt so far away.
Boris once joked that his hero was the mayor in ‘Jaws’ who faced down the critics and kept the beaches open