Social history
The Decline of an English Village
Robin Page (Quiller, £18.95)
ROBIN PAGE is a national treasure. This whiskery and rebarbative countryman, now in his mid seventies, has campaigned tirelessly for the cause of traditional rural life, even if his stand against the tide of change seems Canute-like.
In the wider scheme of things, there may be little that even a tireless writer and activist can do to halt the onslaught of the modern world, but he has shown, admirably, what even a single individual can do off his own bat by founding the Countryside Restoration Trust (CRT). From the initial purchase of a 40-acre Cambridgeshire field in 1993, the CRT has grown to encompass 1,500 acres, which it farms for conservation. Long may his tirades continue.
The Decline of an English Village was one of Mr Page’s early books. Written 45 years ago, and now reissued with a new last chapter, it is a classic.
Most of the book consists of an unsentimental memory of a world that seemed on the brink of extinction in 1974, and has since vanished completely—that of his childhood in the late 1940s and 1950s. These were the years in which farming, inefficient during the agricultural depression that had preceded the Second World War, began to intensify.
As a child, Mr Page experienced the tail end of the old culture, riding on the broad backs of his father’s cart horses clutching a mane. Almost everybody relied on the land to make their limited ends meet. Water was pumped by hand and even the village squire—admittedly eccentric, as well as obsessively frugal—went bird nesting.
The book’s title is explained by the final chapter: All Change. By 1974, meadows and trees had lost their beauty, hedges had been grubbed out and ‘the chafing trill of the grasshopper’ had become steadily rarer. No longer was Britain farmed in a way that allowed an abundance of wildlife to flourish, as an accidental by-product. In the village, gardens became building plots and different people arrived—middleclass types, few of whom would have known that a farm labourer’s sandwich was called a ‘docky’ (because pay was docked for the time it took him to eat it). Even the previously austere chapel acquired padded seating.
Now? Some equivocal triumphs, such as the protection of buzzards and reintroduction of the red kite—although these have not been so good for groundnesting birds. Hedgehogs and cuckoos have all but gone.
The author is scathing about ‘blow-ins’, as he calls the nonindigenous element of the village, and ‘appalling Blair’, one of his many political bêtes noires. But hold hard a minute. Village life could be brutal in the 18th century, when the poor were left to starve. Even in the 20th century, picturesque cottages might be squalid and remote communities interbred. Mr Page happened to grow up in a period of uneasy equilibrium, when the worst of the former harshness had been mitigated and the natural world could still thrive.
He is apt to blame the ‘decline’ on the blow-ins. That’s futile: they’re in the majority and could, if courted, provide the energy to create friendlier conditions for wildlife, as well as campaign for the cause (look at Extinction Rebellion).
Besides, aren’t there some rays of hope? Young people may be ignorant of country lore, but they are ecologically minded. Cars, such a bane of the countryside, appear to be on the way out. As we leave the EU, it’s possible that the post-cap regime will bring a dividend for Nature. The new agricultural revolution, with gene-editing, robotics, lowtill systems and the rest, could leave more space for wildlife.
The CRT’S own Lark Rise Farm, although small, is bright with butterflies. There can be resurrection, as well as decline. If we lose sight of that, the game is truly lost.
Robin Page grew up in a period of uneasy equilibrium