Giles wood
According to Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield (1969), the townsman envies the villager his certainties and has always regarded urban life as just a temporary necessity. One day he will find the cottage on the green and ‘real values’.
This is the premise of a gloriously bland offering on daytime TV, called Escape to the Country, wherein a selection of rural retreats in the chosen county are spread out like a chocolate assortment box to tempt would-be escapees. Participants in this reality show are gloriously bland too, and have usually declared that ‘nice’ or ‘pleasant’ country views are high on their wish lists, along with ‘some land for a pony or’, chuckling wistfully, ‘maybe even a goat or two’.
Sometimes, they plan to offer bed and breakfast in their new country escapes but often there seems no rhyme or reason for them to move to the particular county featured. With no friends or relations – indeed, no business even being in that county – they might as well have stuck a pin in a map at random. Surely they aren’t being coaxed into commitment to the ‘wrong county’ – the one that least suits their needs, purely to satisfy the story arc of the programme makers?
On the other hand, maybe it’s just as well to go it alone. We came to our own village as a result of Mary’s crush on the family in the Big House. Socially, everything went well for a few years; then the family moved on, leaving Mary feeling like ‘a miner in a pit village, where the pit has closed down’.
Nevertheless, Mary often likes to watch Escape to the Country while she eats lunch, probably to stop me from talking and doing what she calls ‘Pandora’s boxing’ during her ‘only break in the day’, by bringing up difficulties and decisions we may have to face over the next thirty years before death.
The tactic does usually work to gag me as I find the programme strangely mesmerising, even soothing, until a dwelling with pleasant views onto farmland is shown and, as the escapees gush, they seem blind to the tramlines in the crops. I don’t normally shout at the telly but why don’t they know that arable farmland is not proper countryside and that tramlines are the chemical signature of sulphur-based fungicides that will give their children asthma?
‘Stop introducing stress to my only relaxation period of the day!’ bawls Mary.
One of the only reasons for me to enjoy the forthcoming ‘festive’ season is that the week after Christmas is traditionally the only non-spraying period in the pesticide calendar. As humans, we can go outside and breathe in the downland air without the fear of toxins entering our systems.
Meanwhile, today, while Mary is Christmas-party-socialising in London like a headless chicken, I am drawn to my book-lined study to dip into my mostly unread library. A passage in H J Massingham confirms one of my worst fears – that I myself may have been coaxed into living in the wrong county. The alternatives, thirty years ago, included Berkshire – too featureless. And too depressing to have to pass through the Great Stink of Slough to access it. Hampshire was out because of gin and Jag, as well as being the home of spooky Hartley Wintney with its murder clusters.
Oxfordshire was out because it was too much like living in the Midlands and too far from the sea. Gloucestershire was too poncy. Wiltshire had none of these faults, but I was always adamant that I preferred the idea of Dorset. I told Mary that, if it was good enough for literary giants such as Thomas Hardy, John Fowles, the mysterious Powys brothers,the magnificent Kenneth Allsop, Anna Pavord (and, more recently, Tom Stoppard), then it should be good enough for her. But Mary said Dorset was too far from London for ‘someone who works’.
Massingham put into words the vague unrest I’ve felt all these years. ‘There can be no real difference of opinion as to the precedence of the Dorset over the Wiltshire downs for the pleasure of dwelling upon them. Both possess the wildness, nobility and freedom of the heights; the curves and undulations are equally delightful to the eye but Dorset gives a welcome to the human spirit; the Wiltshire downs do not.’
Incidentally, picking up another slim volume, I learn that all the great prehistoric invasions from Europe came into Britain via the Dorset coast because Kent, Sussex and Hampshire were covered by impenetrable forests and swamps. But, in Dorset, the chalk hills, with only a thin cover of earth, could not support many trees and, in consequence, the clear, dry, open downland made an ideal site for settlement, and the chalk was comparatively easy to work with primitive instruments such as antler picks. This afternoon, I have been using antler picks myself to dislodge stones, without breaking my precious fork.
However, if there is one thing that compensates for the comparative austerity of Wiltshire’s downland; it is the fact that Dorset and Wiltshire between them contain more sites of archaeological interest than all the rest of the British Isles put together.
So when Mary rang to ask if I was getting on with the painting and decorating, I told her I had been busy with research into why Dorset was inherently superior to Wiltshire. ‘And what did you conclude?’ I had to admit there was not much in it . ‘So why have you been negging for thirty years?’ she railed.
‘Have you never heard the expression “the grass is always greener”?’
‘The Diary of Two Nobodies’, by Giles Wood and Mary Killen, is published by Virgin Books (£14.99)
The Oldie