Mrs Country Mouse Mary Killen
Should oldies live in cities or the country? I write as a woman with near insatiable social needs, who has been exiled these past three decades to a Wiltshire backwater without public transport. I can’t drive and am wife to a recluse – your usual Country Mouse correspondent, Giles Wood.
Yet it was I who chose the exile, partly because, at the time, a 12-room, thatched cottage in Wiltshire cost the same as a basement in Clerkenwell, and partly because I was a self-sacrificing soul and was putting husband and children first.
Let me start with the drawbacks of rural living. Commuting is necessary if you need to stay in the swim for professional reasons but it’s physically arduous. I’ve just weighed my bag of essential items for a day trip to London and it was a stone. On the other hand, the train is the only time you get any peace to read. That’s why HS2 is such an own goal. Workers depend on slow trains to get their work done.
But the last train home has always left Paddington at 20.35. Although I’ve got friends to stay with in London, it means that, over the years, I’ve missed at least 600 key parties, gallery openings and book launches, to say nothing of memorial services, lectures, theatre and art exhibitions. And masses of work in the boom days of journalism when editors rang your mobile, wanting to commission you to write a highly paid piece, but gave up if they didn’t get through immediately. There’s never been any signal to speak of in our cul-de-sac village.
But Giles lives for nature and so do most children. So I put them first and spearheaded the escape to the country. In those days, I wanted Giles to be happy but, looking back, it might have been better for him not to have had an acre of land to constantly tempt him away from the easel. Had he been in the Clerkenwell basement, he might have painted to create the landscapes on canvas that he was starved of in real life.
But country life was indisputably better for the children. Moreover, they had a longer childhood. One 12th birthday party has stuck in my mind because there were two nymphet girls there, cousins of the host child. These had naked midriffs, dyed hair and – more pertinently – breasts. ‘They’re only 12,’ explained their aunt. ‘But girls mature earlier in London. It’s partly all the oestrogen in the London water and partly because London children look at screens all day because it’s too difficult for their parents to keep driving them to the park.’
I liked it that my 12-year-old was still childish. If she was going to live to 100, that’s 88 years of adulthood. No need to fast-forward the condition.
There’s nowhere to play outside in London. Here, the children had dogwalking on the downs, bluebell woods, river swimming, bicycling in the lanes, sandpits, dustbin baths (the poor man’s hot tub), hammocks, swings, barbecues, a teepee built by Giles from his own willow fronds, skating on frozen puddles, shooting stars, crackling log fires, roast chestnuts and cobnuts from his trees, and an outdoor ‘museum’ displaying fossils, handworked tools and iron-pyrite nodules we stumbled across in the ploughed fields. And they had seasons, in the days when there were seasons.
Children can have a Christian education in the country. It was drummed into them at school by experts giving them a solid foundation to deviate from, rather than a blur of pick ’n’ mix snippets of your own culture given equal weight to snippets from multicultural others. I relished the sight of them sitting with their schoolmates in obedient ranks, warbling Make Me a Channel of Your Peace.
When they were confirmed, Giles said the collective religious rapture would stand them in good stead, giving them a Christian armour-plating against half-baked pseudo religions, Aleister Crowley and other occult forces encountered on the dreaded gap year.
I’ve liked having more space than I would have had in London. And Giles has been happier here, if less productive. I suppose I’ve had a few laughs at home, too, even if I’ve missed out on the socialising. But, for the final decades of life, a London dwelling is the best choice for those who can afford it. It’s too much of a nuisance to visit someone who lives in the country, no matter how much you love them. Friends and family in London are 20 times more likely to come and see you in town, not least because they want a bed for the night.
Had we bought that basement in Clerkenwell, it would by now have come right as an investment. Through living in the country for 30 years, we now can’t afford to buy a London flat. Having opted for the thatched cottage for all these years, we’ve been sitting on a tin mine, not a gold mine.