On Saturday Defining what it means to be truly local

APROPOS of not much at all, I have been wondering how many people reading this column live in the same place where they were born? Not the exact same house, maybe, but in the same area?

It’s an interesting question because for most of human history comparatively few individuals would have wandered far from their home patch.

So it could be argued that as a species we evolved to spend our lives in the place where we grew up – which in turn would mean we are emotionally designed to develop our thoughts, daily procedures and patterns of life based on the landscapes which moulded us.

That was the way it was for hundreds of thousands of years, until suddenly the reverse became the norm. Nowadays in countries such as Britain, vast numbers of people no longer grow old in the place where they were born. A great many move away in order to find work, or marry, or for countless other reasons.

There are no official statistics when it comes to this internal form of migration. We Brits are free to move anywhere in the UK without having to apply for official visas. So there’s little data, for example, to say whether people born in towns and cities are more or less likely to move away than us country hicks.

The only non-scientific measuring stick I have comes from the recent school reunions that I’ve mentioned a couple of times in this column. In total, there were some 120 kids in my year – 50 years later, only a dozen or so former pupils still live within 10 miles of the old school, and I’m happy to say I am one of them.

If we expand the idea of localness and spread the net to include those of us who still live within 30 miles, the area would include the two largest nearby towns, Taunton and Bridgwater. Which increases the tally to around 20 of us who stayed local.

That leaves 100 school chums who left this mainly rural area to live their lives elsewhere.

Even my poor maths can tell me that this means only one sixth of the original Class of ’72 remained in the part of Somerset where they grew up (and I include the dozen or so who have died, because the same percentage had migrated before they perished).

In very loose terms, if that overall percentage remained was a constant across the UK, it would mean some 50 million people in this country no longer live in the place where they spent their formative years.

Which I find extraordinary. Half-acentury ago when you went somewhere other than a big cosmopolitan city like London, you’d assume that most of the people you saw around you were true, born-and-bred locals. Now, here in the West Country at least, you must assume they are not.

Several times in the past year or two I have been introduced to newcomers who’ve moved into our local village. “How long have you lived here, Martin?” they ask. And when I point to the large eminence that looms to the east of the community and say: “I was born just over that hill,” they exclaim: “Oh, you mean you are a real local!”

Sometimes I suggest that the word they are looking for is “yokel”.

All of which makes me feel as bemused as a gap-toothed yokel when I see people getting all angry and defensive about the subject of immigration – here, in a country where 50 million people reside far from their original birthplace! We are a nation of incomers.

“Don’t be silly!” I hear some cry. “British is British. That’s different to those who come from thousands of miles away.”

But is it? When I was growing up here in lovely peaceful West Somerset, I regularly heard snatches of what you might call “interior racism”. I was born just 11 years after the Second World War ended and as a kid I heard the unpleasant things which local people used to say about Londoners who were evacuated here during the Blitz.

“No one ever locked their doors before they Cockneys come down!” people would growl in their Somerset accents, referring to some of the families who must have liked the rural way of life because they stayed on. “You gotta keep yer eye on they Londoners! They’m a sly lot…” is what the country folk used to say.

Brummies were also regarded with disdain. Even Bristolians, with their strange, clipped, urban version of the Somerset dialect, were not to be trusted. In fact, anyone who came from east of the Quantock Hills was regarded with suspicion. Unless they had a posh accent, of course – that seemed to be a passport to acceptance anywhere back in those days.

Often wrongly. More than once I’ve heard local tradesmen mutter: “The posher the voice, the longer you’ll wait to be paid.”

All gone now, of course. The whole cultural, ethnic, tribal, shooting match. Gone, for better or for worse. People worry nowadays about the rights of this ethnic minority or that and want to protect cultures that have been trounced and generally decimated – but there are times when my erstwhile tribe feels fairly beleaguered.

At least the lovely hills of home are still there to give us rare lesser-spotted locals a bit of comfort.

‘Vast numbers of people no longer grow old in the place where they were born’