Home-cured
Wilfred De' Ath
Country Voices: Life and Lore in Farm and Village Charles Kightly (Thames & Hudson £8.95) Professor Laurie Taylor would not like this book. Recently given his (rather swollen) head by BBC television in a prolonged essay in facetiousness called One Pair of Eyes, Professor Taylor said that he did not like the country because he found it inhospitable. He was making the mistake of many town and suburb dwellers - even, I am sorry to say, of many who now live in the country in flight from town and suburb — of assuming that the country exists solely for their entertainment and relaxation. It does not. The countryside is a working place.
This mistake is, alas, only too common. Even Christopher Hall, who edits that excellent quarterly The Countryman, which is published in Burford, Oxford- shire, where I live, is for ever weighing in against the 'greedy' farmers for not being nicer to ramblers, more sympathetic to the concept of countryside as amenity. But why on earth should they? The countryside is the place where they earn their living. One important respect in which the countryside has changed in the 20th cen- tury is that in the period with which this book deals, that of around 80 years ago, town dwellers - with the exception of the East End hop-pickers who went to Kent in August in search of a bit of extra money simply did not want to tramp all over the English countryside. That was not their idea of a holiday - as it is today. They went to the seaside instead. In this, as in so many other respects, the English country- side has changed out of recognition. As Charles Kightly says in an evocative pas- sage in his introduction: 'No longer do the "farm chaps" gather in the market place for the hiring fair, or sit down to a breakfast of fat pork and skimmed milk. The stables which once housed the great farm horses have fallen into ruin, and the cunning, secretive waggoners have pinched their last corn and mixed their last, myste- rious powders. The cottager's pig has gone, protesting, to the factory farm, and the cheese-press (with luck) to the museum. The scythemen and stooktiers have left the harvest-field for ever; the mighty traction engines chug and clank no more from farm to farm at threshing time; and Kentish lanes echo no longer to the songs of London hop-pickers, warding off the coun- try dark.'
Country Voices consists, like its famous predecessor, Ronald Blythe's Akenfield, of a series of 'actuality' inverviews with elder-
ly countrymen and women; most of them were born around 1900 into a rural world which was in many ways closer to the 17th century than to the last decades of this one; many were well established in work before the great cataclsym of 1914 which was to change that world for ever. Mr Kightly, in the course of what must have been a curiously gypsy-like existence, has man- aged to contact them through old people's homes, through chance meetings in pubs or even in country lanes or, most frequently, through their friends and neighbours. A few have elected to preserve their anonym- ity, but no-one ever refused to talk to him. He was received everywhere with kindness and patience and generosity and seems to have been good at taking his own advice to oral historians: 'keep your mouth shut and your tape-recorder running.'
Mr Kightly invariably left the humble cottagers dwellings with invaluable in- formation as well as with gifts of apples, vegetable, home-cured bacon and country wines of formidable potency. He has been very good at listening to what people wanted to tell him - which was not always the same as, though usually far more interesting than, what he expected to hear. Thus, the Flinton family from Lincoln- shire, expected to talk about milling, told him instead about geese, asthma cures and the life of a traction engine driver; Maggie Joe Chapman from Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, consulted about knitting, re- counted in addition her enthralling saga of a hill-farm family in the setting made famous by James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small. And so on.
The 'country voices' in this book come from seven different areas, each with its own distinctive manner of speech (which does not always make easy reading), whose flavour Mr Kightly has striven - perhaps too hard - to preserve in his transcriptions: Tyneside; the north Pennine Dales; the flat farmland of the Plain of York; the bare chalk Wolds of East Yorkshire and Lin- colnshire; the secret hill-country of the Welsh borders; the rolling cornlands of Suffolk; and the apple orchards and hop- gardens of Kent. Presumably, Mr Kightly had to call a halt somehwere, but it is difficult not to feel that he could have gone on for ever. As it it, these areas speak authoritatively for the whole of an almost vanished rural world.
I would never have believed that such a collection of folk memories could have been satisfactorily illustrated by old photographs alone, but such proves to be the case. The treasured, tinted pictures pressed upon him by the old cottage-dwellers (Mr Kight- ly must be an extraordinarily easy man to trust) proliferate and form, indeed, the most nostalgic and instantly digestible part of his book. Here the old country people as small children gaze at one out of a world that would surely have seemed out-dated to Thomas Hardy; quite often, there is a strange, baffled, bewildered look at the back of their young eyes as though they feared what the 20th century had to bring.
Previous page
