AND ANOTHER THING
Well: are you a countryman at heart, or a town-lover?
PAUL JOHNSON
Last weekend's march set me thinking. Am I a countryman or a townsman? I dare say quite a lot of people have been asking themselves the same question. Some peo- ple are quite clear about their loyalties. Dr Johnson, though born in a country town, saw himself as a Londoner, within easy reach 'of everything that life can offer'. He did not despise the country but it was a marginal presence in his life. It was the same with Charles Lamb, who greatly rel- ished his trip to the Lake District under Wordsworth's guidance, but told his host his heart lay with the 'sights and sounds and smells of Covent Garden'.
Equally there are those for whom city life is abominable. Jane Austen found even Bath too noisy (there is a fine passage in Persua- sion specifying her, or rather Anne Elliot's, horror at it). It's not recorded that she made hay or did anything more rustic than pick flowers, but gentle walks in country lanes and daily friendship with the kind of ramifying gentry families then found in small rural towns were essential to her well-being. Thomas Hardy was a kindred spirit. The film of The Woodlanders reminded me that he introduces the book by saying that it is pre- cisely in such 'sequestered spots outside the gates of the world' that 'dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concen- trated passions and closely knit interdepen- dence of the lives therein'. To him, city life was unreal, untrue.
Such clear loyalties are rare now. The only truly urbanite writers I can think of are Peter Ackroyd, a Dickensian Londoner, and Mar- tin Amis, torn between the fleshpots of the Smoke and the Big Apple. Most are inclined to be divided, like Evelyn Waugh, who thought living in London was improper but was periodically drawn there, as by a drug, to wine and party and gossip with sophisticated women, until he worked himself into a fren- zy, from which he would retire exhausted to recuperate in the bucolic stupor of Somerset. Or, reversing the pattern, there was Virginia Woolf, living among the intellectual nourish- ment and spitefulness of Bloomsbury, with- out which she could not write at all, but needing Sussex weekends to stay sane, just. Every writer I know who can afford it has a country home and a town pad, or a London house and a weekend cottage. It is expensive and causes all kind of inconveniences, such as where to keep key books, but it is some- how essential. The need to keep a foot in both worlds is very English (the Scotch and the Welsh face different problems of alle- giance). All successful merchants seek to `seat' themselves in the shires. Any bumpkin with brains wants to make his mark in the city. But both lots cling to their roots too.
I was born in Manchester and raised on the outskirts of the Potteries. It was only a short walk to deep country and moorland villages where strangers were liable to be stoned. Our milkman, Arthur Machin, brought it in churns from his father's farm every morning and often took me for rides in his pony and trap. My mother used to say you could not call yourself 'country' unless you knew how to scythe hay, a skill I never mastered so I failed by that test. But I felt then, and still do, a sense of happiness when I step from a bus or train or plane into deep country, so intense as to be tran- scendental. It is the emotion Milton expressed in Paradise Lost: 'As one who long in populous city pent . . . '
That word 'pent' says it all. Anyone who feels pent in a city must be a countryman at heart. But do I? Loving walking, I never take a bus or Tube if I have time, but sim- ply tramp the London streets to my desti- nation, fascinated by the shops or peering up the façades to the rooftops, taking in the minutiae of London architecture, good, bad and simply workmanlike, but all dear to me. And the people! All the world is in the London streets — it is becoming like New York — each person unconsciously assert- ing personality, race, views, occupation and varieties of moral temper.
In the country one notes wild flowers, trees, views, animals, insects, the weather. But in the London crowds, and especially in the Tube, I study faces: careworn, tri- umphant, greedy, dissipated, angelic, self- assertive or shy, some with flickers of aggression or contempt, faces which radiate love or extreme sensibility, and coarse faces, of men who would put the boot in or women who love nothing but their cats. I try to read the stories behind those faces, I study make-up, linen, hair or the lack of it, the monstrous kit which people sport nowadays. Has she got a lover? Is he think- ing about the rent? What will he do this evening? Why is that smartly dressed black woman absorbed in a well-thumbed copy of Plato's Republic, open at the section on eugenics? How come that dirty man in rough boots is studying the stock prices in the Financial Times with a concentration which almost made him miss his stop? And that pretty woman flipping through the Daily Mail, is she going to stop and read my article on the leader page? She is! I thought she looked intelligent. But why does she appear to be reading it backwards? And what is the meaning of that slight up-curl- ing of her cherry-red lips? Well: let us be honest with ourselves. You can't get this kind of show down in Somerset.
On the other hand, there is one way in which the country scores always: sounds. Big city sounds have an undertone of men- ace. They usually signify trouble, distur- bance, pain, anger, uncomfortable density. Even in Newton Road, one of the quietest streets in the capital, there is a just percep- tible susurrus of urban activity, round the clock. I hear it faintly as I write this. And it is punctuated by police and ambulance sirens, a jet straying off its flight path, a helicopter circling to land at Kensington Palace, occasionally by a shout of nocturnal rage. You are aware that people are dying, suffering, quarrelling, running from justice, surfeiting themselves or hungry.
Now I know that there are some incorrigi- ble tits, such as the editor of this journal, who find country sounds too strange and frightening, but most of us delight in both their restfulness and their clarity. There is no unspecified soup of sound there: each is dis- tinct, identifiable, accountable. As I sit out- side my house at Over Stowey, I can some- times hear nothing at all, for minutes at a stretch, save birdsong or the humming of insects. Then comes the voice of a man working in the fields over the hill, more than a mile away. From beyond the Quantocks, in the Vale of Taunton, drifts the haunting whistle of the light railway, most melancholy of sounds, never heard in the city now. Then, very quietly, the coughing of a fox, from somewhere in a scrubby thicket. And, as if echoing it in rural congruity, from high, high above, the sad call of the buzzard, sovereign of our skies, calling to his mate to come home. Urban faces, rural noises: I love both.
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