Country Life
Autumn reflections
Peter Quince
I rather enjoy walking along our hilltop as the November daylight fades, and from there watching the windows light up in the valley. There is usually a tractor or two still at work in the fields, but one senses the village settling down to a warm and comfortable evening. The contrast between the cold, empty hillside and the snug domesticity, at the foot of the slope is agreeable.
All the same, the arrival of these wintry evenings has provoked some not particularly comfortable reflections this year. Thoughts of electricity cuts, and petrol rationing, and scarcity of oil, put something of a damper on the scene. We have all been made to realise how vulnerable our lives and our comforts have become to hostile influences far away.
It would have astounded our forebears (and I dare say appalled them, too) to know how dependent their familiar rural economy was to become upon (bizarre notion!) a handful of Arab rulers. Yet the English countryside of today is even more at the mercy of those capricious gentlemen than the cities. Without their oil, modern agriculture would come to a full stop. And although it would be absurd to foresee in our present difficulties any such ultimate doom, other considerations of a less fanciful nature cannot be denied.
Social life in the country nowadays is completely bound up with the motor-car (far more than with the bus, since that usually provides only the ghost of a public service, where it is not actually extinct). Schools have been centralised. so children have to be transported many miles each day if they are to be educated. Our local hospital was closed down years ago, in favour of a glass palace in another part of the county. Most of the old village shops have been put out of business by the more ' efficient ' establishments a dozen petrolconsuming miles away. There is scarcely a corner of daily life in the country which would not wither away without its regular dose of .petrol.
Since this is the way the world has moved, there is no point in being glum about it. But anyone interested in the evolution of English country life must recognise that it is this single fact more than any other which marks the present age as being different in kind from all the ages which have gone before. Hitherto, whatever else changed in the countryside, the essence of its life was selfsufficiency. Country people fed themselves, obtained their own fuel and power, built their houses from what materials were at hand, produced their own clothes. My own village, for example, had within the memory of the old men enough craftsmen to supply almost every need of the local population; that kind of resource has all but disappeared now, and the only newcomer in their place is the garage with its petrol pumps.
At some point which I imagine to have been around the turn of the century, the entire pattern of self-sufficiency was abandoned. Every village became instead a small dependent part of a huge economic system, contributing its produce and relying upon it, in return, for the supply of all its necessities. And the whole infinitely complicated machine will be struck motionless without copious supplies of that liquid which happens to have been discovered buried far beneath hot Arabian deserts! We take it so much for granted that the sheer incongruity and Strangeness of it pass us by. One day perhaps a future Gibbon (if such a person be imaginable) will take pleasure in exploring the irony of it to its depths.
For us at the moment Gibbonian ironies hardly meet the case. If our movements are to be curtailed by petrol rationing, we shall simply have to make the best of it. A few stalwarts will no doubt discover that their horses have acquired an unhooked-for utility; a neighbour of mine was found looking speculatively at his ancient pony trap.the other day. But if our light and (more important) our heat are to be affected by one trouble or another this winter, then more positive action will be needed. I have detected a sharp rise in local interest in the availability of wood for burning, and the industrious sounds of saw and axe can be heard at unaccustomed volume. But it would be a dark and chilly prospect if we had to fend for ourselves as our ancestors did. Needless to say, much of the wood-cutting is being done by the screeching band-saw, which is driven by petrol.
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