The Last of the Gooseberry Wine
Eric Christiansen
For 200 years, it has been obvious that authoresses and cottages go together. It is a relationship both mystical and practical. Cottages benefit authoresses: authoresses benefit cottages. They stop them falling down, they clean them up, they beautify them with tangerine-coloured telephones. They stock them with gin, they warm them with oil, they gird them round with eager rows of courgettes. They sit in their gardens watching birds through huge dark spectacles, and they never harm a liv- ing mammal. In return, the cottage offers them whatever they ask of it: a bit of peace and quiet, a nest, a work-space, an echo of paradise, a one-woman kibbutz, or a dirty week-end. Any of these lie within reach, because what distinguishes a cottage from a real house is its abject vulnerability to the fantasies of its owner.
That is why all cottages ought to belong to sensitive ladies who write books and get paid for it. Male writers are not much good at this sort of thing. They grow morose, drink too much, and knock themselves out on the beams. They shout 'bugger off' at the owls, and carry their sorrows to the pub. Other kinds of people can afford cot- tages, but it looks as if it is still the lady writer who gets the most out of hers. There is only one drawback, and that lurks in what comes out of the cottage on quarto sheets. In, for example, The Magic Apple Tree, a Country Year, by Susan Hill, which Hamish Hamilton has just published at £7.50 with engravings by John Lawrence.
The dust jacket is beautiful, the engrav- ings are nice, the type-face is all right. The contents consist of an 'account of a year of village life' with the added bonus of nature notes and recipes. And yet the reading of this work has not been all pleasure.
Miss Hill has got her cottage, a few miles outside Oxford in a village she calls 'Barley'. She deserves it in every way, since she has written ten books and is not afraid of working with her hands. The cottage has evidently got her, since she describes at length her affection for the whole messuage and its appurtenances, and the lives that are led there. She sees the good in almost everything round her, even to the extent of liking a village where the meanest hovel changes hands at £50,000. The trouble is that the depiction of happiness is difficult, and apt to be wearisome.
Take the ideas that go through your head while your body is happily bashing away at the thorn bushes or forking over the com- post. The brain feeds itself with a con- tinuous stream of waffle which could only be termed thought by the most strenuous and polite of fictions. It isn't really think- ing, it is more like the circulation of a thin fluid preventing the too rapid decomposi- tion of the brain-cells. You imagine some nice French beans, then you remember some nasty ones you saw in a shop, then you remember some slugs, then you wonder if there is a really humane slug poison, then up come sloes, why aren't there so many this year? And so on, and so on. Now pro- fessional writers can put most of what enters their heads into some sort of in- teresting shape, but in the country, isola- tion and hard work make this a doubly demanding task. It is too easy to shove it all down just as it comes, especially after a hard day at the potato-ridges. Miss Hill must know this, and yet there is rather too much wool in her pensees.
There is also too liberal a dressing of detail. So much patient information about the two cats, the dog, the fox, the child, the Women's Institute, Mr Ash, George and Nance may at first give the impression that we are embarking on a good Patricia High- smith. It is bearable, because something
unbearably foul is about to happen, preferably to the heroine. Who but a
murderee would chronicle herself as remorselessly as this? Tragedy must be waiting for the lady who uses the words I or me fifteen times in one paragraph (on page 111) in order to explain why she likes but does not grow sweet peas. Such expectations are disappointed long before page 111. In the event, nothing worse than a failure to sell purple beans at the Bring and Buy interrupts the writer's contentment. Some of the villagers die, but
the ménage at 'Moon Cottage' goes
through a whole year unscathed. Or at least, so the reader is led to believe. The fact
that the real counterparts of 'Barley' and 'The Fen' are about to be smashed for ever by the extension of a motorway is for some reason suppressed.
Anyway, if Miss Hill wants to write a cheery sort of book, good luck to her. The fools or knaves who wrote the blurb on the dust jacket describe her as 'the true suc- cessor to Miss Mitford and Francis Kilvert and Flora Thompson.' This is a comparison which her publishers ought not have in- vited, but since they have, some sort of Pro- test is called for. It is possible that one of Miss Mitford's characters would be made to say 'We are not great dinner-party givers', or 'Souffles have a reputation for being dit." ficult to make, but I have never found their so,' but they would be speaking in accor- dance with the laws of the English comic tradition. Miss Mitford would not have presented such data as intrinsicallY in teresting observations about herself. In Flora Thompson's Oxfordshire, there must have been many who could claim to 'aP, preCiate every last little green goosebenl, and to be 'particularly fond of soup', but their motive was not Miss Hill's. It was not self-congratulation, it was hunger. And Kilvert never published. The Magic APPle Tree is definitely not the one up which the people were barking. Its real purpose is to hymn the triumph of an urban dream. A 'sensitive, cautious' dream, as it happens, of the country-side as massage, but still a dream from the sane hard streets as the bungalow and the caravan site which made the sensitive and cautious dreamer wince. The triumph has, been a long time in the making, and it is no yet complete all over England; but what has happened in Oxon over the last 20 years has administered the coup de grace to th,e, tough, poor, and cramped existence led there in the past out of necessity rather than choice; it is no accident that the rustics of 'Barley' are all past 50, and mostly pushing 90. What has taken its place may indeed he termed 'the true English countryside', as the publishers put it. It may equally well he termed the false.
An inspiring theme, for a comic writer: but the treatment it receives in this book suggests that Miss Hill's talents lie in a dit ferent direction.
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