Country life
`Lovely day' tyranny
Leanda de Lisle
Trigger the hamster is back . .. After an absence of three weeks she turned up in a bucket in the nursery. Not the one with food in it that we had placed next to a stepladder of books, but a free-standing number that{ was there for sick-bug emer- gencies. The boys seemed pleased, but they haven't noticed that I've given away the c, rabbit which used to live with the chickens. Given that hey have hardly noticed the rather bigg gap left by my eldest son's pony, I shou dn't be surprised.
Molly w the little grey mare of my childhood reams. However, I'm not a child any m re and, since riding accidents have left m with a bad back, I very rarely sit on a orse. There was, therefore, nobody around to exercise Molly during the children's term time. To stop her going wild I had her stabled at two separate establishments where, I was told, she would be schooled. However, when the school holidays carne round I was invariably informed that they hadn't been able to find anyone small enough to ride her, and she wasn't really up to doing anything at all apart from chomping grass.
I don't know how other people cope. I suppose the mothers of horsy children build their lives round stables and ponies, but it hardlylseems worth my sacrifice when there aren't any bridleways nearby and the boys show no interest in leaving the house anyway, now that they have a N64 Golden- eye computer game with three controllers. From dawn until dusk, they sit around in T- shirts hunting each other down virtual cor- ridors with virtual handguns. Through the nursery window, the light glances in copper and gold off the brown leaves drifting on to the lakes. 'You should go outside,' I hector; `it's beautiful.'
Like my father's friend Rupert Loewen- stein, the boys call this the 'It's the "a love- ly day like this" tyranny', and respond with rebellious sighs that provoke me into mak- ing veiled threats. 'What's the point of liv- ing in the countryside if you are just going to sit inside all day? You might as well live in London,' I venture, and get the response I most feared from my eldest son. 'If I'm expected to go outside when it's freezing cold, I'd rather live in London.'
Living in the country doesn't make you a countryman or woman. You have to have some kind of connection with the land oth- erwise the countryside is just so much win- dow-dressing. I'm a townie by nature and a countrywoman by education. It seems the children take after me, but it could be worse. They could be like the woman who bought a house next to a wood in these parts. She complained to the woodman that she had made a shock discovery in the months since she had moved in. Trees grow. Outraged, she has demanded that the woodman cuts every tree in the wood off at a certain height and keeps them trimmed as if they were a hedge for ever after. She is going to get an even bigger shock when she sees what sort of things come out of the woods.
I saw a positively gothic scene on the edge of our rookery yesterday. There I was, minding my own business, when a hawk dropped out of the sky in front of me, seized a fat, grey pigeon, landed on the lawn and start eating its prey alive. Then, before I had time to feel sorry for the pigeon, a cloud of enormous rooks gath- ered above the hawk, cawing loudly. The bird of prey paused for a couple of minutes before flying off and leaving the pigeon. I very much hoped that the rooks would then finish off the injured bird, but they disap- peared as suddenly as ghosts, leaving me with that charming task.
Examining the pigeon, I felt glad our hamster had restricted her adventure holi- day to the inside of the house. But, as for the boys ... my three little assassins just don't know what they are missing.
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