Country life
We want it all
Leanda de Lisle
While city people talk about 'retiring to the countryside', those already here talk about retiring to a town where the houses are better heated and you can walk to the shops. Few want to find themselves wid- owed and alone in a rose-covered cottage. They want to be somewhere where their friends can drop in. Somewhere with neigh- bours. There are times in life when the rural idyll can seem less than, well, idyllic. For those of us who were brought up here, the first age of disillusion comes during your teens, when sex suddenly becomes more interesting than horses.
Parents try to relieve the tedium of the school holidays by giving teenage parties that resemble ghastly medical experiments. Boys and girls, educated in isolation from one another, are briefly released into the controlled environment of a marquee where the parents can observe their activi- ties as if they were beetles in a petri dish. For a couple of hours the children rush around in circles and crawl all over each other. Then the party is over and the chil- dren spend the rest of the holidays in their bedrooms listening to gloomy rock music.
Of course some teenagers still appear to be taking long, healthy walks, but that is because they are off to see the handsome young gardener or the barmaid in the vil- lage. My first boyfriend was an American GI whom I acquired while out picking blackberries near the local airbase. Unfor- tunately, however, there was a limit to how many blackberry crumbles my mother was prepared to make and, like many of my peers, I spent most of my teenage holidays day-dreaming. It's a habit I've found diffi- cult to shake off. There was a nasty moment when I found my mind wandering during a radio interview last week. 'It must be luwerly working from a house deep in the Leicestershire countryside' I was asked and I replied dutifully, 'Yes, it is ...' but my voice trailed off as I wondered what his reaction what his reaction would have been if I had said, 'No, it's hell.'
Spectator readers from Clapham to Cal- cutta have informed me that my life is their fantasy. I find this at once bizarre and entirely understandable. My life isn't hell — it's more like heaven. I don't have to deal with office politics, rubbish in the streets and smelly, naked tourists on the London Underground. I can enjoy the peace and beauty of the countryside, with- out ever feeling I have too much time on my hands. Besides my work, I have my chil- dren and their company is made better by the fact that I don't have to dream up activ- ities to keep them entertained. I just open the door and release them into the wild. For them, as for me, now is the perfect time to be living here.
I enjoy seeing my friends from outside the shires, but I don't miss them when they are not around. I wouldn't swap their restaurants, cinemas and shops for our fields and hedgerows ... actually, hold on, would I? For that is exactly what has been happening in the countryside.
We think the new out-of-town shopping centre is a monstrosity, but we are thrilled that we can now buy all the children's Christmas presents in one shop and urban luxuries like sun-dried tomatoes in another. We hate the fact that new and bigger roads bring us within ear shot of traffic, but we are delighted it takes half the time it used to to see our neighbours. We rail against the modem housing estates that engulf our market towns, but we are thankful if they mean that there are now enough parents around to support a good local school. I suspect if we could have a good restaurant instead of the old pub and a trendy club instead of the fifth rate hardware store, our cup would overflow.
In the 18th century, those who could afford to left the country for several months every year, to enjoy the London season or to spend the winter in the local provincial town. Now we want it all, all the time. So we are killing the thing we love. Perhaps by the time you grow old, the shires will be the perfect place to retire. A gigantic suburbia of toy farms, conservation areas, Warner Brother cinemas and fash- ionable bistros. Just as the garden of Eden wasn't enough for Adam and Eve so, it seems, when fantasy becomes reality Arca- dia is not enough for many of us.
The Green Belt.
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