One step from paradise
Roy Hattersley
Iwas brought up in a vanishing village. It did not disappear overnight under the waters of a reservoir. Nor was it suddenly deserted on the orders of the Ministry of Defence. Wadsley was slowly submerged under owner-occupation. Our house bow windows, drive with space for garage and garden front and back — was one of the culprits. But when we moved in, just before the war, the village still had a limestone-and-millstone grit individuality. From my bedroom window, I could see — over the churchyard, beyond the alms houses and past the cottages in which the knife-handle makers used to live — moorland hills that stretched on, only interrupted by farms and quarries, until they reached the Peak District and what was to become Britain’s first national park.
We thought of ourselves as entirely distinct from the borough within whose municipal boundaries we lived. A trip ‘to Sheffield’ was an adventure which we faced with greatest equanimity when, in the course of two tram rides and a bus journey, we passed through the city-centre and emerged into Derbyshire on the other side. There, the villages were still unspoilt and intact. For the next half-century it seemed to me that living where the horizon is the top of a hill not the roof of a house was only one step away from paradise. It still does.
For more than 30 years — living and working in London SW1 and visiting the decaying central area of Birmingham — I knew that, one day, I would go back to the Peak District and to a stone village which has remained, more or less, the same since long before Wadsley was swallowed-up by suburbia. It took eight years to find the right house. But I never doubted that I would settle in before long and before legs made it impossible for me to climb the hills that end a thousand feet nearer to heaven than the city lights in the distance.
I just about made it.
No doubt my village (the possessive pronoun denotes affiliation not ownership) is like hundreds of others. We have a village green with a war memorial and a market cross. The Post Office closed a couple of years ago, but there is a general store which sells almost everything, a butcher and a garage that does not sell petrol but gladly mends our cars. There are two public houses, about which many of us became unnecessarily alarmed when the licensing laws changed. Every application for plan ning permission is fiercely resisted. We like things to remain as they are.
There is a farm, just across the road from the church. One of the farmer’s sons breeds prizewinning Charolais and accustoms them to the hurly-burly they will face in the show ring by walking them through the village. The primary school has such a record of success that it is always mentioned in the estate agents’ advertisements. In the late spring, hawthorn and horse chestnuts glow with pink and white blossoms, which after a week or two of glory, cover the pavements like confetti. We hide away our wheelie-bins as soon as they have been emptied.
All villages have vices. Ancient animosities live on in a genteel sort of way. Matters of little consequence — most recently the relocation of the post-box are treated as matters of great concern. But, with one or two exceptions, we get on well together. We knock on each other’s doors uninvited, warn of windows left open, organise posses to search for missing cats. We close gates after we walk through fields and keep dogs more or less under control. In our way, we are a ‘community’ — though most of us would be embarrassed to use such a word.
If we are, in any way, special, it is because we live in limestone country what W.H. Auden, writing about a village two valleys away, called ‘the landscape which we, the inconstant ones, are constantly homesick for’. But most English villages have defining characteristics. The feature which they have in common is the power to convince the people who live within them that — four-by-fours and television aerials withstanding — they live in an idyll of England. That is why, as I report each fortnight on how we spend our days, I shall call my despatches ‘Letter from Arcadia’.
© Roy Hattersley 2006
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