Afterthought

By ALAN BRIEN

WHEN I was an essay- reader as a boy (when there were still essays to read and before I became the last of the rambl- ing egocentric essayists), journalists seemed to be divided into country- lovers and city-lovers. There were the new-mown-

hay, plashy-footed-vole,

wind-on-the-heath. folk- wisdom boys and the ancient-cobb18, historic- snot, street-of-adventure, heart-of-the-Empire. Cockney-humour boys. Each side, through long Practice, could adapt their stock aria to suit any new outbreak of unpleasantness between the Yokels and the slickers without any painful neces- sity to judge the case on its merits. Both groups usually had comfy, roomy houses in some well- groomed, attractively gardened county with a fast train service and spent an enormous amount of time in London. Town v. Country. like Oxford v. Cambridge in the boat race. became a con- venient and harmless mock-combat for shadow- boxing dogmatists who did not want to get in- volved in such real and messy fights as Religion v. Atheism, Appeasement v. Anti-Fascism, Laissez-Faire v. Planning, or any others which might disturb the readers. 'Hit hard but hurt nobody' is a slogan which has always appealed to editors.

At school 1 soon found 1 could not take either side seriously. Partly because I was, and am, incapable of making a total commitment to any group or philosophy or area. I cannot bring my- self to say, 'I love the Theatre, or Negroes. or the Country, or even My Country or My People.' I do not really know what the expression means to tell you the truth, but I'm suspicious of the ego- boosting, smugly self-satisfied kick that Profes- sional Lovers appear to get out of announcing that they intend to ignore the facts and fly blind on their emotions.

It seemed clear to me in this essayists' rivalry that the Countrymen had a slightly superior social status, a more dignified, and respectable literary tradition and the solid weight of genera- tions of inherited cliché on their side. Even the Townes ownees put in their bid for the excitement, variety and mystery of bubbling metropolis as though they were advancing an amusing, but fan- tastic, paradox which was unlikely to be believed. humming I began to suck up to the English master by numming the joys of the open air. Like almost all school children, I had been trained to be little more than a skilful plagiarist. It did not occur to Me that anyone might actually want my real, Personal, detailed views on the countryside. I by they would assume that I was re-writing °Y processing through Roget all I could remem- ber on the subject from Alpha of the Plough, Robert Louis Stevenson and Hilaire Belloc. This Policy proved unspectacularly successful for quite a while until one day I was re-reading a lush passage about the sweet scent of wood smoke on the balmy evening air, the slumbrous murmur of the hidden waterfalls, and the hypnotic twinkle of the diamond stars in the frosty bowl of heaven, as I lay in my sleeping bag on the forest's ferny floor. An uncomfortable, unnerving thought struck me--I never had smelled wood smoke at night near a waterfall while looking at the stars.

did not even possess a sleeping bag and the whole essay was a load of second-hand rubbish.

I found it quite a strain to force myself to think about the country I did not 'know : up river from the shipyards. beyond the allotments and the racing pigeon lofts, before the pit heaps and away from the trading estate. My essays about this countryside pleased neither me nor my English master. He regarded them as therapy rather than literature and his role as psychiatric adviser not language teacher. 'VG but depressing.' he would write. 'Well written but must you be so concerned with unpleasantness?' I agreed with him but I could not alter my approach without dishonesty. Our countryside did seem to me a soggy, boggy. scruffy. smelly run-down waste- land, stinking in its dank corners and sunless ditches of turds and urine. Every footstep crunched through a thin crust of dried mud and released mad hordes of lip-smacking blowflies; rubbery armies of scrabbling woodlice. ancient hairy spiders and purple worms, with yellowish circles like old bandages around them, who struggled and stretched across the desert earth like a trussed man being sick. The animals, like the land, were all right from a distance but close to, they also reeked of old mortality. No essayist had ever warned me that sheep are very likely to have halitosis. Their teeth were greenish and jagged like rotting picket fences. Their wool was matted and dandruffy like the fur coat of some skid-row tart who had been rolling for months in a gutter. Sometimes they had only one eye or a foot which appeared to be infected with death-watch beetle. The cows

were coated with excrement on the back half and cloaked with a layer of flies on the front. Each field always had one corner which the lovable

countryfolk had used to dump old cans, prams, mounds of suspiciously sticky paper which looked as if it had been used to pack a trunk containing a dismembered corpse, broken glass and half- bricks. The crops were about as interesting as

white lines down a main road eeometrical, repetitive patterns of potatoes and :urnips like

council-house back gardens exterdcd to the horizon. Our farmers never grew anything worth

stealing though we pretended that the great, fat, apoplectic turnips (known as 'narkies') were a local delicacy, like the water melons we saw on the pictures, and we would slice them into wooden, scimitar segments and eat them under the hedge.

The country dwellers that we saw looked if anything less healthy and natural than the slum

dwellers of our town. They stared as us exactly as the animals stared with a blank, mindless

resentment as if they might lower their heads at any moment and charge. Their clothes were so covered with all the slop and debris which gathered in their tumbledown farmyards that they seemed to me some new species—half animal and half vegetable—and as much part of the land as either. We were sometimes cruel by intention. They were continually cruel by habit. They just did not notice that the animals bel- lowed, or bruised, or scarred, or bled when they slashed and prodded them along like weary refugees retreating apathetically before an in- vading army. This was my caricature picture of

the Country then—a place even drearier, poorer, more pessimistic, than our Depression-stricken Town. It never even possessed any of the interest- ing animals, the badgers, foxes, geese, hawks, herons and the rest of the menagerie that Romany

used to encounter in his Children's Hour walks. At last I turned my essays to the Townee cause and my English master's comments became less nervous and more conventional.