A little millennial horseplay

Bevis Hillier

A HORSE IN THE COUNTRY: A DIARY OF A YEAR IN THE HEART OF ENGLAND by Clive Aslet

Fourth Estate, £16.99, pp. 285, ISBN 1841153753

In 1937 Robert Byron, best known for his travels in Byzantium, wrote an article, later reprinted as a pamphlet, 'How We Celebrate the Coronation'. (It was actually an all-out attack on the destruction of historic buildings.) In 2100 — if not much sooner, as nostalgia is fast catching up with its own tail — there will be a rash of books on 'How We Celebrated the Millennium'. It will require a Macaulay, not a Robert Byron, to do justice to the Great Millennium Cock-up: the money-gobbling disaster of the Dome; the grand laser-beam opening of the British Airways London Eye which, er, was not ready to revolve on 1 January 2000; the 'River of Fire' that wasn't; the rejection of Zara Hadid's imaginative design for a Cardiff opera house; the sports stadium that was useless for athletics; the disgusting saga of the British Museum's cheapskate south portico, constructed of inferior French limestone instead of Portland stone; and the tragicomic fiasco of the Wobbly Bridge, a pons asinorum indeed.

Successive governments, both Conservative and Labour, will rightly be ridiculed for a wretched showing when they were offered the front page of history to make a statement. Jennifer Page, Domed and damned but not Darned; the egregious Lord Falconer, beaming fatly through all catastrophes; and Lord Luce, who gave the whole show the opposite of a flying start when as minister for the arts in 1989 he refused to set preparations in train; these are not names that will be breathed with reverence on St Crispin's Day. Where a champagne cocktail was wanted, they served up a Horlicks.

The historians will have their fun shying at these coconut-heads. But the more reflective chroniclers will also ask: 'What happened across the rest of the country? What did the millennium mean to somebody living in the heart of England?' Clive Aslet was living in the heart of England — well, on and off. (Some of his time had to be spent in London editing — paradoxical ly — Country Life.) If you were to aim for the centre and stick a pin into a map of England, the village to be impaled would be Geddington, Northamptonshire. A few miles from Naseby, site of the decisive civil war battle, it is mainly remarkable for the best-preserved of the Eleanor crosses which the grief-stricken Edward I put up across England after his queen's death in 1290. Aslet, with his wife Naomi and their young children, took a cottage there so he could be near a horse he had bought for hunting, stabled nearby.

Aslet's diary begins in October 1999, but most of it is about the year 2000, and intermittently he gives glimpses of millennium preparations and celebration in the English heartland. It all sounds more like the 1951 Festival of Britain than, say, the high-tech Body Zone at Greenwich. On 10 December 1999, Aslet records:

There is only one formal Geddington celebration on offer but it has sold out. It is at the village hall and you have to take your own food and eat it in a marquee, which could be cold.

On 29 December the family visits Valerie Finnis (godmother of the chief sub on Country Life) in 'her handsome, freezing apartments' at Boughton, a house of the Duke of Buccleuch.

Before we go, we have to draw something in the visitors' book — rather large, because this is the last page left before 2000... My contribution is a figure of Old Father Time, with a cherub, representing 2000, carrying a banner saying Merlin Trust.

On 31 December he and Naomi take the children to London in the hope they 'will remember enough of the events to bore people about them when they are old', On 1 January 2000 he thinks, 'Can this be the new Millennium? Dull, dull. dull.' His country friends have spent millennium eve quieting horses, or, in Valerie Finnis's case, enduring 'the torture of booming music until two o'clock', the duke having lent a big room over the old stables to a daughter of one of the staff for a party. Aslet finds a condom by the Eleanor cross.

If this reflects recreational activity on the cross. I take my hat off to Geddington's youth for their hardiness.

He devotes some skilfully contrapuntal pages to a comparison between Geddington in 1900 and in 2000. In 1900 the village `encountered what might be called the entertainment industry only when the dancing bear came around, led on a chain by its owner'. On 3 April 2000 he writes about the local Millennium Wallhanging, a cheery effort created by 40 different 'needle people', depicting Geddington scenes and memories.

He comments:

As a nation, we may not have taken the Dome to our hearts, but needlework records like this have been made the length and breadth of the country. You can't say that the Millennium, in terms of our celebration of it, has been a flop.

Also, while some of us may look on 2000 as a year of lost opportunities. Aslet, as a nouveau countryman, looks on it as a time of 'lost innocence, before the tarry, acrid stink of the [foot-and-mouth disease] pyres settled on Cumbria So the historians will find the book valuable; but it does not really belong on the history shelves, It belongs on the humour shelves. A lot of it is about fox-hunting — those passages, too, may interest the historians, if this turns out to be the last period in which hunting was legal. In Asiet's accounts of riding to hounds, there is some of the exhilaration of Surtees and Sassoon; but he constantly does things wrong, and is deliciously self-deprecating at all times. He buys the wrong kind of jodhpurs and the wrong sort of boots. He is rebuked for funking an easy fence and for taking a difficult one when his horse has lost a shoe. I remember that Wilfred Thesiger and Gavin Maxwell, the otter man, went on a harsh journey together. The valiant. hardened Thesiger wrote it up straight in a book; Maxwell also wrote a book about the journey, sending himself up as a clueless nelly. In a similar equation, Siegfried Sassoon has the Thesiger role; Aslet assigns himself something like the Maxwell one. I can emphathise with him, as Penelope Betjeman tried to teach me to ride. 'Even by the law of averages,' she squawked, 'you should be rising in the saddle once in a hundred times. You're not even doing that!'

Aslet has written some of the finest modern books on architecture, among them American Country Houses and Greenwich. But this book is his funniest. He is the master of a sly irony, implicit rather than explicit. He lets people hoist themselves with their own petards. He meets the Duke of Rutland at the regional Country Landowners' Association annual general meeting:

He is quite small, dark-haired. Conversationally, I inquire as to his thoughts about Prince Charles's Reith Lecture last night. 'These GM crops, we ought to try them out on prisoners, I mean, we've got all these people in jail. They could eat them first. It would be their contribution to society.'

'Perhaps it could be offered as an option, in return for a reduction in sentence,' I suggest.

`Oh no,' he says. They should get five years longer if they refuse. I'm fed up with this namby-pamby society.'

When a man tells you, 'I'm a delegator,' you can't help wondering whether he means, 'I'm bone idle, and like to make everybody else do my work.' Similarly, a critic who quotes reams from the book he is reviewing may seem to be abrogating his proper function. But, with a writer of Asiet's skill, the obvious way to recommend him is to quote him. He has that rare gift of writing a prose which is 'conversational' but at the same time literature'. So permit me to do a bit of abrogating. Aslet on catering in Geddington: One of the cottages tried to follow continental practice by opening a cafe, or — more English — a tearoom, and the iron sign of the teapot still hangs outside it. But I suppose Geddington people did not take to sitting on pavements reading Le Monde...

Aslet on the Country Life colleague who persuaded him to learn to ride (admittedly there is a touch of Dickensian mandarin in this):

Gordon Winter was in all senses a polished man. He had a face that gleamed as though it had been buffed up with a soft cloth. His shoes invariably shone, thanks to the shoe-cleaning equipment that he kept in his desk. His teeth shone as a result of ministrations in the gents, which involved removing some of them. His suits ought to have shone, since, with the economy of the wartime generation, he always wore the same ones — grey in summer. green tweed in winter. To look at, he was as perfect as a pebble: seas could wash over him but he would always carry his tightly rolled umbrella.

A house in Geddington has 'carpets patterned like raspberry ripple ice-cream'. The trunks of an ancient clematis 'twine around each other expressively, like a ballerina's wrists'. In the newly acquired cottage, not yet over the novelty of possession, he feels 'rather guilty, as though I were in the au pair's bedroom'. Some old pasture over which he rides is 'as soft as corduroy and similarly striated with old ridge and furrow'. On 29 December 1999 there is frost on his car, 'as thick as pie crust'. Under stones he finds 'a Panzer division of snails'. He smashes them 'and the snot-bodies ooze out'. Flying a kite for the first time, his five-year-old son William 'holds on to the handle very tight, with an expression of thrill, wonder, responsibility'. I could go on — but why don't you read the book?