Cottage In The Cotswolds

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31316, 11 March 1967, Page 4

Cottage In The Cotswolds

The Wild Hills. By Rupert Croft-Cooke. W. H. Allen. 218 pp. Here again we have an autobiographical offering from this most restful of authors. Mr Croft-Cooke writes of the 1930 s and his Gloucestershire retreat in the small isolated village of Salperton—“a long low cottage built of Cotswold stone.” We are given gentle and perceptive character sketches of his fellow-villagers, rather to the manner of Laurie Lee, the “Cider With Rosie” man, or the philosopical Richard Church. Eric, the local baker’s son, is Croft-Cooke’s “Man Friday," running the house and cooking superbly fbr him. Other members of the menage are two Alsatian dogs, a cheese-eating peacock and his mate, a family of Khaki Campbell ducks (put to a hutch each night by Eric to protect them from foxes), and Fausttoe, a young and spirited Nanny-goat, who delights in accompanying her master and the dogs on their walks. Keeping pets is never an uneventful business, and this part of the book is enlivened with many animal

anecdotes. Nons of this is merely cute. It is all totally absorbing and we drink to every word. Mr Croft-Cooke'* pleasure* were simple—he was 30 at the time. Food, walking, ths company of hi* pets, and in the evenings a drive to hi* car to a local ton for dart* and beer. The people of the village kept to themselves and he made few friends among them; his fellowdrinkers were he says, “slowmoving pungent men ...like characters from a Hardy novel.” Later, through visits to London and abroad, we meet some of his literary and family friends, as intensely interesting as the animals and for the most part, as eccentric. On returning from South America, Mr Croft-Cooke left Salperton and went back to his native Kent to live. So well has the author evoked the lonely comfort of his cottage in the wild hills, that his desertion seems tragic. “So I left the Cotswold* and except to transit have not returned to them, though I had rarely been happier than when I lived in those hills. .. ”