SHAW'S VILLAGE

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 130, 5 June 1933, Page 11

SHAW'S VILLAGE

OLD WORLD RETREAT

FAR FROM CIVILISATION

INHABITANTS' PEIDE

Twenty-five miles from Charing Cross is a tiny village so Temote from civilisation that you canuot buy a daily newspaper there. There is no gas, no electricity, do water-main. The village straggles picturesquely for half a mile or so by dips and bends, and finally tapers away into the homely and miiaiy undulating countryside of .'Hertfordshire. One of the last houses you come to before leaving the village has a quiet, almost ecclesiastical face. 'Its bricks are of a curious reddish grey, creepermantled, and it 3 windows are wide and low, writes Louis Katin in the "Sunday Dispatch." The green front gate does not harmonise very well with it. Dozens of tubby little chimney-pots poke inelegantly from, its roofs. , This is the house of Mr. Bernard Shaw. And the village is Ayot St. Lawrence, unknown to the outside world a quarter of a century ago —now famous as the village where Mr. Shaw lives and writes and has his being. "It is a queer place," said Mr. Shaw, addressing some of the villagers. '' It is a quiet sort of village, and the last thing of real importance that happened here was, perhaps, tho Flood." Mr. Shaw either forgot or was too modest to mention one important happening at Ayot St. Lawrence since the Flood —and that was his coming to live there. If his fame and glory have not reflected a lustre on his fellowvillagers he has at least brought them an extra measure of prosperity. Every summer weekend motorists and cyclists and hikers dawdle through the only street, trying to appear as though the very last thing they had come for was to see where "Old G.B.S. lives, you know," or to hope against hope they might catch a second's glimpse of the genius himself. A dozen of them did have that Experience the other. day, when G.B.S. came along to post a letter. They looked —and looked. "Didn't it embarrass him?" I asked a. villager. "I'd like to see anything embarrass him," was the reply. AFFECTION. TJiey have a humorous sort of affection for Mr. Shaw, have the Ayot people. Ho has won a place in their ■hearts, for there's nothing of the snob about him, and he is always Teady for -a chat. But it took fourteen years to do it. Typically insular arc the Ayot St. Law^ renco folk, treating the idol of the highbrows, as he described it, "as an interloper and a suspicious stranger." Mr. Shaw boasts now that he is the oldest inhabitant of the place, but I came j across an older one —an ancient labour-1 er who had lived there since 1864! It is" a village of the past, is Ayot. Growth and change have definitely.left it, and the only movement is that. of the exodus of young people -who will not tolerate the conditions of labour upon the' soil. ~, . For Ayot is .suffering as most of rural England, is suffering.. A,t...the; T tim£ the I§2l Census the. population!, w.^s 137. In 1921 it was 110. Now it is 93. , They won't work on tho land, the younger Ayot generation, and : they migrate to the towns nearby—to,the new town of Welwyn Garden City four miles away, or St. Albans, seven miles away. . "When I was a young woman,' mourned a villager in my ears, "there were forty children going to the school. , Now there are only five." FOR BAD CONDUCT. G.B.S. made a characteristic suggestion regarding the school when the lady of the manor told him she thought he ought to give a prize to the scholars. She.herself, she said, gave a prize for • tho best-conducted boy or girl. The reply of G.B.S. was an offer to give a ■bad-conduct prize .to the.»worse-con-ducted boy or girl, and he and tho lady of the manor would watch their careers to find out which really turned out the ■begt^-the rightly-conducted or the ' wrongly-conducted one. But his idea ■was never adopted. Now, alas, there are only five children on whom, to conduct the experiment. Ayot St. Lawrence has become a village of country houses, 'of rich people who, like Mr. Shaw, want a paceful haven for their work and weekends. The haphazard ' development which has revised rural England even in the remotest byways Jas halted here. It is.unlikely that "progress" of this sort will eventuate at Ayot—at least in Mr. Shaw's time—for a rich local landowner has bought most of tho 750 acres which, comprise the manor, and he will not countenance ill-con-. ceived erection of bricks and mortar on Ayot's lovely meads and grasses. Apart from an occasional lecture, Mr. Shaw does not mix with the social life of Ayot. This tiny village is divided into two oppqsing factions, and, as one resident described it to me, "It is a very unhappy village." When Bernard Shaw addressed tho women's institute he- referred to this antagonism, and told them, how to conduct it. He advised tho women:'"Learn to quarrel in the' proper political way. When you feel like letting yourself rip, call the other lady names, and when you have finished let her get up and tell you off in the same way. When you have finished, go to tea together. If you do that, your institute will be a great success." Tor the first time for many years Ayot had a rural council electron last year. Thirty-six voters wont to tho poll. Every day at about half-past four Mr. Shaw takes a stroll to the post office, which is about 200 yards from his house. And from six to seven you may see his lithe, alert figure, with the white straw hat, striding rapidly around the quiet and scented lanes, fulfilling his regular evening constitutional. He looks rather like a debonair young faun than the septuagenarian to whom the local women's institute last July gent a message of congratulation on his reaching his seventy-sixth birthday. On one occasion at .the end of last summer he lectured to a group of hikers in the garden which fronts tho old church. Ho was dressed entirely in red, I was told, and woro a red straw hat! Famous though it is, Ayot is still almost literally an island, several miles from a railway station or a main road, and except for those who come to stare at tho house of G.B.S. it sees no traffic or strangers. , Mr. Shaw is a keen photographer, and ho has given some of the negatives to tho post-mistress. Tho reproductions are best-sellers among tho weekend visitors. "I have hundreds of photographs of Ayot St. Lawrence taken in all seasons during t.he last 25 years," Mr. Shnw told me.

Ricardo Pigon, aged five, of Vera Cruz, Mexico, terrorised by talcs.'of bandits, heard a tnx collector demand 'money from his grandfather. The child picked up a gun au4 shot the collector dead,