CHANGING BRITAIN

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 12 August 1942, Page 2

CHANGING BRITAIN

THE ENGLISH VILLAGE NOT SO STATIC AFTER ALL There is quite a common belief that the one spot in the world which never changes from one century to the next is the English village, the little hidden remote English village, with its sleepy stupid inhabitants all j vegetating happily in a flower-bed of trivial quarrels and hoary old j6kes, said Margery Allingham in a B-B.C. talk. That of course is only true in one particular: for the greater part it is a tale—a country tale. In fact I’m not at all sure that it isn’t a sort of smoke screen. English villages are like the people who live in them —poker-faced. The cottage which looks like somebody’s tea-cosy balancing precariously on a hillside is not really balancing at all; it is growing there. “It’ll die when its time comes and not before.” says its erHowever, meanwhile it really is growing, it’s not just sitting there waiting for death, and inside it has changed considerably in recent years. Main water taps have appeared; electric light switches, bathrooms, radio sets and telephones have all sprouted in it, and these developments have improved it out of all recognition as a place to live in. That is a change which has made all the difference between comfort and discomfort, reasonable housework and drudgery, and that’s no small revolution, you know. It is not yet universal, of Course (what change is?) and there are reactionaries among us here and there who cling to the old ways, but they are getting fewer and fewer every yearThe days of the village pump and tlie paraffin lamp are coming slowly and irrevocably to an end. Slowly and irrevocably—like growth. I fancy it is somewhere here that the real peculiarity of the English village lies. The village is like a little replica of the country’s heart; as a corporate body it is alive. The changes it undergoes happen as they happen to living thingsThey start inside, and the evidences of them appear naturally and gradually, so that there is very little shock in them. That is why one does not see many signs of drastic upheaval at first glance. The village that I come from must look much as it did a hundred or even two hundred years ago. but my great-grandfather would only have to live in it for half an hour to find himself in a brave new world, in fact, anyone born in the village who returned to it after even thirty years would find it almost unrecognisable in certain essentials.

CREATIVE GERM OF CHANGE

Sometimes I wonder if we in the ' village are not slightly further ad- ] vanced in the enormous social de- '< velopment which is occurring in the 1 whole country than are our cousins 1 in the towns- We take things very steadily, you see, ephemeral fashions pass over our heads, the peonle we know, we know for a lifetime, and when a great development—a great change of heart —occurs in the nation and we take our share in it like anybody else, we begin at the beginning and go on slowly and irrevocably to the end without distractions; maybe like the tortoise sometimes we get there first. Times of war are often thought to be the great periods of change, and so they are, in one sense, but it is not the wars themselves which produce the initial idea, the creative germ of the change, that comes in quiet times. The wars speed things up. they make things happen so fast that you can see them happening. Well, in our village, in my time, We’ve had two great wars, two great times of hurried development. The first speeded up one great change, and the second is speeding up another- Are these changes good, in the main? Yes, there is no question about that. Of course, as in all upheavals some good things have been lost, things we could do with now, but I fancy some of the things we parted with twenty years ago when we also gained so much, we are gradually recovering •in this second passing through the fire It may well be. It looks like that- The wind blow-; that way. Let me explain. When I was a child, in the last two or three years before the last war, the inner social life of the villages in our part of the country were undergoing a great, beneficial, but also very painful change. I just remember the last of the small feudal squires in our district. These folk have been written about and preached against so long and so fully that it scarcely seems worth describing them. When they were good they were too good and grandmotherly for anything; when they were bad they had to be seen to be believed. Their great sin was bossiness. They interfered with private lives- Everybody knows about them now, and anyhow most of them are dead these twenty years, but what does not seem to have been mentioned so often is that we in the villages began to resent them very early in the century, long before wages went up or taxes and death duties became enormous. If we had not, then none of .these other things •would have made very much difference. That is the kind of people we are. Obstinate, even pigheaded. This resentment which had been bitter and private and very painful for years came to a peak and began to show itself, as I remember it, about 1913. People everywhere, in cottage, farm and professional house began to shake off this petty feudal yoke openly, round about that time, and they began to feel absolutely and entirely free once more, and that for the first time, as- far as I can gather, for well over a hundred years. Then came the 1914 war. and it quickened the pace to racing speed. That kind of feudal domination went for good and all. There were still isolated cases left all over the place, just as there are still paraffin lamps to-day, but the great change had taken place. After the war social independence for everybody was the ideal, and in most cases the practice everywhere, and whatever else happened, that position was consolidated slowly and steadily and without fuss, right on through the temporary peace. However, the country people are very practical, and * they are great believers in not throwing away with the bath water any baby who may be in it, and so at the present time there is a rather interesting code in force. It is this: You can still touch your hat to money or Blood, but if you do. Money must breed money in your pocket and Blood must do you service, or you are making a silly old fool of yourself. This may not be very gracious but it is highly reasonable and also very English. Also it is very like the code of long long ago, in the days of the second George before the enclosure of the common land, and when every rood supported its man.

RETURN TO THE COUNTRY?

Well then, that is new in my time, or new-old, and it is one of the good changes, I think. One of the bad ones is the thing you have heard so much about in every talk there ever was on rural England to-day, and that is the gradual drain away of the poDulation from the land. This, I think, is a slightly misleading phrase, because the villages never were

peopled only by land workers, and I do not believe this fall in the country population was purely due to the slump in agriculture at the end of the last war. Some of it was due to the fact that the big stores in the towns could sell and deliver goods much more cheaply than a village tradesman could make them, but most of all I believe it has been due to something else rather less obvious. The fashion in pleasure. In the last war and in the years after it, mechanical pleasures fascinated everybody. People wanted to be entertained and it looked as though machinery of all kinds was the thing to provide that entertainment. The towns possessed the machines and the country did not, so people went to the towns. There was also an overwhelming and new desire for noise and colour and crowds. These were natural reactions, and they all drew people away from the quiet spacious places so that there was a period in the late twenties when it began to look as if the time would come when the villages would be inhabited entirely by the old, and would in time become deserted. However, things don’t happen like that. There is always the human factor; the eternal pendulum swings back unexpectedly to confound the experts. Just before the present war there was a slow creep back to the countryside among the more wide-awake of all classes. Astute men found transport had improved, and their wives found that living was cheaper, healthier and often more convenient in the country. More and more business men worked in the city and lived in the village. When the war came vast ! numbers of people were moved out j the towns in spite of themselves. : Some of the adults hated it, but the j majority of the children did not, and the longer they stayed the more they ! liked it. That is the way the wind is blowing now. It began as a j zephyr, developed into a hurricane, and may settle down to a steady breeze. If it does, future historians are almost certain to state flatly that wartime evacuation was solely responsible for the great return to the land of the late nineteen forties, but it will not be quite true. The tendency was there before, and it sprang up because people began to re-dis-cover the great point in village life, which is of course that it is a sufficiently scattered community for a man to enjoy living among his fellows and yet be able to call his soul hts own in his own home, without seriously inconveniencing his neighbours. It is in the little things of life that the true freedoms and pleasures lie, and in a village these can be jealously preserved without anyone else being hindered or upset by them.

ONE UNCHANGING THING

I At the moment, the people of the villages are tense, waiting and preparing to fight, and if need be to die. as others of their kind are dying all over the world to preserve these freedoms. They will preserve them. These freedoms are right things, and will survive all wrong things. Right things are growing things; wrong things are decaying things. Whatever happens, even if this entire generation has to die in their defence, if life lasts on earth, they will come up again in the spring. Some spring. When spring comes. This is as certain as that the sun will rise to-mor-row. That is the one thing in the village as in any other little heart of of a free people, that does not ever change. ________________