The invisible background, of course, remains precisely that. I mean the imminent prospect of nuclear annihilation, the industrial strife, the inflation, the class warfare, the threat of petrol rationing, the terrorist bombs and the destructive ‘generation gap’ which meant that children no longer wanted to be like their parents, and parents felt hurt and bewildered. Literary writing then, as now, was almost entirely metropolitan. I don’t mourn these things, any more than I mourn the discontinuation of death by appendicitis. I mourn the people, and I mourn my lost youth, which I entirely wasted through not having enough fun.
I have refused to romanticise the countryside in the sentimental way that seems obligatory in England. After all, the first things that strike you upon coming back from living in a town for any number of years, is the truly shocking amount of roadkill, and the late-winter horror of myxomatosis. Those who grow up loving the countryside do so in the same way as they grow to love their parents. I have aimed to capture the feeling of the times, and I do so remembering not so much the village as those who have been translated into the graveyard of St Peter’s Church, and would otherwise have been forgotten. May they not rest, but live. Inter alia: Mrs Booth, Martin Carroe, Connie and Cecil Chapman, the Churchills, Rev. Elton and Eileen, Molly Gabb, John the Gardener, Bernard Grillo, Sybil Harcourt-Clark, Alan Harper, Joan Herman, Mrs Hopkins, Molly Hyde, Lavander, Dr Strang McClay, Alan, Douglas and Brenda Maclachlan, Major John Major, Mrs Marriage, General Martin and Jean, Beetle and Tony Nation, the Nicholls, Mary Parker (memoirist of the village, and fellow Morris Minor driver), Peggy, Mrs Robertson (who once spent several days in the bath), Dicken and Ruth Steele, Trotty and Ted Sutton, Rev. David Thompson, Jack Thorn, Buzz Walford, Dennis Wieler, Beryl Williams, Yeoli and Kit Wilson. And Eric Parker, soldier, village patriot, indefatigably enthusiastic naturalist, and literary father of the village. I wish I had known him.
‘Archie and the Birds’: Punch (March 1997)
‘Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffiths and the Carol Singers’: Country Life (November/December 1996)
‘Archie and the Woman’: Independent (15 August 1998)
‘The Girt Pike’: London Magazine (July–August 2002)
‘Mrs Mac’: Daily Telegraph (27 December 1997)
A version of ‘All My Everlasting Love’: Waterstone’s Diary (1997)
‘The Happy Death of the General’: Sunday Times (8 July 2001)
‘Rabbit’: New Writing 10 (Picador, March 2001)
‘This Beautiful House’: The Times (18 December 2004)
‘The Broken Heart’: Saga Magazine (January 2003)
‘The Death of Miss Agatha Feakes’: broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (1996)
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Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village Page 24