by Tom Fort
Well, perhaps. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that for a reader of today she is rather hard going. Whatever Professor Keith may say, she resolutely steers clear of the dark side of her own and other people’s lives. She is, I’m sorry to say, trite, sentimental, long-winded, short-sighted, arch, chatty and twee. This paragraph, taken from the second volume of Our Village, is representative:
It is a pleasant lively scene this May morning with the sun shining so gaily on the irregular rustic dwellings intermixed with their pretty gardens; a cart and a waggon watering [it would be more correct, perhaps, to say beering] at the Rose; Dame Wheeler with her basket and her brown loaf just coming from the bakehouse; the nymph of the shoeshop feeding the goslings at the open door – they are very late this year, those worthy little geese; two or three women in high gossip dawdling up the street; Charles North the gardener with his blue apron and ladder on his shoulder walking rapidly by; a cow and a donkey browsing the grass by the wayside; my white greyhound, Mayflower, sitting majestically in front of her own stable, and ducks, chickens, pigs and children scattered all over . . . A pretty scene!
If you care for that kind of thing, there is plenty more where that came from. W. H. Hudson, who stopped off on a walk from the ‘hated biscuit metropolis’ of Reading to talk to the sexton at Swallowfield about Miss Mitford, was very stern about her more ambitious works, which included several lengthy verse plays. ‘Poor stuff’ he called them, but he liked Our Village: ‘There is no thought, no mind stuff in it,’ he wrote, ‘and it is a classic. It endures, outliving scores of better books, because her own delightful personality manifests itself and shines in all these little pictures.’
She certainly did provide a uniquely detailed layout of the village at that time. Starting at the bottom of the road, she described the ‘tidy square red cottage’ belonging to the retired publican on the right, the ‘pretty dwelling of the shoemaker’, the blacksmith’s ‘gloomy dwelling where the sun never seems to shine’, a ‘spruce little tenement, red, high and narrow’, the village shop ‘multifarious as a bazaar’, her own cottage and the pub next door, ‘the white house opposite the collar-maker’s shop, with four lime trees before it’, the carpenter next door ‘famed ten miles round and worthy of all his fame’. The last building combined the curate’s lodgings – with ‘fine flowered window-blinds, the green door with the brass knocker’ – and the wheelwright’s shop. Ahead the lane climbed up ‘between its broad green borders and hedgerows, so thickly timbered’. And that was Three Mile Cross in 1820.
But even then it was menaced. Miss Mitford was inclined to insist at frequent intervals on its unchanging nature – ‘in outward appearance it hath, I suppose, undergone less alteration than any place of its inches in the kingdom.’ But even she occasionally raised her gaze to the swelling urban growth to the north. ‘This little hamlet of ours,’ she exclaimed, ‘is much nearer (to Reading) than it used to be. Our ancient neighbour, whose suburbs are sprouting in all directions, hath made a particularly strong shoot towards us.’
To W. H. Hudson, Reading was not so much a vigorous plant, but ‘a stupendous octopus . . . which threw out tentacles miles and miles long . . . little rows and single and double cottages, all in red, red brick and its weary accompaniment, the everlasting hard slate roof.’ By the time he walked through Three Mile Cross, Miss Mitford’s cottage had become a Temperance Hotel established by William Palmer of the Huntley and Palmer biscuit empire, a prominent campaigner for abstinence from alcohol. Hudson said the building was in a ‘degraded state’ and considered the whole place ‘no longer recognisable as the hamlet described in Our Village.’
The garden behind the cottage, where Miss Mitford had found much solace for her troubles, had by then been filled with a village institute built of iron and also paid for by William Palmer. An article in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1895 reported that the cottage itself had acquired a new front and ‘modern windows’. The writer described the village as ‘quite the most commonplace collection of country habitations that can well be imagined.’ A little later Thackeray’s daughter, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, visited while preparing a new edition of Our Village. ‘I saw two or three commonplace houses skirting the dusty road,’ she wrote. ‘Except for one memory, Three Mile Cross would seem to be one of the dullest and most uninteresting of country places.’
*
Commonplace still seems an apt adjective for Three Mile Cross, only more so. I cycled there from Reading on a June morning, early enough to witness the daily mass exodus from the housing estates at Three Mile Cross, Spencers Wood, Shinfield and other settlements to the south of Reading: a solid line of cars waiting to get out on to the mighty road junction and disperse to all points of the compass. To reach the bottom of the village, where the old turnpike has been blocked off, I had to lug and push my bike up, over and down a network of footbridges high above the flowing, roaring rivers of traffic. The crescent of land between the M4 slip road and the bypass is disconcertingly rustic; rough meadows grazed by cattle and fringed by trees, with a footpath along one edge.
The retired publican’s tidy square red cottage is long gone; the first dwellings are a cluster of generic ‘executive-style’ detached houses half-hidden behind electronic security gates. Further on some of the cottages featured in Our Village do survive in much-altered form, including the spruce little tenement, the village shop, the Mitfords and the curate’s lodgings, now Wisteria Cottage.
Behind the Mitfords is a clutch of dark maisonettes where the village institute used to stand. Behind the maisonettes is the Church Centre run by the Pentecostal Christian Fellowship, and behind the Church Centre is an L-shaped development of modern semis protected by another set of gates. Beside the church car park is a garage, Montelle Motors (‘Quality by Nature’), with the bowling green behind that. A petrol station occupies the site where Miss Mitford’s collar-maker lived, with a tyre-fitting centre nearby. The carpenter’s house, where three-year-old Lizzie, ‘the plaything and queen of the village’ held court, is a Londis store and post office. Opposite the curate’s lodgings and the wheelwright’s are the allotments, a tiny playground, a patch of grass and a seat, and a parish noticeboard with – at least on the day of my visit – no information at all about Three Mile Cross on it.
The swathe of land including Three Mile Cross and the other villages that has been ceded to the housebuilders by Wokingham Borough Council has been designated, in a prime example of the dead language of planning, a ‘Strategic Development Location’ – otherwise known as ‘the South of M4 SDL’. The shared website set up by the developers to advertise their intentions is entitled Creating Communities. The lesson of the story of Three Mile Cross – which was told because a woman born to write with a father born to spend happened to end up there – is that communities cannot be created. They grow, of their own accord, in their own way. But they can be destroyed, very easily.
21
MY VILLAGE
Sonning Common, Oxfordshire
The only remarkable thing about the village where I have lived for the past twenty years is how deeply unremarkable it is. If there is a village in England that is more lacking in distinction than Sonning Common, I would very much like to visit it.
The list of attributes it does not have is impressive in its way. There are no buildings in it with any reasonable claim to architectural merit or historic interest. There are no authentically ancient dwellings – one house of Tudor origin, much altered, is not really in the village at all. There is no village green. The church, 1960s functional, is tucked away next to a car-repair workshop. There is a pond, but it – like the Tudor manor – is on the edge of the settlement, and anyway there are many prettier village ponds elsewhere. There is no cricket ground, picturesque or otherwise.
In short, there is nothing in Sonning Common worth a detour to look at. Nor has anyone with any claim to public attention ever lived there or had anything to with the place. No event of any significance has even a tenuous
connection with it. The county histories of Berkshire and Oxfordshire – it has been passed from one to the other – are silent about it. It is most unusual in having no past extending further back than a century or so; and even the history it has is so lacking in interest that it hardly qualifies as such. I have heard tell that there was once a Sonning Common History Society. If so, it expired because – having exhaustively picked over every trivial incident in a meagre store – there was nothing more for it to do.
Wood Lane, Sonning Common – my road between the wars
Even a hundred years ago, which is roughly when the house I now live in was built, Sonning Common was not really a village in any meaningful sense. A hundred years before that it was no more than an expanse of rough grazing, scrubland, furze, gorse, bracken and woodland, designated as part of the common land assigned to the Thameside village of Sonning, three miles away to the south, but actually an unclaimed tract of wilderness where a handful of poor families had staked out smallholdings, built basic habitations and were eking out survival livings, not bothered by landowners and unnoticed by the outside world. The decent agricultural land in the area was allotted under an Enclosure Act of 1816 to the usual alliance of gentry and made-good farmers. But the part where Sonning Common now stands was not included.
By the end of the nineteenth century there were four significant farms on the periphery of the fledgling settlement: Bishopswood to the north, and Blounts Court, Reddish Manor and Blackmore to the east and south-east. These and the surviving smallholdings sustained a scattering of cottages along Hog Lane (now Woodlands Road) and Wood Lane (on which my house stands). There was a choice between four public houses in the area – all of which are still going today, although not always in quite the same place – but only one, the Hare and Hounds, was actually located in the village itself.
The building of new houses along the through roads got going in earnest from 1902 onwards. In 1907 Sonning Common was sufficiently noticeable to warrant an entry in Kelly’s Directory. Six years later it acquired its school. By then it was spreading in all directions, but it was not until 1952 that it became significant enough to be detached from the parish of Eye and Dunsden and be designated a parish in its own right. By then there was a population of 1450 which rose steadily through the 1960s and 1970s before gradually flattening out. It is currently around 3800, making Sonning Common one of the biggest villages in south Oxfordshire.
Roughly speaking the settlement as currently constituted is in the shape of a wedge aligned north-west to south-east, with the narrow end towards Reading. It is framed between two roads that come together at the Reading end: Peppard Road, which heads north towards Peppard and Nettlebed; and Kennylands Road, which runs along the western flank before changing into Reade’s Lane and eventually petering out in the hamlet of Gallowstree Common.
Sunk into a dip at the narrow end of the wedge is a small development of modern detached houses, with some older dwellings further north. There is then a large gap in the settlement made up of an open stretch of grassland known as the Millennium Green, which was given to the village by its most devoted benefactor, a great lady called Isabella Bonham-Carter (of the great and high-minded Liberal dynasty), who was determined that it should not fall into the hands of developers.
Most of Sonning Common is laid out over the broader section of the wedge, between the Millennium Green in the south and, to the north, an ancient wood, Old Copse, with the fields of Bishopswood Farm to the west. The most pleasant parts are the earliest, which followed the plotland model of development: detached and semi-detached houses fronting the roads but set back behind modest front gardens, with much bigger and generally well-wooded gardens at the back. There is nothing remotely distinguished about any of the architecture, but there is a diversity in the styles and materials which gives the street scene a certain charm. In contrast the estates that came later – from the 1960s onwards – are as bland and generic and uninteresting as they are everywhere else; perfectly pleasant to live in, for sure, but without any aspiration towards character or individuality.
But at least the accretions of modern housing have not – in my view anyway – been allowed to overwhelm Sonning Common. Not yet. They are boring to look at, but have not significantly affected the overall character of the place. ‘Pleasant’ is the adjective that comes most readily to mind, followed by ‘handy’. These are not exciting terms but then my life is not very exciting either.
The village pleases me because it suits me. It takes me ten minutes to walk from my house into woodland or open fields; three minutes on my bike to be in a country lane. The countryside is not in the least spectacular – just an unfolding of fields and copses and bigger woods cut across by foot-paths and bridle paths and windy, hedged lanes. Much of it is included in the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but ours is not the Chilterns of steep escarpments and hidden valleys and absurdly cute little villages of ancient brick-and-flint cottages. Our landscape rolls gently and unassumingly in all directions. What is important to us is that there is enough of it to give our village the feel of being genuinely rural – even though the tentacles of the urban octopus that is Reading are just visible over the furrows of the fields and around the edges of the woods.
For a village, Sonning Common is unusually blessed with amenities. It has a secondary school and a primary school, a flourishing health centre and dental surgery, and a village hall which – although too small – is in constant use with choir, Monday market, yoga, Zumba, Pilates, dance classes and the rest of it. There are pubs, an Indian restaurant, a Chinese takeaway, a fish-and-chip shop, a sandwich shop. There is an excellent small Co-op supermarket, a more than excellent butcher, an incomparable hardware store and several other useful shops. There are two car-repair workshops, a petrol station, a car showroom and a small, classy garden centre.
The village has its troublemakers, but the youth club helps contain the menace. It is full of do-gooders of the best kind. Some get together to plant up and weed the village flowerbeds, some to take the old folk shopping, some to run the Guides and Cubs and the library. I will not itemise everything that goes on because to do so would be extremely tedious, as well as invidious to those I failed to mention. Suffice to say that since I came to live here – quite by chance – I have never regretted it.
*
It was just good luck, at a low point in my life. After divorce and its attendant wretchedness and impoverishment, I inherited some money, just enough to put down the deposit on a house of my own. The first I looked at in my price bracket was a 1930s semi on a lane leading west out of Sonning Common to its neighbouring village, Kidmore End. I knew nothing about the place until I went to live there.
At that time I made no effort to involve myself in what was going on in the village. I was commuting into London from Reading railway station for work. Periodically I had three children on my hands and was struggling to discover how to try to tend to their needs. I had an elderly mother living a few miles away in Henley and requiring a certain amount of attention. In addition, my house was right on the edge of the village, so its life went on largely unnoticed by me.
I got married again and we moved to a house in the centre – insofar as Sonning Common can be said to have a centre – across from the village hall. We had children, two girls. We began to get to know some other parents through the normal channels: National Childbirth Trust classes (I didn’t go), nursery, pre-school. By then I had stopped commuting to London and was at home much of the time, working on one book or another. I began to pay more attention to what was going on in front of me. I went to the newsagent next to the village hall every morning to get my newspaper. I bought meat at the butcher’s and other stuff at Somerfield (later the Co-op). I banked at the NatWest next to the garage. I recognised people who recognised me and said good morning to them, even if I didn’t know their names. The ease of familiarity began to settle on me, a feeling of home, which I had not experienced for a time.
Scho
ol opened new pathways. My wife continued to work in London, leaving me to a good deal of hanging around in the playground. I was significantly older than most of the other parents there, who were mostly mums anyway, but I used to chat to one or two of the regular dads and in time to some of the mums as well. Our elder daughter had a particular friend who was often picked up by her grandmother, who is a few years my senior, and we naturally got to exchanging news and views. She was – still is – an essential cog in the running of village affairs: founder and organising genius of the Village Gardeners, fundraiser, member of this committee and that, proofreader for the village magazine, doughty campaigner against those who would let their dogs shit on the pavements and other social criminals, scourge of litter bugs – the list is endless.
At that time she had recently joined the parish council. She needed allies, she said. Would I . . .?
Ah, the parish council! That fusty, musty, cobwebby, infinitely middle-class, absurdly outdated village institution; that puffing, gasping generator of futile hot air; that laughable talking-shop refuge for bores and cranks and busybodies and ineffectual spinster do-gooders. As a young and appropriately jaundiced local newspaper reporter I had stretched, yawned, fiddled, doodled, dozed and stared at the ceiling through countless parish council meetings, marvelling at the tedium they engendered, marvelling that educated human beings should choose to waste their precious spare time on such mind-boggling trivia. Litter collection! Dog fouling! Street lighting! Repairing the village clock! Grass cutting! Yobboes trashing the playground! Potholes!
Of course I said yes. I am one of those who always says yes, always sticks his hand up when volunteers are sought for some dull, time-consuming chore. In this case I was already being pricked by my conscience into thinking that I needed to contribute in some way, to ‘get involved’; plus my daughter’s friend’s grandmother is a difficult person to refuse. Almost before I realised it, I had been co-opted on to the council.