“It’s every bit as bad as Hitler”, we declare rather more loudly, as we learn that the very fruit from our own gooseberry bushes is to be turned into jam, not by ourselves, but by the Women’s Institute. And they don’t possess our grandmothers’ unfailing recipe.
Again, “how can anyone expect ten self-respecting Buff Orpingtons to produce any eggs at all when they are fed on nothing but the scraps from a rationed household?’’
Well, we are ready to obey orders to “win the war”, but we do want to live our own lives afterwards, and the word “planning” begins to send cold shivers down our spines. It is true that nineteenth century laisser-faire doctrines produced economic, social and architectural confusion; but the twentieth century legislation has been by townsmen for townsmen, leaving the poor countryman to fit himself in where he can. Perhaps after the war we shall find our one chance to arrest the landslide, but we must insist on taking our share in creating our own conditions.
By far the greater part of the soil of England is still agricultural, and if the greater part of its population has become urban, we are not therefore obliged to force the broad country acres through the slim needle’s eye which fits the thread of city streets. Only country people know how much (or rather how little) legislation is needed to revive and preserve the attraction which village life has always held for the village freeman.
Consider the pigsty. Its acreage is small. Its importance is great. In my childhood every labourer possessed one, and on a Sunday morning the most familiar sight in a village street was the back of a man in shirtsleeves with probably three or four small boys beside him. They were leaning over the wall of a pigsty, poking the pigs with their sticks. These pigs were of immense interest to the family, and were a great topic of conversation between neighbours. They also consumed the kitchen waste, which is often a real problem in small villages. They converted this waste into bacon for the family, and nowadays they might have gone far towards making country places self-supporting. Pigsties might have been a main bulwark against the U-boat.
What, then, has happened to the pigsty? It was swept away by the new broom of by-laws created for towns, forbidding the keeping of pigs within sixty feet or so of a dwelling-house.
The pigsty is a symbol. It doubtless appears very small to an eye accustomed to those grand government offices in Whitehall, but it was a big thing to its owner. When it went, life became duller, as it moved another step away from Nature. The farm labourer lost his daily and most absorbing occupation, and he was offered in exchange a possible weekly cinema in a town several miles off, which he could only visit on those evenings when the motor-bus passed near his house. An occasional outing, however entertaining, can never make up for the emptiness of that pigsty, which was a perpetual occupation.
And no one with a first-hand knowledge of the two could possibly prefer a screen decked with film-stars to a sty full of little pigs.
To begin with, like other stars, they are completely remote. You cannot poke them with a stick, or feed them with the crumbs which fall from your table. Then, unlike the pigs, they give you absolutely no nourishment at all, and they don’t address a word to you, or even give you an occasional grunt. So remote are they, that they are not actually there at all, and you are only looking at composite portraits made by skilled photographers. When these portraits speak, they converse one with another in a Hollywood accent which cannot be understood by the natives of English hamlets. Consequently the countryman in a cinema stares solemnly at scenes which have no power to draw out his mind: on the contrary they close it. He has no idea what it is all about; but there he sits, because he has nowhere else to go till the bus starts for home. As the mystic, absorbed in the presence of God, is lost to the events of the world outside, so, for the uneducated film fan, it is not necessary to know what the film is about. He is content to be rapt in the atmosphere of the god he has come to worship. And what a god!
This is no exaggeration. I once saw a Spy play with a party of young people; and, like my fellow yokels, I was baffled by the jargon of the American underworld in which it was played. From first to last I was completely at a loss.
As we came out, I heard my companions declare that they had never seen a better film, and with some embarrassment I confessed that I had not grasped which was the honest man and which was the spy. No one knew. They were all as much in the dark as I was, but this had not disturbed them. They had had a blissful evening, without vexing their minds to learn what they were looking at.
Present-day education of country children has not aimed at creating grown-up people who will make a good thing of country life: it is instead producing a generation of hungry and disinherited hangers-on to the edge of the nearest town.
Grace Stuart says, in her Achievement of Personality, that neurotics are those who have lost “ the power to share an ordinary communal life”, and they will never be at peace until they share it once more, “for that is the true end of the will”. Rural education to-day may well create neurotics. From the age of eleven, children are taken from their villages to share in a more populous life outside. Their centre of gravity is disturbed. Instead of living their own village communal life they become outsiders, trying to join in another one, to which they do not belong, where they feel they are not wanted, and where they are never quite at home.
“This feeling of inferiority”, says Miss Stuart, “becomes crystallised as a great hunger for pleasure.… People with satisfying lives do not rush desperately and continually to the pictures. Nor do they keep themselves glued to their chairs at home by some superhuman effort of will. They quite simply do not need to go, and so they do not want to go.’’
Village life has been growing unsatisfying, and this at a time when, more than ever before, the nation has tried to assure to the young of all classes the birthright which is their due. The cost of national education has increased to an unbelievable extent; but we cannot be getting full value for that money if this education produces an unsatisfied generation.
We missed our opportunity in this country a few years ago when we were considering raising the school attendance age to fifteen years. We did not profit by the experience of other people and so made one rule for town and country. In several of the American states, town children after fourteen only go to school on 120 days in the year, and country children on 80 days; but it is obligatory that they have a regular occupation on other days. It is recognised that from this time onwards they are embarking on the career which will interest and occupy them throughout their lives. Alongside of this occupation it is compulsory that they should attend a continuation school for 400 hours in the year. In California this goes on until the young person is eighteen years of age.
In Switzerland the country children have a very happy time. From the age of twelve and upwards they only go to school in winter, and spend the summer on their parents’ mountain farms, enjoying the life, benefiting by the open air, and practising the farm crafts which will ultimately give them their livelihood.
In parts of Denmark every child attends school for six days a week between November and May, while in the summer the elder children have only to attend once a week and the younger ones on two or four days. All the compulsory hours are worked off in the winter, and the summer lessons are extra ones. It has been found that this system is not only very popular with the pupils, but it produces scholars who can beat all town children in their final exams.
It will be seen that these systems must give considerable freedom to local education committees, and that is what we want here. Our county authorities should be allowed to devise schemes which adapt themselves to country life in the same way as do the educational systems in the countries I have described. Boys in our senior schools learn carpentering, but this is a very different thing from working with the village carpenter. It is merely playing. And no boy can learn in the school anything of the engineering crafts which form so large a part of modern farm life. Nor can he learn the actual work on a farm. There se
ems to be an idea afloat that to share in the work of grown-up persons means too hard a life for children: we have not forgotten the child-slaves of the early industrial age. But the open-air country work which I am advocating could be carried out under educational supervision; and no one who has seen the carter’s little boys riding home with him after work can think for a moment that those children would have a better life if they spent their after-school hours staring in the shop-windows of a country town.
We have built our Central Schools and they must be used; but they should not wean the children away from the life of their own villages. A Central School may be located in a village, but it is not the village of the majority of the pupils. If we could evolve here something nearer the foreign system, our children could get the advantage of advanced book-learning in senior schools, but they could return to their own villages to work on the farm, or in the carpenter’s shop or the blacksmith ‘s forge. And every child prefers something real to do rather than to play at a trade in a class-lesson in school.
The first essential for reviving the English love for village life is to give back to the children their bygone property in it. Country life used to be the children’s freehold. Modern education gives them in exchange a “lease and lend bill”.
If something of this kind was made the aim of rural education we might help to restore to farm people the many skilled industries which they used to practise, and which made their lives infinitely more interesting than the life of a factory hand. We have not only lost our pigs, but we are losing the craft of dairying. No one may now make cheese or butter without complying with such conditions as would make the boldest farm worker quail. Yet, after the war, must it be for ever impossible to revive such a paradisal existence as that which Wordsworth once described?
“Towards the head of these Dales was found a perfect republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists, among whom the plough of each man was confined to the maintenance of his own family, or to the occasional accommodation of his neighbour. Two or three cows furnished each family with milk and cheese. The chapel was the only edifice that presided over these dwellings, the supreme head of this pure commonwealth; the members of which existed in the midst of a powerful empire like an ideal society or an organised community, whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it.’’
It is to be hoped that the rural parts of England will not have to face the tremendous rebuilding problem with which the towns must grapple after the war. Yet some rebuilding there must be. Here and there farms and villages have already been devastated, and village churches have become ruins. But, apart from this, the process of regular rebuilding which always continues throughout the country has been checked. This happened in the last war, and to most people it was a great surprise to find what an immense amount of way had to be made up after four years during which the building trade was otherwise occupied. In 1939 we had not yet caught up with all our arrears and small local planning schemes were still being carried out. We shall have to do this again, and the way we do it will determine for future generations whether the England they grow up into is to be a beautiful country or not. There must be planning of some kind, and such planning should be on broad regional lines. It cannot be left to chance. Yet we don’t want uniformity, which must ever be alien to the country spirit. I myself can conceive of only one unchanging rule. Local materials must be used. Then the country cottages of the future will belong to the landscape. They will grow as naturally into their surroundings as do the great prehistoric earthworks, which now seem part of the natural formation of the land in which they lie. It is only within the last fifty years that this rule has been broken. The thatched mud walls of Wiltshire, the stone-built Cotswold farms, the rough stone cottages of northern England and the Scottish lowlands, which are sometimes whitewashed and sometimes painted in the yellows and browns of the lichens which grow upon them—the timbered and half-timbered houses of the Welsh border; the materials for all of these were ready to the builders’ hands, in days before modern transport had revolutionised the roads. If these beautiful materials were still utilised to build cottages, their interiors might nevertheless conform to modern sanitary conditions. In spite of its internal emphasis on good sanitation, it is not essential for the exterior of a council house to look like a water-closet.
But we shall have more to do than merely build pretty country cottages for farm workers. There must first, as I said, be regional planning on a large scale. One lesson has been cruelly bombed into us: our cities are too big. Such formless conglomerations of houses as exist in the Midlands, or have even been casually allowed to straggle round the beautiful city of London, with its group of surrounding villages, are not only uncivilised, but unsafe. They cannot be protected in modern warfare.
Heaven forbid, however, that we should re-plan our country as if we expected only a repetition of what we are now going through. My point is that these great cities are in themselves like an east wind. They are neither good for man nor beast. They should not be tolerated either in war or in peace. No one seeing for the first time one of our large industrial towns would believe that there was ever a day when the words “ urban” and “urbane” were almost interchangeable; and when a “city” naturally indicated civilisation. There are districts in some of our great towns where such ideas as civilisation or urbanity are simply farcical.
The elephantine size of our cities has demonstrated that we are after all a race of pygmies which has created, and cannot cope with, a jungle of Frankenstein monsters compacted of bricks and mortar. The first aim of our re-planning should be to make towns in proportion to our size. Our industries will doubtless be quite ready to scatter themselves more widely, now that modern fuel inventions have made them independent of coalfields. So I hope we shall have a considerable number of moderately sized industrial towns, planned as complete organisms, and not as factories surrounded by cells; planned as Bath was planned, or Little Blandford in Dorset; or as Christopher Wren first planned London after the Great Fire, when his intentions were frustrated by the vested interests of the City Companies, already, even then, for centuries in possession of the field.
Nothing can be more delightful than the small provincial town. These little industrial cities would be pleasant points of focus of the surrounding country. They would have their smokeless factories, and their streets and squares of artisans’ houses; and they would also have their churches, schools, theatres, concert halls and playing fields. They should be frankly towns, not overgrown villages, and their inhabitants would be within easy reach of the “real country” outside.
But in addition to these country towns of the future, we shall, I believe, have to provide for many town evacuees who have discovered the charms of true village life. I know several town schoolboys who declare that, having spent these few years in the country, they will never return to the old life. They want to stick to the land, and if they do, they will bring fresh life to the farms. We have therefore a chance to arrest that townward trend of our population, which has been so disastrous for the health of the nation and so fatal to the farming industry. But we shall have to build good houses in the villages for these new comers; and we must give back their market to the village crafts and industries which are now being strangled by chain-stores. Village life must find again its old pride in itself.
Not long ago, I had a visit from an old-age pensioner, who could not write his name on the form he asked me to sign. He “ made his cross”. We had a good talk, and I found that he was a modern old fellow, who listened to the wireless every day, and said he didn’t know what he should do without it. Then he went on to speak of his boyhood, when he had never seen the sea, never went to London, and only went to the nearest town with his mother two or three times in the year to buy clothes for the family. He described the fetes in the landlord’s park, the cricket matches, the amateur theatricals, the village concerts, the choir festivals and the flower shows. He finished by saying, “ Don’t
you think we was more civilised then than what we be now?’’
I saw what he meant. He remembered a community life, satisfying in itself, and without the inferiority complex which now prevents a village from doing things in its own way, because it hears so often that “they” do everything much better in town.
This snobbish attitude towards the town is no new thing, although my old-age pensioner was intelligent enough to be free from it. It existed in the days of La Fontaine, not to say in the days of Horace. Le Rat de Ville doubtless thought that his Turkey carpet set him several steps higher in the social scale than the Rat des Champs with his buttercups and daisies; but there came a common danger, which sent them both in search of country peace. Does not this recall memories of past months?
Here is the Fable:
THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE
One fine evening the Town Mouse
Asked the Country Mouse to dine
In a fashionable house
Off remains of galantine.
On a handsome Turkey rug
The repast, was neatly laid—
Never anything so snug
As the time our cronies had!
The regale was choice and rich
Everything correctly done;
But alas, there came a hitch
In the middle of the fun.
From the hall a sound was heard—
Was it an approaching foot?
Straight the host had disappeared:
His companion followed suit.
But away the footstep dies:
Back the timorous couple steal:
“All is well”, the Cockney cries
“Come and finish up the meal.’’
“Nay, I’ve done”, the Bumpkin said:
“Dine with me to-morrow night!
Country Moods and Tenses Page 12