Читать книгу True Blue: Strange Tales from a Tory Nation - David Matthews - Страница 7

‘Rural England is the real England, unspoilt by factories, financiers, tourists and hustle,’ wrote A. G. Macdonell in England, Their England, his classic 1933 novel. The book concerns the exploits of a young Scotsman, Donald Cameron, as he tours southern England and some of its more conservative byways. The most famous episode in the book is a blow-by-blow account of a cricket match between a gang of First World War invalids from London and a team from the village of Fordenden, still hailed by many critics as one of the greatest pieces of sports writing. The episode was, though, anything but fictional. Literary historians have established beyond doubt that the match Macdonell describes actually took place in the village of Rodmell, in Sussex, not far from Brighton.

‘The entire scene was perfect to the last detail,’ Macdonell wrote of his visit to Rodmell. ‘There stood the Vicar, beaming absent-mindedly at everyone. There was the forge, with the blacksmith, his hammer discarded, tightening his snake-buckled belt ready for the fray.’ According to Macdonell, the locals in this idyllic hamlet sat around the cricket pitch with tankards of ale while ‘blue and green dragonflies played at hide and seek among the thistledown and a pair of swans flew overhead. An ancient man leaned upon a scythe, his sharpening-stone sticking out of his velveteen waistcoat. A magpie flapped lazily across the meadows. The parson shook hands with the squire. Doves cooed. The haze flickered. The world stood still.’

After my experiences in Richmond the world of Conservatism just appeared a bit sad to me. The party and its followers hardly seemed worth writing about, except, perhaps, as an exercise in gloating. A year passed, during which I saw off a near fatal illness, which got worse before it got better, and which had made my life such a misery during the 2005 election campaign.

Meanwhile, David had been off on another project, investigating the world of Sierra Leonean war criminals and, on the side, writing about the lifestyles of gangsters and the super-rich for glossy magazines. After the 2005 election Tony Blair’s government had become so unpopular that the Conservatives, still unpopular themselves, started to creep up on the inside of Labour in the polls, giving them an outside chance of once again forming the government of the country. Michael Howard stepped down from the Conservative leadership and handed over to the much younger, more media-friendly figure of David Cameron. Cameron began to work his magic, at least at the level of national politics and television, and the Conservatives looked like coming to life once again as a force in their own right. What interested us was whether things were changing at the grass roots of the party and, more broadly, in the attitudes of ‘small c’ conservatives who might support the party.

A second stage of our Tory journey thus began, and it was to take place against the backdrop of the growing unpopularity of the Labour government and incessant talk in the national media of a rightward shift of the political tectonic plates of the country. We had entered what was for us the alien world of Conservatism through the front door of my local Conservative Association office. We now planned to re-enter by the back door of day-to-day life among conservative people. Our itinerary was to include gatherings of the Women’s Institute, bank holiday pilgrimages to Winston Churchill’s house, agricultural shows and village fetes, polo matches and summer garden parties, rubber chicken circuit fund-raising dinners, and immersion in a ‘Nimby’ campaign in Oxfordshire. This, we felt, was the ‘real’ or ‘small c’ conservative England on which the fortunes of the Conservative Party ultimately rested. Rodmell, the focus of Macdonell’s journey seventy-five years ago, seemed the best place to start – especially as we’d learned that the village still had a cricket team. So we went to the village to watch Rodmell play a one-off invitation match against a local Sussex league side called, of all things, Blackboys.

In 1933, Macdonell described Rodmell as a village of red-roofed cottages gathered around the flint tower of the church, set in meadows bursting with wild flowers and buzzing with bees. It was still a lot like that, at least along the tree-lined lane leading away from the main road and down towards the church, school, graveyard and cricket pavilion. Here, cottages were of the picture postcard variety with clouds of roses around the door and riots of wisteria and other climbing plants. One cottage had a perfect thatched roof, set off by crisply painted white wooden clapperboard exterior walls. Others were of ancient red brick set in wooden frames.

The 1939 census, taken on the eve of war, six years after Macdonell’s novel was published, put the population of Rodmell at 359 people living in 101 occupied properties. At that time the village had two farms, a shop, a post office, a petrol forecourt, a blacksmith’s forge and a school as well as the pub. ‘Today,’ said a booklet produced recently by a local historian, Rodmell was a ‘commuter/retirement village with a similar population but with little employment in agriculture’. The independent farms had hit financial ruin and had been merged. The resulting larger farm had, in 1999, moved to a complex of industrial-looking modern ‘crinkly tin’ sheds outside the village. The shop and post office had closed long ago. The blacksmith’s forge was still there, but now, from what we could see, it was essentially a car body repair shop.

The village primary school had almost closed at one point, but was now thriving and was highly rated in the school performance league tables. This, we gathered, was because kids were bussed in by thrusting middle-class parents from urban areas a few miles away in Brighton. Few of the children in the school were connected with Rodmell, the chairman of the parish council told us, since so many of today’s inhabitants of the village were well beyond the age where they were bringing up young children. The younger executive-commuter types living in the village tended to send their children to one of the many private schools to be found in the area.

The village notice board was festooned with leaflets giving out information of use mainly to older people with a lot of time on their hands: watercolour painting exhibitions and classes; classical music recitals in churches in surrounding villages; a forthcoming midweek evening concert in the pub to be given by a folk combo called the Wayfarers – who were apparently an ancient Peter, Paul and Mary tribute band.

Inside the renovated cottages, instead of going to church and getting ready to play cricket, people were watching Sky Sports or playing computer games on giant plasma TV screens. Some of the cottages had garages built on the side, tastefully done to match the original brick, timber and tile work, their weathered oak-style doors left open – ostentatiously, we thought – to display a variety of gleaming Porsches, BMWs and top-of-the-range Audis. It was unlikely that the owners of these luxurious cottages would be seen dead consuming scampi in a basket in the village pub, or in the church, which looked underused and served, mainly, it seemed, as a tourist attraction and a local monument.

Many of the first wave of incomers to the village had been hippies fleeing urban areas, and semi-bohemian and intellectual people connected with the University of Sussex, which had expanded in the 1970s. In Rodmell a process had occurred similar to the ‘gentrification’ of the inner cities – squatters and bohemians had made once-dilapidated areas like Islington and Spitalfields trendy and well-off professionals had followed later.

One of the cottages we visited was home to an arty type who had opened it to the public, advertising the fact with a newsagent-type A-frame sign erected next to a single brightly coloured floral deckchair. The deckchair constituted an al fresco café at which ‘Sussex cream teas’ were available for £3.50. The deckchair was not provided for people to sit in – it was being used as a sign in the lane, advertising the cream tea deal, a neat combination of surrealism and hard-nosed commercial nous. This open-door policy meant that we were able to get inside one of the Rodmell cottages and thus reveal the truth about what goes on behind the figurative net curtains of rural Sussex.

We entered, stooping to get through a doorframe originally designed for medieval peasants bent double by a lifetime of toil in the fields. The building was a low-ceilinged former hovel, now gentrified, consisting of a small front room, a small back room, an upstairs and an outside toilet. Discreet handwritten signs on lilac notelets with tiny drawings of flowers said PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH, forbidding the unknowing punter from laying a finger on the sort of items that were standard fare at any car boot sale. As soon as we crossed the threshold there was, I felt, a wrinkling of the nose, a sign of distaste at our presence. ‘Can I help you?’ said the owner of the nose, a self-styled water-colour-artist-cum-instructor, willow-thin and probably about fifty, as she emerged from the back room with a look of alarm in her eyes.

An unconvincing dialogue ensued about a furry portrait of Virginia Woolf, made from bits of old carpet sewn together and stuck in a wooden frame (£350). We could feel the owner’s eyes drilling into us as we surveyed the artfully arranged wares, principally examples of pink-tinged wholesome chintzy niceness. On offer were handmade silk pincushions, homemade paintings of flowers, gingham tablecloths, an Isle of Wight tea towel and scented candles set in tiny flowery china teacups.

Our hostess was suspicious of us and understandably so. David, tricked out in combat pants, dark glasses and a baseball cap, was the walking, attention-grabbing essence of the inner-city criminal (as the Richmond Tories used to put it). In the rural world-view there was just no credible explanation as to why a black man would travel to a village in Sussex to inspect a £70 pokerwork representation of a windmill, or peer through wraparound shades at a purple silk tasselled macramé plant potholder on sale at the bargain price of £22.50. David later said that the cottage owner might well have taken us for a gay couple up from Brighton for the day.

It was just a short walk from the artist’s cottage to the field where the village cricket pitch lay. Set into the hedge surrounding the field was a concrete machine-gun bunker dating from the Second World War. Puzzlingly, the field was relatively flat. The pitch described by Macdonell had a slope on one side with such an incline that, as he described it, when the bowler started his run-up he could not be seen by the batsman at the crease. In Macdonell’s day the bowler would only come into vision, like a distant ship appearing above the horizon, as he puffed up the incline ready to deliver the ball. The pitch also seemed far smaller than that described in 1933, and further away from the pub, which, in the twenty-first century, was not adjacent to the pitch but on the other side of the village.

Rodmell Cricket Club had erected a brick-built pavilion – complete with flagpole – in the 1980s. There was an arrangement with the local council whereby the council mowed the field and local schoolchildren could use it for sports days and the like. On the day we visited, the wives and children of the Rodmell cricket team had gathered in the pavilion to make cucumber sandwiches. The consensus among them was that the England, Their England cricket match had taken place in a field now known as Cricketing Bottom on the other side of the village. The likely site of Macdonell’s cricket match now had the ‘crinkly tin’ farm buildings on top of it, erected to replace the old ones in the centre of the village, which had been bought by developers and turned into luxury homes.

The irony hardly needed to be pointed out. The Rodmell of England, Their England had been ‘unspoilt by factories, financiers, tourists and hustle’. Now a charmless, factory-like farm building covered the cricket pitch where dragonflies had once buzzed about the players. The village was now a popular place for financiers to live. Indeed, the farmer’s house and barn was now occupied, we discovered, by the finance director of a very large energy company. In summer, the village was flooded with tourists, many of them visiting Virginia Woolf’s house (she lived in Rodmell from 1919 until her death in 1941). And there was plenty of hustle, too – from the hippy capitalism of the cottage artists to the ersatz country fayre of the village pub and the rampant hype of local estate agents.

The new cricket pitch was in a more exposed position than the old one, but it did have a view across the valley. That was, however, spoilt by the sight of a gigantic white chalk scar on the other side of the valley at Beddingham. This marked the location of an enormous landfill site used to dispose of rubbish from Lewes and most of Eastbourne. Initially, and unbeknown to the people of Rodmell and the surrounding villages, the site had also been used to store radioactive waste from Cumbria, a profitable business and, at least according to a spokesman for the company which operates the site, a safe one. ‘The waste is so low-level we can transfer it on the back of an ordinary lorry. It is handled in the same way as asbestos sheets. It’s put in a pre-excavated pit.’ Safe or not, it still sounded a bit unnerving and not very A. G. Macdonell.

When we visited, the Rodmell village cricket team was, not surprisingly, a reflection of the village’s new population of commuters and people who worked in finance. They were not very serious about cricket, and did not seem to know each other particularly well. The team included several accountants, an ‘estimator’ (whatever that meant), the aforementioned finance director of the multinational energy company and the director of a primary healthcare trust. They tended to commute to big city offices during the week, and play out the role of stout yeoman or country squire at the weekend. One of the team told us, ‘I never played cricket until I moved here – it is just that this field is here so we think “why not use it”?’

The locals were kitted out in pristine old-fashioned cricket whites, caps and cable-knit jumpers of the sort that had not been worn by anyone serious about cricket for decades. In contrast Blackboys, who were regular players, wore modern Nike-style gear, with their names emblazoned on their backs, like today’s professional cricketers. It had taken the Rodmell team a long, long time to find a date in their diaries when they were able to put a team together, perming a squad of a dozen or so from the male population of approximately two hundred.

Rodmell versus Blackboys turned out to be a ridiculously one-sided match. Blackboys batted first, and within minutes their batsmen were confidently dispatching the ball to the boundary. Rodmell’s opening bowlers were not bad, and looked as if they had played plenty of cricket long ago at school. But when the pair had each bowled their maximum number of overs, several unskilled pie-chuckers had to take their turn bowling. Further diminishing Rodmell’s chances of winning the match, their fielders were hopeless. Later, the consensus was that they had dropped a total of nine catches, and also received injuries ranging from getting hit in the face by the ball to tripping over.

As Blackboys’ innings went on, their batsmen were soon whacking the ball clear out of the ground at will. They played their shots with increasing power and verve and eventually the ball rocketed straight at the spectators in the pavilion, missing David and me – and also the skull of a six-year-old child – by millimetres before smashing a neat cricket-ball-sized hole in the glass of the pavilion door. After a couple of hours, Blackboys were 196–1. Had this been a five-day test match they would have been on track to declare at 3,000-odd runs for, say, eight wickets.

It was a big target, and when Rodmell came out to bat they didn’t look as if they would meet it. In fact, they were bowled out for forty-three. Reactions to the drubbing seemed to vary. Some of the very worst performers were self-effacing and tried to turn it into a joke, but others were clearly irked and there was a very uncricket-like snippy feeling in the air, with the slightly better players exuding resentment towards the passengers and no-hopers. It was not as though Blackboys were up to much either. The Rodmell game was to be their first win of the season and, two months and nine games later, it remained Blackboys’ only win of the season.

The last Conservative Prime Minister John Major is famous for a speech in which he quoted George Orwell on the English love of village life. ‘Fifty years on from now,’ Major had said, the country would still be a place of ‘long shadows on village cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’. By the time we arrived in Rodmell ten of those fifty years had elapsed since Major left the scene. And in Rodmell at least we discovered that his vision had already vanished almost entirely.

According to a plaque on the wall of the twelfth-century church, the last burial in the graveyard at Rodmell had taken place in 1992, the year John Major was elected Prime Minister.

It seemed to us that, however you wanted to define it, there was very little in the way of Conservatism in Rodmell. Farming had been replaced by agribusiness and the village had become part reluctant tourist attraction and part estate agent’s dream – thatched-cottage living on the edge of a city and only half an hour’s drive from Gatwick – a picture, we reckoned, repeated all across the rural (or once rural) south of England. The rosy image people liked to have of the countryside was of a timeless, gentle place of seasonal rituals, home to farmers, craftsmen, vicars and parochial, patriotic yokels. The reality, as it appeared to us, is that it was populated by number crunchers and workers in the ‘knowledge industry’, most of whom had not a local outlook but an international and strongly pan-European one.