Читать книгу Country Fair - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 6

AS ANYONE WHO reads my writings will have noticed over the years, I am addicted to rural history. Not to nostalgia, because we should recognise that, in the countryside as elsewhere, over the last half-century some things have grown better rather than worse. There is no surer shortcut to senility than forever to be lamenting a lost past. Yet it is always pleasing to relate the world we know today to that which our parents and grandparents inhabited. I have been thumbing through the bound volumes of a now-forgotten magazine named Country Fair, which flourished for a time in the 1950s, half a century ago. It holds a special charm for me, because my father created and edited it alongside that great Wiltshire farmer and writer A.G. Street.

Successive issues of Country Fair captured snapshots of a world I can just remember, in which the combine harvester was slowly replacing the binder and thresher; BSA advertised a single-barrel shotgun (‘hitherto for export only’) at £18.2s.11d; and ‘B.B.’ in his shooting column urged the merits of a stuffed cat as a surefire lure for carrion crows. J. Hughes-Parry described how he gaffed a thirty-seven-pound spring salmon for his wife Pat on the Welsh Dee on 26 March, among a host of lesser monsters which fell to his rod that season. Jack Ivester-Lloyd wrote about hunting clothes, telling me something I never knew: ‘The custom observed by many hunts of asking farmers who come out with them to wear black coats and hunting caps came into being for a very good reason. It is done so that others may easily recognise the men over whose land they may be riding and who, therefore, should be treated with special courtesy.’ Arthur Street described, with copious diagrams, the art of setting a course to plough a field.

My mother, Anne Scott-James, wrote deploring the fashion in which old cottages in our villages were being pulled down. Landlords found this cheaper than making repairs, when statutory controls restricted many rents to three or four shillings a week. Mother’s rage was inspired by the demolition of a very old thatched cottage immediately opposite our own. ‘The Whitehall bureaucrats say people must be cleared out of sub-standard properties,’ she wrote, ‘and they declaim violently against “country slums”. They regard a man with money to spend on converting an old cottage with hatred, and talk of “the wrong people” getting homes…As fast as new houses are built in the country, old ones are pulled down. It doesn’t make sense.’

The magazine’s ‘topic of the month’ for July 1951 was that of farm holidays. Agriculture needed a lot of scarce seasonal labour between July and November – ‘It wants twelve to reap what it takes one man to sow.’ For several decades in the early and mid-twentieth century, townsmen were encouraged to take cheap holidays by boarding or camping on a farm. In high summer they paid thirty-five shillings a week for their keep – £1.75 in modern money – and could earn one shilling and sixpence an hour – around 7p – for their labour. By October and November, the rate for a week’s bed and rations on a farm had fallen to a pound, and wages had risen to one shilling and ninepence.

Ralph Wightman, a Dorset farmer who was also a well-known writer of the period, urged the virtues of the farm camper not only to provide a hand, ‘but because his labour holiday will show him the real country. He will see the fields as a workshop instead of a playground. He will go back with a different feeling about our British heritage.’ Would that it was feasible to do the same today, for a new generation of urban dwellers! Elsewhere in Country Fair that summer of 1951, Lady Patricia Ward explained how she rented a Suffolk farmhouse for £60 a year, and persuaded her trustees to release the money to equip and decorate it from top to bottom for £1,190. A village dweller, Evelyn Gibbs, described how mains water was at last being connected to her hamlet, provoking head-shaking among elderly inhabitants about the consequences of this reckless innovation, when main drains were still lacking.

Maurice Burton, the magazine’s resident naturalist, lamented the decline of the dormouse, which he blamed upon the spread of grey squirrels. The famous amateur rider and breeder John Hislop wrote about the charms and horrors of owning a racehorse. Training fees were running at an extravagant seven guineas a week, plus 10 per cent of winnings. A jockey received five guineas for a losing ride and seven for a winner. It cost £100 to enter a horse for the Derby.

Here is some miscellaneous rural information from the same page: did you know that Northamptonshire is the only county of England to have nine others abutting on it? Or that until the late seventeenth century, July was called Jooly? Or that a Leicestershire acre used to be 2,308\\¾ square yards, and a Westmoreland one 6,760 square yards? In Anthony Armstrong’s essay on Sussex, he quotes a disobliging comment on the county by one Dr Burton in 1751: ‘Why is it that the oxen, the swine, women and all other animals are so long-legged in Sussex? May it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much mud?’

Thank God that these days we no longer have to make fuel briquettes out of coal dust and cement to heat the house, as some people did in 1951. I sympathise with the writer who lamented the miseries of driving a tractor in winter when cabs, heated or otherwise, were unheard of. Ploughing a furrow demanded a struggle with the elements almost as taxing as that involved in driving a horse team.

Constance Spry, who wrote a column on home entertaining, offered some tips for keeping food cool in a home without a frig (sic). She suggested hanging a damp cloth in the larder. Major Hugh Pollard contributed a recipe for cooking the harvest rabbit. Hugh, a notably eccentric friend of my father and author of that celebrated work A History of Firearms, was a keen cook in his leisure moments. In his youth after service in the First World War, he had seen action in Ireland as a Black and Tan. More dubious still, he and one of his daughters assisted General Franco’s secret passage from the Canaries to mainland Spain at the outset of that country’s civil war. As a child, I was impressed by the manner in which the Pollard house near Petworth was strewn with exotic weapons, invariably loaded.

Today, I fear, an unamused constabulary would remove Hugh’s Firearms Certificate in about five minutes, though most of the guns he kept about the house were not the kind for which one could have gained legal sanction even in those indulgent times. I was especially keen on his machine-pistols. Come to that, in Country Fair there is a set of photos of our family cottage, showing some of my father’s guns standing unlocked in a rack at the foot of the stairs. My oh my, as Mole might have said, how the world has changed!

Yet some things are exactly the same. Roy Beddington, the angling writer and artist, painted a picture of chalk stream fishing in father’s magazine which remains instantly recognisable to any of us: ‘July is the month of the evening rise,’ he observed. ‘It is no time for the bungler or the over-excited, but a time for circumspection.’ A host of new salmon flies has achieved primacy in our fishing lives since 1951, but the trout patterns which Beddington urged are the old faithfuls we still use today: Pale Wateries, Lunn’s Particulars, Red and Sherry spinners, Blue-Winged Olives, Silver Sedges. ‘It is time to make haste slowly,’ he wrote, ‘when every minute is precious, and every tangle and change of fly must be avoided.’ These are sensations every fisherman still knows intimately, even if other experiences of that era – rationing and National Service, disastrous floods in East Anglia and black-market petrol – are mercifully unknown.

One of Reginald Arkell’s verses decorated the pages of Country Fair that July of 1951:

The young men of the country

They hurry up to town.

In city ways they spend their days,

A-running up and down.

But the old men, the old men

Can plough a furrow straight,

In rain or shine, and still have time

To lean upon a gate.

Here, surely, is the greatest change since the days of father’s old magazine: the pace of life has quickened. One of my family used to assert years ago that I would never be a proper countryman, because I did not make time to hang about and gossip with people across the counter of the village shop, or when passing them in the lanes. Those strictures were just. They apply to many others of a new generation who live in rural places. Even the ploughman whom Arkell celebrated above now has a computerised schedule to meet. We inhabit a far more comfortable rural world than our parents knew, in the days when even the grandest houses were underheated and hot water was a luxury. But our own era is a hastier one. Few people now dare admit to enjoying leisure to lean upon a gate. If they did so, an agent of the Health & Safety Executive would likely leap from behind a bush, pointing out the risk that it might fall on their toes and provoke litigation.