Valerie Hill: End of a way of life

Apr 18 2008 by Valerie Hill, Liverpool Daily Post

IF THE answer lies in the soil, what’s the question? Well, one that is worth asking is what is happening to community life in the countryside?

Indeed, if like many people you dream of escaping there from the urban hurly-burly, it could be just too late unless you really want total rural isolation.

The disappearance of post offices – a scandal I’ve previously referred to here – is but one of the key amenities that village and rural areas have lost. Unbelievably, in just four years, half of all such neighbourhoods have also suffered the shut-down of surgeries and shops and schools.

The finest landscape in the world is improved by a good alehouse in the foreground, said the great sage Dr Samuel Johnson.

Fast forward a couple of centuries and you can’t drown your sorrows in a cheerful old country inn. Four pubs go out of business every day in Britain. The countryside is far from being a Constable painting, immobilised in time.

Not that rural deprivation is anything new. The Georgian priest and wit, Rev Sydney Smith, complained more than 200 years ago that his Yorkshire parsonage “was so far out of the way that it was actually 12 miles from a lemon.”

Today, what we regard as basic services are heading into oblivion “at their fastest rate ever”, according to a report from Oxford University which condemns this as “the slow death of community life”.

This news comes after Stuart Brown, PM Gordon Brown’s “rural advocate” warned that poorer country people “form a forgotten city of disadvantage”.

This rural population is already facing housing shortages and has little chance of a good education. Hardly the pastoral idyll so many of us hanker after.

Some 45% of English neighbourhoods – 14,493 out of 32,439 – have become more “geographically deprived” since the last such study was conducted in 2004.

Thankfully, it’s not all bad news. The residents of one village are kicking the supermarket habit and growing their own meat and not two, but 45 vegetable types.

If this sounds rather like the antics of Tom and Barbara Good in the 1970s hit comedy The Good Life, then you’d be right. In fact, the 405 villagers of Martin, Hampshire, enjoy the comparison and like the fictional Goods proved their critics wrong four years after starting the scheme.

Volunteers and paid staff sow, reap and husband chickens, pigs, lambs, honey, garlic, onions, chillis and green vegetables on plots around the village.

Each Saturday morning, the produce is sold and every year more variety is added. The Future Farms scheme costs participants a £2 annual fee, but anyone can buy the goods.

Nick Snelgar, who conceived the idea, says that the project was gradually “weaning” people off supermarket food.

“I like to think of it as a large allotment in which there are lots of Barbaras and Toms working away.

“There are also Margos, but everyone can get involved because we sell the goods, do the accounts and market the food to the village.”

Not everyone “gets” the countryside. WH Auden complained that “five minutes on even the nicest mountain is long enough”, while Oscar Wilde, (perhaps while camping) squealed that “grass is hard and lumpy and damp and full of dreadful black insects.”

Remember one of the classic lines from Yes, Minister when Sir Humphrey Appleby explained: “It’s only the urban middle class who worry about the preservation of the countryside because they don’t have to live in it”.

My own favourite is Kingsley Amis’s moan that he could “never understand why anyone agreed to go on being rustic after about 1400”.

Having been a town girl born and bred, I was of Kingsley’s opinion and wasn’t entirely at ease when we moved to the countryside just after getting married.

It didn’t last as careers and family carried us back into urban living. Now I’d love to go back to a small village with high street shops where people get to know you.

For many of us, to live in the beauty and space of rural Britain remains an ambition that we’d love to fulfil. During the last war, the Government shamelessly played on evoking a rural England where there’ll always be a country lane, to create a glowing image of a country worth fighting to the death for.

It’s a crying shame that the countryside’s quality of life is being constantly depleted as we sink into a nation of endless suburbs where nobody can walk to a shop, pub or church (if any survive).

And that’s for those of us who merely dream of returning to a small, rural acreage. It’s already a depressing reality that’s getting swiftly worse for those that live there.