By Max Hastings
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Some viewers have complained about the ‘unrelenting grimness’ of BBC1’s new Sunday night period drama series, which its makers hope will grip the nation in the same fashion as ITV’s Downton Abbey.
The 42-part epic aims to depict the life of a rustic Derbyshire community across the 20th century through the story of one family â€" but without a butler or water closet in sight. This is intended to be the countryside as it really was, with lots of poverty and incest and no toffs.
But I welcome the grittiness of The Village because most TV versions of old England are characterised by soppiness and ignorance.
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Harsh reality: The cast of new BBC drama The Village
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about such issues, while spending some idle hours leafing through copies of a magazine my father created and edited in the Fifties, entitled Country Fair.
Its pages offer a wonderfully vivid picture of the life of old rural communities, both the good bits and the bad. They seem as remote from today’s world as witch-burning and the horse-drawn coach.
But it is still an image that has a powerful draw. Only last week, a survey by The Halifax bank highlighted the attractions of living in England’s top rural areas â€" offering as they do a combination of relative prosperity, good health and even good weather. These values are fiercely protected by communities deeply worried that new planning laws will lead to ‘irreversible damage’ to the countryside by allowing millions of new houses to be built in areas such as the green belt.
Back in the Fifties, rural England was still a place of dormice and red squirrels; of travelling knife-grinders and wooden sign-posts which were things of beauty; of cows with horns and sheaves of corn stooked in harvest fields.
John, played by John Simm in the Village which shows that rural England was a place of incessant toil for extraordinarily meagre rewards
And a place of incessant toil for extraordinarily meagre rewards, which killed many country folk before their rightful time.
It was a very insular world. Such people knew almost nothing of life outside their own tightly knit communities. The novelist Anthony Armstrong wrote about the disbelief of some soldiers in 1915, ‘who had been gathered in by Kitchener, straight from the plough’, upon hearing the French language for the first time. ‘The idea of a completely different tongue with completely different words was incomprehensible to some of them.’
Local traditions achieved extraordinary durability. An old man at one village’s harvest suppers every year sang a song about Queen Elizabeth, the Pope and the King of Spain. One of his audience reflected that it must have been a survival from the 16th century.
As late as the Fifties, many ru ral areas lacked electricity. Farmer’s wife Esther McCracken described how she went round her house each evening lighting the oil lamps, ‘and later conducted the ceremony of handing them out to each family member as they went up to bed’. The ‘night cart’ toured cottages, collecting human waste.
The decision by producers of The Village to avoid the traditional, glossy costume drama version of rural life is an honest one, for they are capturing both the virtue and vice of the old countryside
A country doctor told how, during the terrible agricultural depression of the Thirties, his patients had no money and were often reduced to paying him in bacon, butter or eggs. He treated endless accidental injuries: men gored by bulls; mangled in the local quarry’s stone-crusher; almost blinded by a thorn in the eye while hedging.
Often a horse had to be summoned to pull the doctor’s rickety car out of winter mud and snow on unmetalled roads.
He looked back on his long rural career: ‘One needs a tough constitution, a deep love of human nature, infinite patience, and a heart that can only dwell in the country. What is there in return? The friendship that can only exist between countryfolk.’
They were accustomed to say: ‘I’ll give you a leg up. You may be able to do the same for me one day.’
Religion pla yed a big part in everybody’s lives, not always benign. I am intrigued by a parson’s 1953 account of his predecessor’s regime in the Edwardian era: ‘The rector, who was very rich, travelled the parish in his dog-cart, ordering everybody’s affairs as the squire would not have dared to do. He took no collections, because he preferred to fund the church himself.
He told families what trades their sons should be apprenticed to. If a girl “got into troubleâ€, he was insistent that she should quit the village, and there was no appeal from his verdict.
‘He could be a kind man, but he was hard and unmoving when it came to any breaking of the moral code.’
Rural England in the fifties was a very insular world. Such people knew almost nothing of life outside their own tightly knit communities
When it came to the introduction of machinery to make life easier for farm labourers a century ago, many country people denounced them as ‘damned, stinking, noisy things guilty of the appalling crime of frightening half-broken young horses’.
How ironic today to see some of those steam engines lovingly preserved.
The big historic decline in the use of horses in the countryside took place between 1935 and 1945.
Sentimentalists lamented the rise of the internal combustion engine, but many farm horses suffered lives that were nasty, brutish and short.
Though good farmers loved their beasts, there were also plenty of bad ones who treated them appallingly.
Daily life was so different back then. Does anybody today know how to make furmity, a favourite drink of the rural labouring class, often m entioned by Thomas Hardy? Here is a recipe: mix seven gallons of milk and seven pints of cooked wheat, 12lb of dried fruit, plenty of sugar and spice and 60 eggs.
The decision by producers of The Village to avoid the traditional, glossy costume drama version of rural life is an honest one
There were then vastly more bees, and honey was harvested at Martinmas (November 11), much later than now.
A village apiarist named Vere Temple wrote with moving reverence and passion about the tenants of his own hives: ‘To me, bees are a force. They are a manifestation of the Power that rules the universe and orders the pattern of all Life’. Before refrigerators, there was constant argument about how best to keep things cool. A cellar was best, of course, but few cottages had one.
Some housewives recommended keeping a wet cloth hanging in the larder, and suspended meat in a loose bag of butter muslin. It was commonplace to bury bottles of milk and beer under the shady roots of a big tree.
One country-dweller, Marjorie Burford, wrote sorrowfully in 1952 about the sale of her village’s stone-built, thatch-roofed school, which a succession of h er own family had attended. It was icy cold in winter, but a kindly teacher allowed the 30 pupils to cluster their desks around its open fire.
The pathetic shortage of teaching aids, Burford wrote, ‘taught the children not to expect everything ready made for them, but to use their own brains and hands to make, adapt, substitute’.
They picked reeds to make baskets, brought oddments of wool from home to knit mats and cushions, toilet paper for scribbling, empty matchboxes to make dolls’ furniture.
Some housewives recommended keeping a wet cloth hanging in the larder, and suspended meat in a loose bag of butter muslin. It was commonplace to bury bottles of milk and beer under the shady roots of a big tree.
Discipline was rigorous: ‘To spoil the register by being late, or even away with a cold, was dreadful?.?.?.?Teacher threatened anyone who was away: “The attendance officer will be after youâ€.’ Like with so much rural life, we like to idealise the old village shop. But it held fewer charms for those who were captives of its whims and pathetic range of wares.
A writer described how, in her own shop window, there were only a bottle of metal polish; another of indigestion mixture; a few fading postcards of local views; and a jar of brightly coloured sweets, whose contents could only be dislodged with a knitting needle.
This shopkeeper was also the postmistress, with a high-handed attitude to telegrams: ‘If one arrives in the morning, the gardener will deliver it on his way back from dinner; but if it comes after midday she will take it to the inn and leave it there, propped against the bottles beh ind the bar; to remain until the addressee, or a friend, notices it’.
Yet that same villager who described the old shopkeeper with such exasperation concluded: ‘Her days and those of her kind are numbered, but when they are replaced by Efficiency, the villages will be duller places’.
She was right, was she not?
In those days before ‘Efficiency’, superstitions prevailed. Every self-respecting manor house had its ghost, made much more believable under dim lighting. Some rustics affected a wristband of blue worsted â€" it had to be blue â€" as a specific against rheumatics.
My father once went sea-fishing with an old Cornishman who demanded a penny, threw it into the waves, then knelt and touched the deck in hopes of a good catch â€" which they got.
There was more natural beauty, and less man-made ugliness, in the old English countryside. Children had better lives, partly because we knew such freedom
One village odd-job man, a misanthropist named Mr Batt, buried his savings for fear that ‘the gov’ment’ would suddenly descend and steal them. If he was alive today he would nod wisely and declare he had been right all along.
Mr Batt, like many of his tribe, wielded a scythe with a beautiful and almost effortless skill, and hated all machinery.
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In the post-war days when meat was still scarce and some commodities still rationed, one writer dismayed by the increasing numbers of that pest, the grey squirrel, wrote wistfully: ‘If they could be introduced to our menus, they could swell our meat-less diet.’
However, this drive to produce more food meant that a disastrous error fell upon the countryside from the Thirties onwards: the conviction that every development in agricultural science and technology must be for the good.
My father’s magazine, Country Fair, extolled chemical spraying of crops, especially from the air.
The professor of agriculture at London University declared in 1953 that since everyone at the time realised that Britain was no longer a wealthy country, they must grow much more food. He urged ploughing up most of Britain’s 12 million acres of permanent pasture.
In a true Stalinist spirit, he argued that they needed ‘the corrective influence of the plough’ and corn-growing. This duly happened, and we know what an environmental disaster this prairie-style farming has turned out to be.
In tandem with such developments, the precious sense of community has slowly eroded.
Farming, and those who work in it, have become divorced from the majority of country-dwellers who work far away, and in their homes often complain loudly about the smell of pigs or crowing of cockerels.
Contrarily, however, we should recognise how many country people were, until at least the Sixties, prisoners of their villages and of their employers. Some were contented to live highly disciplined lives, but others suffered terribly.
Incest was a serious problem in remote places, each of which had its brutally dubbed ‘village idiots’ in consequence.
There were benign squires and landlords, but there were also harsh ones, who exercised a power over people’s lives that is today happily unthinkable.
But there was more natural beauty, and less man-made ugliness, in the old English countryside. Children had better lives, partly because we knew such freedom.
One photograph in my father’s Country Fair of 1952 shows a monumental tree-house built 40ft up an old oak at Dymock, Gloucestershire. We can imagine what health and safety would say about that today.
The decision by producers of The Village to avoid the traditional, glossy costume drama version of rural life is an honest one, for they are capturing both the virtue and vice of the old countryside â€" the usual human paradoxes and contradictions.
Indeed, those characteristics were once eloquently expounded to me by an old fisherman in a wonderful story.
He was furious to find one of his lobster pots emptied of its catch by a passing yachtsman. But then, at the bottom of the pot, he discovered a canvas bag containing a gold sovereign.
The miscreant had stolen, but he had also paid. Who can imagine that happen ing now?
Harsh reality: The cast of new BBC drama The VillageÂ
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