The Village News

by Tom Fort

  But the school of the first Miss Read book is the one she had known and loved as a child. By an unusual stroke of imaginative transference, she casts herself – not as the girl pupil – but as Mr Clark in female form: wise, tolerant, firm, a spreader of enlightenment and delight. How curious it is that the experience of those three years should have been so intense, the memories so indelibly stamped, that she should have wanted and been able to work on them in such a way so long afterwards.

  Miss Read’s talent, a slender but very distinctive one, was to be inside her village, to portray it from within. Her characters – the school cleaner, the vicar, the bossy postmistress, Mr Willet the school caretaker and sexton at St Patrick’s Church, Mr Mann the local ornithologist, Mr Annett the choirmaster – are drawn with unobtrusive, unsentimental skill. Her novels are not really novels at all, but collections of loosely connected stories in which the regular cast sometimes act as sources or witnesses, and at others as a kind of Greek chorus, commentating on incidents of curious or unexpected behaviour.

  In general the events are suitably mundane: a fallen elm, a leaking skylight, a jumble sale, a harvest festival service, the making of a Christmas pudding. One exception was the running story in Storm in the Village, of how the villagers of Fairacre suspend their differences and put their usual concerns aside to unite in opposition to a plan for a housing estate on Hundred Acre Field to accommodate the families of employees of the Atomic Energy Authority. But it was unusual for Miss Read to permit the world outside Fairacre to intrude when there was so much going on within to keep her pen busy. As she wrote in the fifth of the Fairacre chronicles, Over the Gate: ‘With what avidity I listen to my neighbours’ accounts of tales of long ago and with what unfailing curiosity I observe the happenings of today . . . the story of the village goes back a long, long way; and it still goes on . . . Can you wonder that we are never dull in Fairacre?’

  Elsewhere she refers to the village as timeless and unchanging – this is why her fans loved Miss Read, because she gave them the impossible and made it seem real. Her Fairacre recalled for them a place and time which had somehow regained and retained the simplicity and innocence that the modern world had annihilated. In Fairacre there was love but no sex. There were differences of opinion but no hatred, setbacks but no disasters, going short but no poverty. Children might be rough, but there was no bullying. People might be down in the dumps but there was no clinical depression. The harsh, ugly, incomprehensible aspect of life was kept at bay – a sleight of hand that also protected the residents from ageing or becoming decrepit, and ensured that time did not really move at all.

  Miss Read was extremely popular in her day, but that day seems to be over. Her work really belonged to the same era as that in which crime fiction still featured upper-class pipe-puffing amateur sleuths who solved intricate mysteries through ingenious deduction, usually assisted by a dim-witted sidekick and even dimmer-witted, heavy-footed but scrupulously honest police officers. The toff sleuth eventually made way for the detective-as-police-officer, invariably divorced or with his marriage on the rocks, hopeless at relationships (because of the job) but irresistible to women, disdainful of the rules of procedure. Every murderer became a serial killer and every murder involved torture and dismemberment instead of genteel strangulation or a single shot through the heart.

  The contemporary equivalent of Miss Read’s Fairacre Chronicles is J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, a 500-page epic in which the vacancy in question – on the parish council in a town in the West Country (never mind that towns have town councils not parish councils) – sets off a perfect storm of murder, rape, sexual abuse, drug-taking, porn-watching and other miscellaneous nastiness. The author, who lives in Edinburgh, maintained that her reason for writing the book was to explore ‘real issues’ affecting ‘real people’. While it is certainly true that not one of her gallery of social misfits and monsters would have been allowed over the parish boundary into Fairacre, the question of who gives the truer picture of village life – Miss Read or the creator of Harry Potter – remains open.

  *

  My first port of call in Chelsfield was at the school, where the headteacher kindly invited me into her office to tell me what a happy place it was. On a shelf were the logbooks from the time Dora Shafe had been a pupil and I browsed through these while the head dealt with a tortuous narrative of misbehaviour coaxed from three sheepish and crestfallen lads, one of whom had cut his hand and was trying to explain why he had hidden in the toilets taking the playground basketball with him.

  The 1921 summer term, I discovered, had opened on a positive note with ‘the scholars’ celebrating Empire Day by singing ‘Flag of Britain’ and ‘The Recessional’. At the beginning of June attendance was 100 out of 115. But many of the children were required to contribute to keeping their families financially afloat, hence the logbook entry: ‘Fruit picking has commenced.’ On 17 June the school closed for three weeks for the ‘Fruiting Holiday’, which may have been a holiday for Dora and the other children of professional salary-earners, but was anything but for many of her schoolmates.

  School reopened on 25 July then closed again on 2 September, the time for hop-picking. The following year, 1922, the attendance in June was assessed as ‘very poor’ and the logbook for the 19th noted: ‘Certain growers have started fruit-picking.’ Three days later the school closed until late July. Attendances through the winter months were generally patchy owing to the incidence of measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, influenza and other illnesses, and the difficulty of getting the children in from the outlying hamlets and farms when there was snow on the ground. The brief entries in the regular handwriting – Mr Clark’s or the school secretary’s? – suggest a harsher context of economic struggle, toil and unwholesome living conditions than Miss Read ever allowed to intrude into her village idyll.

  That context now seems infinitely remote. The agricultural society that dictated the school year was dismantled long ago. The notion of children having to pick hops and fruit instead of doing their lessons seems to belong more to Victorian times than the century we have recently left behind. The diseases that ravaged school ranks have been largely eliminated, and absenteeism is likely to land parents in court. Miss Read herself went back to the school in 1975 to write an article about it for the Sunday Telegraph. She was reassured to find the building largely unchanged, the shed where it used to be, the lime trees still flourishing. The children, she noted, were more interested in learning than in her day, the teachers were quieter and the whole school was more tranquil. ‘It was this domestic atmosphere which I so clearly remembered and so feared to find gone which impressed me most during this return visit,’ she wrote.

  She would still find it today. But what might surprise her would be the demographics, a word she would have disdained. None of the children come from the village itself, the headteacher told me, because there are almost no young families; and those that there are send their children to private school. Much the same applies to Chelsfield Park, where the stratospheric inflation of house prices means that incoming families buying houses must be rich, and rich families favour private education. There are long-established families both in the village of Chelsfield and in Chelsfield Park, but their child-rearing days were long ago. Because it is a sweet little school in a good area, Chelsfield Primary pulls in children from the Chelsfield around the station and well beyond. But the umbilical connection between school and village has been broken for good.

  I cycled out along the road the little girl had walked each school day, over the bypass and past the church. Dora’s mother died in 1937. Her father remarried and continued to live in the bungalow at the top of Chelsfield Hill until his death in 1968. The local historian and expert on Miss Read, Patrick Hellicar, told me that there was no evidence of her having been a dutiful or regular visitor to Chelsfield after she left to pursue a career in teaching. Her parents do not figure prominently in her two volumes of autobiography, nor does her sister,
which perhaps suggests that the intensity of belonging she felt at school may not have been matched at home.

  The fate of the family home, Bramleigh, is typical of the fate that has been gradually overtaking Chelsfield Park as a whole. It lasted until 2014, when it was demolished and replaced by – I can do no better than quote the estate agent’s brochure – ‘an imposing and spacious 5 bedroom house offering a superior specification.’ The brochure characterises the house as ‘opulent’, though some observers – faced with the frontage of red brick, tile cladding, beaming and leaded windows with dark-brown frames, kept company by double garage and paved drive behind the inevitable security gates – might search for another adjective.

  Two million pounds would have secured Bramleigh, with its cinema/games room, Stoneham kitchen units, its underfloor heating and its ‘sophisticated perimeter alarm system’. A little way down the hill is Edelweiss, belonging to the same architectural genre as Bramleigh, but with the addition of ‘indoor pool complex’ plus marble stairs, limestone fireplace, galleried landing and ‘multi-room audio-visual system with surround sound’ plus CCTV – hence a price tag of £2.5 million.

  All over Chelsfield Park the original unassuming houses built by Homesteads Ltd. have been or are being bulldozed to make way for mansions routinely advertised as stunning, wonderful, contemporary, magnificent, beautifully crafted, luxurious, exclusive, exceptional, perfectly suited to family life and so on. The one-dwelling covenants on the plots have prevented wholesale redevelopment, but have made it worthwhile for developers to pay £1 million for a perfectly decent and pleasant three-bedroom house, knock it down and replace it with a six-bedroom monster. Some of the plots are on to their third rebuilding inside eighty years.

  In 2001 the Chelsfield Park Residents’ Association produced a Millennium booklet commemorating the history of the settlement. It is easy to detect the community spirit that once prevailed. Car ownership in the 1930s was limited, and the salaried commuters forged friendships walking to and from the station in suits and bowler hats, carrying their umbrellas and – in bad weather – wearing wellington boots that they left in the booking office to await the return walk. Some Chelsfield Parkers kept chickens and ran smallholdings, and had eggs and produce for sale. There was cricket and football on the recreation ground, and the tennis enthusiasts got together to build hard courts. There was a drama club and a swimming club. Most families were of the same social class and shared the same interests and were eager to come together.

  Today there is a handful of second- and third-generation Chelsfield Parkers left. But the survivors are elderly, and the old community of interest and the spirit it fostered have withered away. The families that have moved in come from all over the economically advanced world, and the one thing they have in common is wealth. Their children go to private schools, and when at home they generally retreat inside their high walls and CCTV-monitored security gates to pursue their private, sealed-off lives.

  *

  In the early evening I made a point of attending Chelsfield village hall’s AGM, hoping as ever to stumble across scandal, drama or at least a decent feud. No such luck. The meeting, attended by twenty or so villagers, was over inside half an hour. The bookings secretary was congratulated on his excellent performance in securing bookings. The retiring chairman was congratulated for his work upgrading the kitchen. The retiring secretary and the retiring treasurer were congratulated for their sterling contributions over many years. The replacements in all these posts were warmly welcomed. The only debate was at the beginning, and arose over who should sit where: a very English debate, because English people always want to sit at the back.

  Outside the hall – a rather sweet and modest wood-and-brick affair which was a Coronation initiative and replaced the previous reading room – I had a chat with Chelsfield’s exceptionally friendly and talkative rector. A career bank worker and manager until being made redundant when he was nearly fifty, he had come to Chelsfield after a stint in charge of a tough parish at Accrington in Lancashire. Chelsfield presented a different kind of challenge: a very long-serving rector of staunchly conservative leanings had been replaced by a reforming rector whose new ways had provoked discord and strife and led to an early departure.

  My genial acquaintance told me that his task had been to steady the ship. Changes were needed but they had to be gradual. How gradual, I asked? He laughed. Well, we still use the 1660 Prayer Book, he said. We have Evensong with anthems and Choral Matins and Choral Eucharist. He laughed some more. ‘I’m trying to bring in a Family Service,’ he said. ‘That would be a start. We all know things have to change, but the change needs to be managed diplomatically.’ I asked him how he liked his job. His face lit up. ‘He’s just the best boss, the Lord is. I am so lucky.’

  I went to the Five Bells in search of food. At lunchtime the place had been busy with passing trade but at 7.15 in the evening it was very quiet and I discovered to my dismay that they did lunch but not dinner. However, the landlord came to my rescue with a ham-and-tomato sandwich to keep my couple of pints of Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter company. In the gloaming I cycled up Church Road for the last time. The Chelsfield Ladies Group was having a meeting in the Brass Crosby Room behind the church (so named after a Chelsfield dignitary who was Lord Mayor of London in 1770) which I was anxious not to miss. By a splendid fluke it featured a talk about Miss Read and her local connections by Mr Hellicar, and although I was clearly neither a lady nor from Chelsfield I was made most welcome. The chairman told me the group had previously been called the Young Wives until the label had ceased to be wholly appropriate. She looked around the gathering. ‘We’re flagging,’ she admitted. ‘It’s so difficult to recruit new members these days.’

  Mr Hellicar’s talk was absolutely first-rate and very expertly illustrated, and I would like to record my gratitude to him for making his material available to me subsequently, as I had to leave a little before the end to get home. As I pedalled back to Orpington railway station along the path beside the bypass, it occurred to me how much Miss Read would have liked the Chelsfield Ladies Group and how much at home she would have been with them. She would have enjoyed the prayers before the talk and would have nodded approvingly as the chairman thanked those who had made the posies for Mothering Sunday and done the flowers for Easter.

  The meeting was a taste of an England which has never received much attention and which is now quietly disappearing. Miss Read herself did not claim that she had ‘a message’. ‘I think people like to look back,’ she said, ‘not because everything was better in the past but because often they were happy then.’

  9

  PARSON POWER

  Eversley, Hampshire

  Eversley is at the north-eastern edge of Hampshire, where the winding River Blackwater forms the boundary with Berkshire. Although classified as a single village for administrative purposes, it actually comprises three distinct components, all named on the Ordnance Survey map: Eversley, Eversley Centre and Eversley Cross. Plain Eversley is very insubstantial – coming over the river from the direction of Reading you are through it in the blink of an eye. Eversley Centre is next, presumably so designated because the school and village hall are there and because it is halfway between Eversley and Eversley Cross, where the two pubs and the village shop are to be found. The topography of Eversley is further complicated by the situation of its lovely, spacious church, which is somewhere else altogether, standing with its enormous rectory and a couple of other substantial houses well away from all three related settlements.

  The land around is flattish, well wooded, pleasant enough but for the pounding of traffic along the A327 leading from Reading to the suburban sprawl to the east embracing Yateley, Blackwater, Sandhurst, Farnborough and Frimley. There are fields between the copses, and paddocks with horses, and plenty of characterless new private housing developments. It is prosperous, mundane commuter-country. But this was once a desperate part of the country.

  When the new curat
e was appointed in 1842, his parish was a byword for poverty, neglect and ignorance. It was a wild tract of land, much of it unreclaimed heath. The fields, waterlogged by floods from the Blackwater, were poor, able to support no more than a meagre population of illiterate, downtrodden peasants, poachers, hedgers, ditchers, labourers and Gypsies, eking out subsistence livings in a scattering of damp and insanitary cottages. There was no school and the only source of education for the children was the village cobbler, who – according to the curate’s wife – operated in the parish clerk’s room where ‘cobbling shoes, teaching and caning went together’.

  At the church, communion was celebrated three times a year, attended by a handful of communicants. The font was a cracked basin, the alms were collected in a wooden saucer. The churchyard was used to bury the dead and to graze sheep when grass was in short supply elsewhere. When the new curate proposed monthly communion, Eversley’s churchwardens told him he would have to provide the wine himself.

  His name was Charles Kingsley, remembered today principally for his children’s story The Water Babies, but renowned in his own lifetime as a poet, novelist, historian and essayist. He was the son of a clergyman, Cambridge educated, a gentleman with some private means, high-minded, radical in his thinking, passionate by nature, somewhat neurotic and afflicted by a stammer which he learned to live with but never control, addicted to tobacco, stern-featured, loving and much loved.

  Charles Kingsley’s home in Eversley, with the church behind

  When Kingsley came to live permanently in Eversley – having been promoted to be its rector – he was twenty-five, newly married and ready for a mission. He yearned to put his fierce faith into practice, convinced that it could raise people to a higher level however humble their station in society. He found the right challenge in this almost literally God-forsaken parish. And despite his achievements in other spheres, Eversley remained his focus and took his best efforts and energies.