19 March

My first introduction to the countryside was made through books. When I was tiny, my mother read me the Little Grey Rabbit books by Alison Uttley and opened my childish eyes to a world of frozen ponds with skating squirrels and hedgehog milkmen. When I was around four, I adored the Mrs Pepperpot books. As some of you may remember, Mrs Pepperpot lived in a house which was really a vinegar bottle (surreal in a Doctor Seuss kind of way) right in the middle of a field. I was born in a city centre; when I was five we moved to a nearby market town, ‘in the country’, my parents explained. I still vividly recall my excitement at the thought of going to live in a vinegar bottle in the middle of a field; imagine my disappointment when we arrived at a 30’s semi on a tree-lined avenue. Visiting my grandparents would have given me a taste of real countryside, but your world is so small in those early years that in truth I don’t remember much beyond their garden and the small patch of wild land where we played with the local children. At seven I moved again, this time to the south-east, where the little I saw of the countryside was soft and green and cosy; easy to believe that animals had little houses and skating parties, and that nature was smiling and benevolent. Like many bookish children, as I grew up many of my experiences were first derived from stories, and books about adventurous children galloping on their ponies were, to me, the height of sophistication. Books have been my companions all my life, and I had a stash of books about the countryside, without ever having lived there. I didn’t read them all just for their rural visions, of course, but images burn deeply into your brain; Heathcliff on the moors, Hardy’s Woodlanders or Heath-dwellers, poets and authors galore whose characters still roam the fields and woods, whose dreams still linger on the uplands.

You don’t need to be a master of logic to know that you can’t experience something without actually living through it. Reading about the countryside no more prepared me for actually living in it than books about pregnancy and childbirth prepare you for the real thing. There I was, of course, pregnant and smug, having a whole shelf of books to refer to at every twinge or flutter. Be prepared was my motto, and there was no doubt that I was. Fat lot of good it did me of course, come the shock of the primitive bloodbath of childbirth. There I was again, though, when my baby cried, weighing up Penelope Leach versus Miriam Stoppard, or whoever else was in favour that year. At least I could feel like I had some control, for the brief minutes when I was reading, rather like today, where on a day where I have absolutely no intention of going in the garden, I am reading up on old roses and smelling a promise of summer, though whether I will actually get around to planting them is a different matter. I can live on a dream.

Moving here was nothing like reading about rural life. You can have roses around the door, sure, but you’ll also get murder and mayhem, as anyone who has kept chickens will know. Wake up and smell the de-caff latte, as my city friends might say. Only here it’s not the smell of coffee beans but manure that seeps through the windows. I admit that I hadn’t thought much about rural poverty until fairly recently. Deprivation to me was miners with no livelihood, the urban homeless, the desperation of immigrants. The countryside was a place of dreams, where the rich retired at weekends, where you could return to the rhythms of nature. A refuge, a retreat. I’d read Akenfield, by Ronald Blythe, but it wasn’t until I lived here that I met country people who’d experienced the most grinding and desperate poverty. It is, for me, still a retreat, still a dream come true, a blessing. But for so many others, it is still a world of mass emigration, of failed dreams, of a dying way of life.

Books may not help you much with the real business of living, but they’ll always open doors to worlds. I was chatting idly to a Mum at the school gates today, not someone I know very well, just passing the time of day. She announced that she’d been cleaning over the weekend, then her husband had bought a few books, and she’d had to ask him to put them away. They’re so messy and untidy, she explained, I’d just got the house sorted, I hate to see them lying around. She might as well have told me she was running away with Roman Abramovich. I was stunned. I hope she never comes to my house; we have books in the living room, in the bedrooms, in the loo, stacked untidily on the landing, groaning on shelves in the kitchen, stored in trunks upstairs. I remember staying with some friend’s of R’s, years ago, who must have subscribed to the same philosophy as the school gate Mum, for there was no reading matter anywhere in their house. No books, no magazines, no children’s stories that I could see. I even went in desperation to the kitchen to find a cookery book, but to no avail. They were quite wealthy people, but the house felt poor because of it. If books are messy, then anarchy rules OK.