26 March

Given that we have an eight year old boy in the house, any conversation seems to turn magically to Doctor Who. After we’d listen to a loooong discussion between J and our friends’ sons on the benefits of time travel yesterday, we started idly discussing where we’d like to go, if we had our own Tardis. The main question we decided upon was, if we could only go either into the future or back to the past, which would you choose? You could travel as often as you wanted, but could only go in the one direction. Obviously everyone wants to do both, but given this choice, I chose to go back. My husband, without a shred of nostalgia in his bones, chose the future. So did our friends. The boys, their lives stretching before them like the Yellow Brick Road, are amazed to even be asked. They want nothing but the future; their brief pasts just a hazy milky memory. I’d love to see what lies in store, but the past wins every time for me. I would hate to be stranded, uncomprehending, in the future, like a 21st century Catweazle (showing my age here!), with no points of reference to cling to. Maybe I’m just unadventurous. I’d love to revisit the past, both the personal and the public. Think of the people I could see again, and think of the questions that could be answered. I’ve always loved history, but often felt dissatisfied with the interpretation of historians. So easy to remake history according to your own standards and culture, and so beyond the realms of the possible to ever know for sure. I’m not sure what my ‘favourite’ history period is; if I had to choose one, I’d probably pick the early medieval period, through Britain around the time of the Roman conquest would come pretty close. And world history – think of where you could go, what you could see.

I’d like to get back close to home, too. See my house as it was when it was first constructed, in the eighteenth century. It was originally two houses, in fact, although dwellings may be a more appropriate word – the smaller half would have been a one-up, one down, tiny rooms at that. I could find out who ‘Bess’ really was (I wrote an earlier blog about the name scratched on a beam in my daughter’s room). I don’t think I have a romantic view of the past; I know how hard life would have been for cottagers in those days; I know about the grinding poverty, the meagre survival rates for infants, the threat of starvation. Great to pop in, though, like the benevolent Doctor, dispensing wisdom and handy survival tips. I look at our sleepy village on this clear blue spring morning, and think what I’d have seen a couple of hundred years ago. More activity, more life, more people, for sure. We don’t do badly for a rural parish of a few hundred souls, well off the beaten track; we have a pub, a school, a doctor’s surgery, a butchers shop. But there used to be so much more here, truly a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker. And a rope maker. And a corn chandler, blacksmith, cartmaker, washerwoman, dairy maids. Even as recently as the 1970’s there was a chip shop and a delicatessen, (both ends of the market catered for!) now vanished along with the post office and general stores. So many of the village houses have names telling of their former use; the Old Stores, the Old Bakers, the Old Post Office. I don’t want us to be preserved in aspic, a charming reconstruction. And the village is fighting back, campaigning for more facilities, fewer closures, more affordable housing. But the yearning, nostalgic part of me misses a past I never knew. I think about the noises, too; one of the things we love about living here is the silence. No major roads are near, although traffic does of course pass through the village, so thre’s plenty of birdsong, the nights silent apart from the hooting of the owls. Daily life a hundred years ago must have been far noisier, although lovely not to hear the jets overhead or the background hum of cars. The sound of horses’ hooves must have been a constant (I was surprised to read, once, in a book about 12th century England, that market towns had ‘cart parks’). The strange thing is, is that in our little lane, I often hear the sound of hooves, even when there’s no horse to seen. It’s probably the acoustics of the green, or something; there are certainly a lot of riders about. But maybe the past is all around us, after all.