SOMEONE sneezes at the Old Forge Cottage. Is it the new baby? Mrs Granger at the tea shop has a homemade remedy. Grandma Brown at the almshouse has run out of sugar. No problem, because Ted the driver will exchange a cupful for some rhubarb. We can imagine this village—let’s call it Loveby, because it survives on caring and helping.
Thousands of such communities across this land after the First World War knew the value of self-sufficiency and the necessity of using all the skills and experience collectively available. Villages through the decades after 1918 survived on communal values and these were driven by a particular brand of economics, made up of questions and cheeriness.
Villages as they were by about 1930 were magnets for women writers, new professionals who were emerging in droves, supported by a boom in outlets for stories and reportage. There was a middlebrow revolution going on and women had acquired the necessary skills, from shorthand and typing to editing and drafting. When they looked around them for inspiration, they found that writing didn’t have to be metropolitan and sophisticated. There was an abundance of material in those small places that had lost most of their young men and massive storytelling potential under their apparently tranquil roofs.
When Stella Gibbons wrote her novel The Rich House, she used an epigraph from Tolstoy: ‘Every life— the practical life of each individual, with its home questions of health and sickness, of toil and rest… with its passions, loves and friendships— ran its regular course, without troubling itself… about an alliance or breach with Napoleon.’ Does our cosy Loveby not fit the bill here?
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 19, 2023-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 19, 2023-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
