Tales from the echoing green

For the writers of the interwar years, the English village became the perfect stage for tales of community, where the homes were snug, their inhabitants friendly and even the murders were cosy

- Stephen Wade

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?