We like our little cottage in a pretty Wiltshire village on the River Kennet — and we just hope the village likes us. It’s hard to tell.
‘I see you’ve been doing a lot of work on the house. So, have you finally moved in or are you [slight pause, crinkle of nose] weekending?’ asked one of the village’s grand dames.
‘Oh, yes, we’re very much here and loving it,’ I said. There was no need to mention that London is where we live, Wiltshire is where we flop, and that we don’t even get down every weekend. Don’t tell anyone, but we are guilty of fortnighting.
Even so, we made the cut for drinks (6.30to 8.30 p.m.) at one of the big houses on the outskirts of the village, where our hostess, Victoria (‘everyone calls me Tor’) — whom we had met at a stile while she was walking her dogs one crisp and even morning — waltzed us round the room with such warmth and enthusiasm that we began to understand the ‘coming home’ sensation that born-again Christians experience after completing the Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton.
A couple of months on and we’re keeping the faith — pretty much. It’s just that we haven’t received any further invitations and wonder if we should start sending out some of our own. We’ve come to the first hurdle in what turns out to be an almost impossible ambition: to gain acceptance into an old English village.
‘That drinks party was your beauty parade,’ says a friend, who has lived in the shires most of his life and knows about these things. ‘If people want to see you again they will ring your hostess and get your number. I wouldn’t push it if I were you.’
He’s right — being pushy is the fastest way onto the village black list. But I have been pushing BT to install a telephone line just in case. Tor doesn’t have our mobile numbers, but she does know where we live should any of her friends want to get in touch. They don’t. Of course, January and February were hibernation months, we tell ourselves, and the weather was filthy in March. April is a period of transition. And May? Well, there was the small matter of an election to take care of. So presumably the stiffies will start dropping on the mat in early July, we decide, and we’ll be heading for the second hurdle in the social steeplechase.
Or perhaps not. My wife thinks we may already have fallen flat on our faces by the manner of our behaviour with regard to worship. Our cottage is bang opposite the lovely 13th-century church. We went to the ‘family service’ once and stayed for coffee afterwards (and were given a helpful Welcome Pack by Mrs B) but we didn’t much care for the Mission Praise hymn book (the one produced in 1984 to coincide with Dr Billy Graham’s worldwide evangelical crusade) because we didn’t know any of the tunes. We haven’t been back. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake and I would advise any other aspiring villagers to get God.
One good reason for liking our village is the working post office, run by a lady ‘who knows everyone and everything’. She sounded like an excellent way into the heart of the village, so I called in to introduce myself and tried not to be overfamiliar. ‘We’ve just moved here,’ I said. ‘What a nice shop you have.’ I might as well have inquired whether it was true that she had romped with the former England football captain, John Terry, in the back of his Bentley. I had clearly overstepped some invisible line, just in making the first move.
Then I asked if she knew of a window cleaner in the area. Without looking up from the receipts she was stapling together, she said I might find one in the Yellow Pages. Later, on the way to the pub, I saw a window cleaner’s advertisement hanging in her post office window.
My friend from the shires assures me that it can take years to be accepted in an English village such as ours. ‘The big ice-breaker is children,’ he counsels. ‘All the networking goes on at the school gates. That’s where you’ll be asked round for drinks, probably on a Friday night, followed by dinner a few months later on a Saturday and then, if you’re lucky, lunch on Sunday, which really is the badge of honour.’
The problem is that our children have all left school. We don’t even have a dog. But we do go on long walks and spend lots of money in the restaurant attached to the pub. I’ve paid my subs for the sports club and bought some wine glasses from the charity shop that we will never use. I’ve apologised to lots of people for the mess caused by our builders, particularly when it came to blasting paint off the front of the house — an operation that saw shrapnel raining down on the street for the best part of two weeks.
Clearly we are under surveillance, and here’s the rub: I actually admire the village for holding out against interlopers in such a doughty and uncompromising way. The British countryside — long abandoned by successive governments — deserves nothing less. It’s a bit like Test cricket. You have to play yourself in, get the measure of the popping crease, keep an eye on the outfield. Then again, I worry that the umpires already may have given us out for some reason or another but that the news hasn’t quite filtered down to our end of the wicket.
My hope is that we are starting to build a long innings and that once we’ve done ten years here on what locals call the ‘Wiltshire/Berkshire border’, we may still be regarded as newcomers — but without the terrifying connotations. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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