Country Boy, by Richard Hillyer – review

Under his real name, Charles James Stranks, the author of this little masterpiece wrote on a number of ecclesiastical subjects: the Venerable Bede, Jeremy Taylor, Durham cathedral, where he was a canon. He died in 1980.

Country Boy was originally published in 1966. It is a memoir of the author’s childhood, and there is no reason to doubt the truth of its salient events. However, using a pseudonym, and changing the name of the Buckinghamshire village in which he grew up from Hardwick to Byfield (even giving us the proper pronunciation — ‘Biffield’) and presumably the names of the people characterised so brilliantly, perhaps accounts for the book’s coherence and heft. It reads like a novel.

There are moments of Proust-like detailed description of walks, of Tolstoyan evocation of farm labour, and his mother (charitably pitied by the loving son) is an almost Lawrentian figure, intelligent, no longer aspiring, trapped by class and poverty, ‘always sharp when doing someone a kindness’.

There is craft here, but not that artfulness that turns the real into a convenient lie. This is an utterly unsentimental portrait, full of the contradictoriness of the ordinary.  Its subject is not the author himself, but the society, hermetically sealed from the rest of the world in a way that anyone born after the advent of the motor car and telephone would not recognise, in which he grew up. This is a memoir, not an autobiography.

The ‘immemorial rhythms’ of agricultural life are the beat of an almost feudal drum. There are the labourers (Hillyer’s father is one), there is the gentry (the farmers, the Rector, Mr Du Cane of the manor) and the owner of the lot, Lord Postern. For the labourers the life is frugal drudgery.  Hillyer’s saintly father takes it as it comes, giving all his wages to his wife, satisfied with very little.