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In Praise of John Moore

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We are already nearly a month into 2025 (and who shall not be delighted to see the back end of January recede into the distance once again?) and I realise that, for all the words written about books in 2024 I never once mentioned what my favourites were. In truth there were several things vying for the top spot and all three of them, unsurprisingly, were written before I was born. First is Noel Streatfeild’s ‘Saplings’ (1945) which I read in another of those gorgeous Persephone reissues that I have been consuming and collecting over the past few years (their grey and cream/off white spines make a very pleasant decorative element above the bed). I may write more about ‘Saplings’ at some point, just not today. Suffice to say that it is a wonderfully written novel that captures much of the disruption and uncertainty of English family lives in the early years of WW2 and provides a piercing critique of class attitudes of the period. I’ve heard it suggested that the novel is a kind of “dark inversion” of Streatfeild’s classic children’s book ‘Ballet Shoes’ but not having read that one, I cannot be sure. ‘Ballet Shoes’ is certainly on my sizeable ‘to be read’ list though, which in turn sits in the shadow of the physical ‘to be read’ piles and the ‘to be read’ Kindle collection. This is how life ought to be, however, so that is fine.

Is ‘The Wind In The Willows’ (1908) a children’s book? My copy says ‘Penguin Classic’ so I am sure that it is admissible for adults to read it, even if they are not necessarily seeking to rekindle the feelings they might have felt on reading it in their childhood. Regardless, I am certain that one reason I never read it in my youth is that it is another of Those English Things that were rather scorned in Scotland. I know that I Make A Lot Of This these days but it is something worth repeating, I think, because of its essential truth. To me, if to no-one else, although I suspect it is also a truth that is, if not universal, at least quite recognisable to those of a similar age and geographical background. Anyway, the point here is that I finally read ‘The Wind In The Willows’ in 2024 and was startled by just how beautiful and ageless it is. Lots of little cultural puzzle pieces fell into place on reading it too, which is always a delightful feeling. Humbling too, for this kind of experience also shows how little one knows, or half knows. The roots of the present are in the past, after all.

Just edging these two titles for the dubious prize of being The Unpopular Book Of 2024 however would be John Moore’s ‘The Waters Under The Earth’. Originally published in 1965, this was another of the Persephone reissue titles that had sat on the aforementioned ‘to be read’ pile for a good eighteen months before I finally got round to it, but goodness it was worth the wait! Although written in the early 1960s the novel is set a decade earlier, in the Gloucestershire countryside that Moore knew and loved so well. It is a rural landscape that Moore had written successfully about previously, and his ‘Brensham Trilogy’ books (‘Portrait of Elmbury’, ‘Brensham Village’ and ‘The Blue Field’) published between 1945 and 1948 sold handsomely at the time. So too did his enormously entertaining 1951 novel ‘Dance and Skylark’, whilst ‘September Moon’ (1957) apparently sold half a million copies. All of these are worth reading, and whilst I believe that ‘the Bresnham Trilogy’ have been collected and reprinted within the past decade or so, second hand copies of early editions can be picked up cheaply. In many ways each of these books seem to set the groundwork for ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ and each seems to inform the subsequent instalment. Characters return, sometimes in alternative guises but usually recognisable, whilst through it all the rural landscape and the rhythms of its life emerge as the dominant presence. All of these books are marvellously entertaining reads. Short and comedic, they also explore themes of class and industrial ‘progress’ that lend them a degree of weight. The books are light but never slight.

‘The Waters Under The Earth’ on the other hand stands out in being much longer and by some distance more sombre than any of Moore’s previous books. This is perhaps apt since it was to be his last prior to his death, in 1967, at the youthful age of 59. It also arguably reflects a degree of disillusionment in the post-war Labour government and the Urban/Rural divide apparent in much of the later 1940s and early 1950s. Being unashamedly a ‘countryman’, Moore’s books are necessarily conservative in much of their tone, yet ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ is noticeably more apologetic for the way of life lived by the rural land-owning classes than any of his previous books. Whilst there remains a lingering affection for hunting that might cause a degree of hand-wringing amongst many Waitrose shopping Guardian readers of the 21st Century, this is tempered with a growing awareness that Tradition need not be an excuse for cruelty. What comes across much more strongly is the sense of the landowner as custodian of nature being replaced by exploitative greed. ‘Growth’ and ‘Progress’ at all costs and hang the consequences. Indeed there is arguably a deep seated sorrow at the heart of ‘The Waters Under The Earth’, a recognition that human beings are doomed to destroy themselves by their lack of empathy and understanding not just for nature but for each other. There is a kind of existential ennui suffusing much of ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ that feels at odds with the comedic pulse of Moore’s earlier books, yet at the same time the book retains a warmth that is heartening. This is a difficult balancing acts to pull off, but Moore does it admirably. He also pulls off an exploration of class in the post-war period with remarkable even-handedness, escaping a class partisanship which might have otherwise derailed things. Slightly less effective is the theme of romance which suffers somewhat by what Amanda Craig refers to in her excellent preface to the Persephone edition as being an example of the trope where “posh young women take up with ambitious working class men”. Craig suggests that this in turn may be “perhaps not unconnected to the ending of the ban on ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’” and whilst mildly irritating it also arguably lends ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ an additional degree of historical cultural context.

Like Ronald Blythe’s ‘Akenfield’, all of Moore’s novels are to an extent records of a disappearing rural landscape and way of life. What perhaps differentiates between them, however, is the context of the two authors: Blythe being from yeoman stock and a childhood of rural poverty, Moore from a comfortable middle class, growing up in a Tudor townhouse in Tewkesbury (now The Tudor Hotel). This possibly explains too, in part, the different lasting degrees of recognition for their work, ’Akenfield’ never being out of print since 1969 and Moore’s books being only sporadically reprinted in much smaller numbers. After all, when ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ was published four years before ‘Akenfield’ it perhaps already suffered from entering a publishing realm where the fashion was very much for The Voice Of The Working Class. The Angry Young Men in the ascendency and Swinging London getting into its stride. This might explain why Moore seemed so quickly to be forgotten. A voice of The Past when all that mattered was the shiny and new. Or NEW! AND IMPROVED! as the advertising lingo might have put it. Did ‘Akenfield’ then slip neatly into the space between that Swinging London POP explosion and the ‘back to the earth’ Hippie daydream, and was ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ just a little too late and a little too early to gain the traction that it perhaps, in hindsight, deserved? Perhaps.

Whatever the reasons for its sixty odd years of neglect, ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ more than deserves a place on the top shelf of classic rural fiction. It deserves attention too for its apparent prescience of what was, in 1965, The Future and is to us, in 2025, the recent past and the present: The Earth exploited for personal wealth; faceless corporate/syndicate wealth wielding power; the cult of individualism insidiously dismantling notions of community and class. The roots of the present are in the past, after all.

Unpopular Advent 2023 – Day 5

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Tiny Leaves – ‘With the Hollow at My Feet’ from ‘Mynd’

The landscape of the Long Mynd first came to my attention courtesy of Malcolm Saville and his Lone Pine adventure series of books. I have written before about how my very belated discovery of Saville and the Lone Pine books might have been due to a strange England/Scotland divide enforced during my formative years, but in some respects I am rather pleased to have come to them, and him, in my fifties. Had I read the books as a youngster, I wonder if the draw of the specific landscapes would have been so appealing as they are now, or would they have skimmed over my head as simply a setting for the adventures of children I may have longed to be? It’s a moot point of course, but regardless, I am pleased that Saville’s landscapes of the Mynd were already recently fixed in my own, ahem, mind, when I came across the tremendous audio exploration of place released in 2023 by Joel Pike, aka Tiny Leaves.

Emerging from an artist-in-residency week at the National Trust’s Cardingmill Valley site in 2021, ‘Mynd’ is a meditative narrative through the landscape with a deep connection to nature. As example, Pike harvested sounds from the conductivity in the leaves of trees to his synthesiser and subsequently discovered that Alder Trees communicate via their roots through a sonic frequency that corresponds to the note A3 on piano.

Now I admit that I struggle sometimes with conceptual music that does too little or too much with field recordings. It is, it seems to me, a damnably tricky balancing act to carry off. Pike errs on the side of caution which, to an admitted audiological ignoramus such as myself, is doubtless For The Best. For the entirety of its 41 minutes and 41 seconds the record subtly interprets the sounds of the landscape with delicate gestures of eloquent decoration. This balancing act is perhaps best captured on the exquisite shimmer of ‘With The Hollow At My Feet’. A five minute meditation on the pause during motion, it is the aural equivalent of a Dorothy Wordsworth diary entry, a breath of warm air and the glimpse of harebells dancing in the breeze. One suspects that Malcolm Saville would wholeheartedly approve.

Unpopular Advent 2023 – Day 4

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Vic Mars – ‘Pen Y Fan’ from ‘The Beacons’

The Clay Pipe label released a perfectly formed handful of records in 2023, their 3” CDs by David Boulter, Zyggurat and D. Rothon in particular being gleaming gems. It is such a glorious format, and artist/illustrator Frances Castle typically makes the most of it. Of the ‘big’ records, both Cate Brooks’ ‘Easel Studies’ and the Gilroy Mere ‘Golden Gate’ LPs could have represented in the Unpopular advent, but it is Vic Mars’ magnificent ‘The Beacons’ that gets the nod.

In terms of musical pleasure there is little to choose between any of these three records, and ‘The Beacons’ wins through only from a sense of connection, however slim and fleeting, to the landscape memorialised in sound. Track titles variously reference particular mountain peaks and places: Picws Du, Foel Fraith, Corn Du, Cam Llwch. Elsewhere it’s human interventions in that landscape: ‘The Obelisk’ (presumably that which commemorates little 5 year old Tommy Jones who died on the Brecons after wandering off in 1900), ‘MF 509’ (a Wellington bomber which crashed on the Beacons in 1944’) and ‘Memorial Cairn’. All of this music is strongly evocative and suggests a deep connection to the landscapes that it celebrates.

Best of all is perhaps the sonic conjuring of the iconic Pen Y Fen, the mountain whose impressive scalloped Northern face graces the album cover and which we glimpsed every morning in the distance from our short August retreat in the hillside above Talachddu. A blend of whisper thin refrains, thrumming low frequencies and muscular drums suggests the mountain’s monumental status whilst acknowledging the delicate beauty of detail. Skies darken and break into sunlight with the beat of a wing. Here is peace, sorrow, release, escape and enfoldment. Both inherently of the landscape and irrevocably outside it.

From Lunesdale to Budleigh-Salterton.

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Regular readers of the Unpopular Guide To Crime and Detective Fiction, if there be such a thing, will know that I have a particular penchant for books where an effective sense of place is evoked. A decent setting, preferably in a landscape where the real is either barely fictionalised or easily recognisable is almost guaranteed to have me hooked and spending my time between reading bouts poring over old OS Maps. George Bellairs is a master of this, particularly with his books set on the Isle of Man, as is E.C.R. Lorac, whose books set in Lunesdale are one of the greatest pleasures in her impressive catalogue. I have written about this before, of course, but the recent publication of her ‘Theft Of The Iron Dogs’ in the British Library Crime Classics series makes a re-statement of Lorac’s tremendous appeal worthwhile.

First published in 1946, ‘Theft Of The Iron Dogs’ (it’s title in the U.S.A. was ‘Murderer’s Mistake’) is another one of those terrific post-WW2 novels that captures a sense of the age and gives an astute nod to the immense social shifts that are inevitably occurring in the English landscape, both physical and metaphorical. The theft of clothing coupons acts as one such contextual marker in the book but is significant only in so much as to mark out a character as one of those Spiv type chancers whose actions are bound to be dubious and whose sticky end we find difficult to mourn. That said, there are numerous references to the importance and value of fabrics throughout the book, which feels faintly quaint to anyone rooted in the disposable culture of our own times, but which effectively captures something of the austerity of the times. There is too something of the way in which old, well-worn, tatty overcoats and raincoats are seen as a symbol of pride amongst the gentry (I’m reminded of this again in a wonderful Harriet Rutland novel that I’m currently reading), and indeed it’s the ratty, smelly (“all good tweed smells!”) overcoat used in a reconstruction that helps nail the murderer.

In terms of the murder, it is a little difficult to say too much about this aspect of the book without giving away spoilers, but suffice to say that Lorac seems to use the book to tentatively explore those notions of the changing positions of class in the structure of the English landscape so vitally prevalent in the post-war period. There may still be a degree of mistrust in the itinerant working-classes, but Lorac does a decent job of attempting to play a fair hand. It’s notable of course that in her Scotland Yard character of Inspector MacDonald she allows the body of the Police force to be seen as decent and entirely reasonable, something that would, I’m sure, feel sadly alien to many in our 21st Century times. Whether the portrayal is any more accurate of the state of policing in 1946 is, of course, entirely up for debate.

The book really though is about that division between rural and urban that seems to have coloured much of the immediate post-war period. Lorac makes the point early, noting that “In the [rural] north-west of England the war effort had not been concerned with the nervous energy required by resistance to bombs or doodles or rockets: it had been the strain of sustained physical effort.” Later, she has characters discussing this divide, with one asking “Why the devil do we equate civilisation with cities?” before noting that the open fire before which they sit is “worth more than the proximity of cinemas and shops.” Finally, at the book’s conclusion, Lorac has her Inspector MacDonald reflect that “The life of the land was incomparably more important than the deaths of two men who had never realised that man still lives by the land and that its tilling is more fundamental to human needs than the accumulation of money.” No doubting where Lorac’s sympathies lie in that urban/rural debate, then…

Headon Hill’s ‘The Cliff-Path Mystery’ was written nearly a quarter of a century before Lorac’s and it shows. Many novels inhabiting the crime/detective genre from this period seem to me to be caught in a place where the author cannot quite decide if their book is a mystery or a thriller/adventure and end up with a foot in both camps, with neither convincingly planted. ‘The Cliff-Path Mystery’ is certainly such a book, but has more than enough charm to make up for this fact, particularly for anyone familiar with the Devon coastline around Budleigh Salterton, which here becomes Bicton-On-Sea.

The ‘mystery’ alluded to in the title refers to the death of a ne’er do well character tramping the coastal path who rather fortuitously stumbles on a letter in an overcoat pocket (those damned tatty overcoats of the gentry again). Said letter remarkably alludes to a wife deserted by the tramp some seven years previously who now, even more remarkably, appears to be living in Budleigh and planning to marry a retired Colonel. Such scarcely believable coincidences (which are unfurled in the first few pages of the book, incidentally, so I’m hardly giving the game away here) do rather set the tone for the book, which romps along in much the same way for it’s entirety. Naturally there is a Scotland Yard element (both retired and serving), alongside mystery romance novelist Claude Raven (which if one were to be enormously generous one might suggest lends the novel a gossamer thread of postmodernism) and his daughter who lends a romance element of sorts. Throw in an illicit distillery, a melodramatically evil financier (“with the coal-black hair and the Hebraic nose”, naturally) and a gaudy stage celebrity whose star has waned, plus sundry stereotypical Toughs and Wrong’Uns and you have a concoction that fairly bubbles with entertaining action. It’s hardly top-drawer stuff, and if the final third of the book dissolves rather into run-of-the-mill adventure yarn, that’s fair enough. Still, it is more than worth the 79p admission price for a Kindle edition. One might be excused for asking for a new cover, however, as the design of the Black Heath Classic Crime series books really are universally appalling. Many is the time I have shuddered and passed on their titles when they are ‘recommended’ by the algorithm, and I would certainly have done the same with this one if not for the local setting. As such, the cover shown here is my own replacement, dashed off in a few idle moments. If I ever pick more of the Black Heath reissues (and after this one, I admit, I could be tempted) I can see the template being re-used (publishers please note that I’m for hire)…

‘The Cliff-Path Mystery’ does capture its setting remarkably well, however, and it is obvious that Headon Hill must have been intimately familiar with Budleigh Salterton and its environs. The old Rolle Hotel for example becomes Royal Hotel (see what Hill did there?!), whilst the importantly positioned ‘Peak House’ is most likely the red-brick late Victorian villa that sits above the site of the former Rosemullion Hotel, its garden gate vitally giving direct access to the cliff-path. I admit that I am uncertain if the Rosemullion would have been built at the time Hill wrote his novel, but nevertheless the inclusion of Claude Raven as “a household word on four continents as a writer of sensational fiction with a punch in every chapter” seems a rather nice nod to the fact that Sir Henry Rider Haggard enjoyed spending some of his last days at the hotel. Entirely possible too that this is merely my projecting knowledge onto the fiction, but that is half the fun of such things, isn’t it? Meanwhile, the retired Scotland Yard detective sergeant and his wife keep a lodging house on the Parade, which these days is commonly referred to as ‘Millionaires Row’. So a shrewd investment for their future family I should have thought. Elsewhere, the golf course (where Noel Coward’s Elvira Condomine would spend “seven hours of every day”) is of course in play, as are the cottages and villas of Victoria Place and the imposing holloway of Dark Lane. Also, as is not uncommon in such books, there is a mixing of real and not-quite-real place names. Exeter, Sidmouth, Ladram Bay, Brixham (with specific reference to the brown sailed trawlers at work in Lyme Bay) and the distant Berry Head are all named, but Newton Poppleford rather bizarrely becomes Newberry Poppleton.

Of course one of the downsides of having local knowledge is in seeing peculiarities amongst accuracies. As such, anyone with a working knowledge of the area (and now, by default, anyone reading this) cannot help but wonder why anyone going from Budleigh (okay, okay, Bicton-On-Sea) to ‘Mucklepath Farm’ (which is supposed to be very close to Ladram Bay – so perhaps the real ‘Sea View Farm’) would go all the way up to Newton Poppleford and then back down the lanes. Why would they not just cross the river by the Otterton bridge and cut several miles off the journey? It is possible that Hill was overthinking things (as indeed I have just done a century later) in order to extend the time needed to get there from here (or vice versa). Such are the vagaries of landscape, fact and fiction.

Unpopular Book Advent 2022 – Day 13

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‘Shalimar’ by Davina Quinlivan
Published in 2022 by Little Toller Books. Buy direct here.
This review was originally published by Caught By The River here.

Tolstoy famously reckoned that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” whilst just over a century later Douglas Coupland figured that this could all be simplified down to the notion that “All families are psychotic.” Writerly conceits both, of course, but surely underpinned by the truth that any understanding of immediate and extended human family is damnably tricky and endlessly elusive. Yet despite or because of this it seems also to be some kind of ageless imperative: Who am I? How did I get here? Same as it ever was…

Davina Quinlivan undertakes a deeply personal exploration of her own family history in the elegant, eloquent magical realism of ‘Shalimar’, although wisely chooses to do so in part as a means of engaging with themes of migration and sense of place and belonging. Structured in three sections, the book explores distinct places (Burma, Surrey, Devon) and periods of Quinlivan’s personal history. This underlying structure allows the author to tease out specifics (some of the historical contextualising of Burma, for instance, is particularly interesting) whilst also necessarily casting out the tendrils of individual transformation that bridge across all three. Time wrinkles and slips continuations of the past into the present. Ghosts slip through these crinkles and settle gently on our hearts, tempting us back to go forward.

My own interest in family might be described as ambivalent at best, for whilst I admit a degree of interest in the physical geography of my genetic past (hill farms and coal mines, a TB clinic turned into a caravan park), my interest in individual’s lives is almost entirely non-existent. Perhaps it sounds heartless and crass to suggest that the individual is a fleeting irrelevance in the face of more lasting physical presence, but I’ve become comfortable with that. Perhaps too this explains my complete inability to empathise with those (irrespective of gender) who appear to feel a physical need to have children. I have looked inwardly to the place where I imagine others experience this feeling and have seen a gaping chasm of emptiness. Which is needlessly theatrical of course, because the lack of something does not necessarily suggest a void waiting to be filled. So whilst I believe I can understand something of the drive for genetic continuation, this is solely in abstract terms. Emotionally, I feel nothing.

As such, I admit that I find it very difficult to generate much interest in other peoples’ families, Quinlivan’s included. Yet whilst this may be me projecting, I cannot help but sense in ‘Shalimar’ a tacit acknowledgement that if there are few things more boring than reading about other people’s dreams or drug stories, then hearing about their families is a topic following closely behind. It’s those broader themes of the book, therefore, that succeed in drawing me in. The elliptical trails of colour that weave around meditations on loss, place, nature and the very act of movement through landscape are captivating and deliciously drawn. It may be down to Quinlivan’s background in the academic world of film criticism, but regardless, ‘Shalimar’ displays an astute understanding of pace and innate awareness of when a scene might have outstayed its welcome. The ebb and flow between the personal and what we might broadly accept as being the universal is perfectly portrayed, whilst the inevitable references to films and books are dropped at opportune moments and always fit seamlessly with the underlying narrative, often defying gravity in that they simultaneously inform and are themselves informed by the context around them.

It’s the concluding section of the book (titled ‘Devon, Rivers’) that really floors me though. I read it in the haunted Ayrshire landscapes of my own youth; these twenty pages consumed whilst sitting in a hotel room on the hillside where once the ghosts of young men dreamt of distant shores and of life being plain sailing. A quarter of a century has passed since then, and if the place no longer drains my energy in the way I remember (or imagine?) it once doing, the dull aches are nevertheless recognisable. They penetrate my carefully constructed defences, hostile companions to the constant presence of sciatic pain. Some days I wish that my memory could be as numb as the lower right leg that denies the existence of hail battering against it on winter cycle rides. Perhaps perception really is everything and if things cannot be felt then they surely do not exist? Some days I dive into this belief and let its non-existence enfold me.

Quinlivan’s short passages about Devon, then, are like laser guided munitions ripping deliciously through my defences. Riddled with familiar place names, they leave me breathless with an almost physical yearning for the place I have called home for more than half of my life. Thorverton, Brampford Speke, Silverton, the road between Rewe and my own home village of sixteen years: names that necessarily resonate with deeply rooted personal memory, yes, but also with something altogether more intangible and spiritual. A surprisingly powerful surge of emotion rushes through me as I read these pages, like sap rising from the depths. The sun dipping below the horizon beyond Ailsa Craig might be visually beautiful, but it cannot hope to compete with this love for another place.

There is a lovely moment in this section where Quinlivan and her own children point to their home on the aged OS map that hangs in the Killerton estate visitor’s centre. It is a moment of connection to an unknown past within a precious present and an unseen future. One of those wrinkles in time. I have looked at the same map, and whilst our house does not yet feature (our street is still an orchard), I can at least point to Joan Dewdney’s cottage, out of whose thatched roof hordes of sparrows descend daily to nibble the greens in our garden.

I can’t help but wonder if our paths have crossed. Perhaps as I’ve cycled home along Green Lane, returning from rides between the high Devon hedgerows? Perhaps on a walk to the 15th Century church isolated in sheep-filled fields or over the Exe in the Secret Garden on a summer’s afternoon? Not that it matters much of course, for as ‘Shalimar’ itself suggests, the energies from these places that nourish us will continue to exist long after our flesh and blood have evaporated into the void. Our connections, genetic or otherwise, may root in one place and give meaning and context, but only the magic of place will endure, perhaps enriched by the imprint of our impermanence. There is something oddly comforting in that, even for a cold fish like me.

Unpopular Book Advent 2022 – Day 12

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‘Return Of A Native’ by Vron Ware
Published 2022 by Repeater Books. Buy direct here.
This review was originally published as part of a longer blog post here.

Hall’s Farm sits on the lower slopes of Higher Metcombe, a stone’s throw from the Western edge of the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. I pass it regularly on my bicycle, in a blur going down and rather more sedately going up. It’s home to The Metcombe Herd, which perhaps sounds like a rural 1960s Peter Frampton tribute band, but is actually a gang of pedigree Holstein Friesian cows. There’s a nice little sign on the end of one of the outbuildings proclaiming this, although lately it’s obscured by a larger one announcing that the farmhouse, its outbuildings and 18 acres are up for sale. I dread to think what will become of the place. Will it continue as a small working farm or will it fall foul of the drive to turn every available piece of rural architecture into second homes and holiday lets? Will the fields be dotted with Yurts and will signs for Glamping replace the one for The Metcombe Herd? Sadly, it feels inevitable. West Hill, with its exclusive gated properties, is a stone’s throw away, after all, and one imagines the inhabitants there would rather have more Chelsea Tractors in the lanes rather than mucky Masseys towing trailers of slurry.

There was a time when I was profoundly mistrustful of the countryside. I remember Lawrence of Felt/Denim/Mozart telling me the same thing. About how he was terrified of rural sounds. Animals, birds, whatever. That and the silence. He said he needed the reassuring constant thrum of the city to feel safe and alive. At the time I was living in the centre of Exeter which was hardly a metropolis (a visiting musician from LA described it at the time as being ‘pastoral’) but I kind of knew what Lawrence meant. During this time I also lumped farmers in with every other type of rural dweller as being ignorant blood-thirsty Tories to be despised and ridiculed, every one a cartoon comic strip villain from Chris T-T’s ‘The Huntsman Comes A Calling’. Foolish and naive, of course, particularly since my own ancestry is firmly rooted in the soil of tenant farmers and Ayrshire fields. My great-great grandfather bred champion chickens, and the High Park farm at which various ancestors worked still sits above Cairn Hill in New Cumnock, a stone’s throw from the council house I was born in and the now empty site of the school I once attended.

It is only in more recent years that my (at best) ambivalence towards the countryside and farmers has shifted. Sixteen years of living in a village in the Exe valley have been the primary driver for this, I’m sure, although there is some symbiosis too with my reading an increasing amount of what I guess folks refer to as ‘nature writing’. Any previous urban arrogance/ignorance about the countryside then has dissipated, more youthful perceptions of the rural/urban divides replaced by developing understanding of the complexities and inter-connectedness of what we see around us. There is certainly something of this in Vron Ware’s excellent ‘Return Of A Native’. I first read some extracts of the book on Caught By The River and was immediately taken by the imagery of the fingerpost sign defaced at a crossroads in the depths of Hampshire. Ware’s writing around this sign and its significance is captivating. She weaves elliptical stories around it, ruminates on meaning and impermanence. This kind of personal rumination is common in so many non-fiction books these days, but as I have mentioned previously, it is a welcome strategy for it allows the reader to understand the inevitable interplay between the global and the personal. Ware does this as well, if not better than most, and the passages about moving to and fro between London and the Hampshire cottage of the/her past to visit her mother are poignant and tender. That space between the rural and the urban is played out in sensitive, understated ways. There is anger and frustration here too, however, aimed mostly at those who have made excessive financial gain out of exploitation of resources/the land/the rural population. There is some excellent historical exploration of the shift from essentially horse-powered ‘human’ scale farming to mechanised agriculture on an industrial scale, particularly around the development of the factory farmed chicken, and throughout the book there are fascinating excavations that explore the relationships between land ‘ownership’, exploitation, slavery, hunting, class, betrayal, rock and pop culture and all points in between. Ware is always engagingly informative about these issues (as one would expect given her decades of writing about racism, gender, history and national identity) but is clearly keen not to fall into the trap of being overly judgemental or to be tempted by the simple stance of ideology. Instead her overviews strike a fine balance between righteous indignation and the pragmatic awareness that Things Are Complicated. Except when they aren’t, of course, which means that any kind of obnoxious apologist attitudes towards racism, sexism and exploitation of the working classes are given short shrift. There is not much love lost either for City Bankers (yes, the rhyming slang is very definitely implicit) who used the Banking crisis of 2008/9 as an opportunity to syphon money into the purchase of cheap agricultural land, thereby protecting their capital and not coincidentally benefiting from tax breaks. Ware additionally shines a light on how these new ‘hobby farmers’ were/are quite happy for these farms to operate at losses, deductible for tax purposes from their obscene City bonuses. All of which doesn’t exactly fill me with hope for the future of Hall’s Farm.

Mature, expansive, yet engagingly personal, ‘Return Of A Native’ then is a compelling outline of the state of England’s rural landscape in the 21st Century and how it got there, for better or for worse.