Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 109

This is a very English sort of book falling broadly into the ‘good life’ genre. Yet it manages to go a little further than most examples of the genre which tend to irritate and exasperate in equal measure. In brief, the author, a high-flying media man, used to the fleshpots of Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, is posted to London and rather than put up with the horrors of living in that city, he decides to abandon his job and to buy a cottage in the Cotswolds where he goes to live with his young Australian wife. She becomes pregnant at last (fresh air and wholesome veg. presumably), he is able to confront and come to terms with the earlier loss of his father and elder brother, and the pair of them gradually become integrated into village life. In doing so, they meet the usual dramatis personae of earthy characters, loveable rogues, cynical and hypocritical incomers and less than pleasant members of the ‘county set’. Despite his own upper-middle class background, the author finds little point of contact with the latter, appears to despise the ‘white settlers’ (of which he is, of course, a prime example) and prefers to seek the company of the worthy indigenes among whom he learns a great deal of the rhythms of country life. Accompanying the small working farmers, game keepers and tractor drivers about their various tasks, he comes daily into contact with birth, death and decay, causing him to question some of his own values. Meanwhile he glimpses the darkness behind the rural façade as he comes face-to-face with local vandalism and crime and the sheer hypocrisy and moral cowardice of many of the dwellers in Arcady. It is a world of deep social divisions and despite the genuine efforts of the Rector to blur distinctions of class, the orbits of those few working folk still living in the village and those of the barn conversions, former farmhouses and ‘artisan’ cottages rarely converge.

All this will be familiar to those who know Cirencester and its surrounding villages or who have walked or ridden through Lord Bathurst’s great park. The peer himself will be less than delighted by the author’s unenlightened criticism of estate farming, given that the ‘Marsham’ estate is almost certainly modelled on his own, while the authorities at the Royal Agricultural College will deprecate the rather snide descriptions of some of its students. I think I recognize the village in Walthew’s account, and am certain I know the pub which features so prominently in his daily life. Indeed, given the number of nights that he staggered home after long hours of beer, cider and tequila, it is quite remarkable that Walthew ever managed to set pen to paper, let alone produce what at one level can be read as a serious and coherent critique of developments in the modern countryside.

In a manner reminiscent of H.J.Massingham (with even a hint of his rhapsodic descriptive writing) the author attacks the supposedly dehumanized face of modern farming, where economic rationalism has driven the people from the fields and labourers from their cottages and where agrochemicals have ushered in a sanitized landscape of cereal monoculture. He contrasts this with the smaller-scale mixed farming system followed by his friend and mentor, Norman. The author admires this kindly, gentle bachelor who represents an older, less ordered world and we are expected to sympathize with him as he struggles to survive in a tough physical and economic environment. The trouble is that for all his warmth and strength of character, and for all his deep roots in the Cotswold countryside, Norman is the farmer from Hell. He is technically incompetent; his livestock die in the fields for want of a vet, his wheat remains un-harvested in October when all around have already planted next year’s crops, his gates hang drunkenly from their hinges, his cattle and sheep wander at will and he is the quintessentially past master of the botched job. His two hundred acres yield little and despite Walthew’s unconcealed sympathy, Norman’s relative poverty is the product of his own inability to confront the demands of modern farming. It would be nice to think that this island could afford to support a countryside populated with backwoods yeomen of the Norman type with their poppy-infested fields, ancient tractors and homespun ‘wisdom’. But this is a notion as absurd as it is impracticable in a desperately overpopulated land. The idyll, if it ever existed, is dead and gone. It gave way long ago to a wholly different world of wholly different values. As America converts its vast acres to producing biofuel, India and China absorb ever greater amounts of food from the world market and climatic change exerts its insidious effects, we shall need all the food we can possibly produce. If I am right, the Normans of this world will disappear forever along with the inherently inefficient organic systems so enthusiastically supported by the urban middle classes, and the ridiculous notions of extensification proposed for some of our most fertile acres.

Ian Walthew, of course, would be appalled. Yet towards the end of his charming and arresting book the need to earn a living forces him and his little family back to the metropolitan life and, in a sense, back to reality; the reality of the Britain of graffiti, pierced navels and Hello magazine. We are left with the feeling that Walthew’s friends including Norman, the folk in the pub and the other Cotswold denizens in his pages would have little alternative but to confront their own reality by awaiting the inevitable change and the tide of ‘white settlers’ which would finally engulf them.