Gripping Study of the Real Rural Life (From The Oxford Times)

Gripping Study of the Real Rural Life

11:26am Thursday 18th October 2007

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'The Countryside Alliance's wider 'rural' political agenda had always struck me as little more than a cynical appropriation of issues and politics that had nothing to do with hunting, simply in order to broaden its appeal. Worse . . . many of the local leaders of the Countryside Alliance I had come across around our village seemed to have little to do with the village whose side they claimed to be on. I suspected most of the leaders would be hard pushed to name more than a handful of the children within our community whose futures they were apparently fighting for."

Such combative writing concerning a very powerful pressure group - and there is more where that came from - provides a convincing explanation for why Ian Walthew's A Place in My Country (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99) has been denied the high profile it deserves. The Countryside Alliance has considerable influence in the media, especially at the Daily Telegraph. You might have thought that a book of this sort would have provided perfect material for one of the Torygraph's many country columns. But then it doesn't toe the party line . . . On the other hand, this very fair-minded book doesn't take an anti-blood sports stance, either (indeed, our narrator helps launch a small-scale shoot on a neighbour's farm). So that's another important section of our biased media put off too.

Let me then do what I can to encourage sales of this beautifully written book - its author's first - which has something to amuse or enlighten on almost every page. I read it during a recent holiday in Greece and found it hugely entertaining. In part, this was because I recognised a number of the people and places - though their names are disguised - in the area of Gloucestershire, close to Cirencester, that Ian describes. In part, it is because his view of what country life should be accords very closely with mine. But chiefly it is because his discovery of that life, as it is going on around him, is an accumulative process in which the reader shares.

In brief, aged 34, Ian gives up his job as marketing director of the International Herald Tribune and returns, after ten years living abroad, to a new home - and a new start -in England. The area of the Cotswolds that he and Aussie wife Han choose - which I recognised as the village of Coates, with its famous 'hooray Henry' pub, the Tunnel House - provides an interesting study in contrasts. These exist, not least, in the vastly different approach to agriculture taken by the big local land magnate (unnamed, but recognisable by those in the know as Lord Bathurst) and the Walthews' immediate neighbour, 'Norman', who still works in traditional ways.

Stand-offish - as it first seems - and curmudgeonly, Norman steadily emerges, once Ian has befriended him, as one of the real characters of the story. There are many others. They include Geoff, the jovial landlord of the local pub which, at this time, had yet to become an exclusive enclave of the 'Aggies' and other members of the upper class; the ex-gamekeeper Tom who introduces Ian to aspects of rural culture; the ex-soldier Spider, first encountered as a bouncer at a local 'rave'; and the local parson, the Rev Charles Stanton ("Clipped, public school, Stanton was so finely balanced between being aloof and warm that my first impression was that he had achieved a rather disconcerting ambiguity.") One of the oddest episodes recounted concerns the deliberate poisoning - eventually reported on the TV news - of several hundred pounds worth of plants and a third of an acre of lawn at the home of well-heeled newcomers, the Larches. The attacker was never discovered. Some believed it was merely vandalism and not, therefore, as Ian puts it, "an act of class war against people who lived in big houses, sent their kids to boarding schools and hosted their noisy twenty-first birthday parties in marquees in the garden".

Not all agreed, however. "The other more local school of thought was that Peter Larch had badly upset someone and, around here, if you do that, despite all the steady gentrification and class cleansing and barn conversions, this is still deep rural England, full of Gloucestershire man who'll 'ave you."

Combative stuff, as I said.

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