Nostalgia is a funny thing. It can lead you to view the past through wonderfully rose-tinted glasses, longing for a time that exists almost entirely in your imagination. But it can also occasionally point up some hard truths.
Some memories of the past
I was reminded of this recently when I came across a photo taken decades ago of one of the local characters in the Sussex village where I was living. At that time, already in his seventies, a retired farm worker, Dan was the keeper of village memories, able to talk endlessly about times past, having a deep connection with the community and the countryside.
Always dressed in a collarless shirt, braces and a flat cap, he would reminisce about farming pre-World War II, having been first employed as a boy to care for the massive Shire horses still used for most heavy work on Sussex farms in those days. He told of the special vocabulary, unique to each village, that was used to command the horses or oxen pulling the plough, and he was still able to remember the names of many of the Jersey cows that he had milked as head dairyman on the same farm later in his life.
Dan had lived in the village almost his entire life, and he cared deeply both for its past and for its future. When I asked him once what the rows of strange-looking plants were in his immaculate vegetable plot, alongside the cabbages and carrots, he explained that every year he collected fallen acorns from the village oak trees and seeds from the ash and beech and grew them on.
When the seedlings were large enough, he planted them out on verges and uncultivated land around the village. “I know that I won’t live to see them anywhere near full size,” he explained, “but I’ll know that they will be there maybe for hundreds of years after I turn up my toes.”
Changing nature of village life
He was also a determined gloom-monger, constantly complaining about how the influx of “newcomers” was changing the nature of village life. As I was one of those newcomers this was sometimes a little difficult to take.
One day when he was launching into his familiar grumbles and I was thinking to myself, “Here we go again,” he suddenly paused, and then said with a catch in his voice, “The heart of this place is being hollowed out. Come the future, it will have no heart left.” It was said with such emotion and the phrase was such an unusual one that I have always remembered it.
At the time, I thought that he was being over-dramatic and indulging a misplaced nostalgia for the past. After all, we were one of only three households who could be described as incomers. Most people in the village worked for the local farmer.
But perhaps he has been proved right. Decades after that conversation, the majority of the picturesque cottages in his village have been sold or rented out to a transient population of tenants who have little or no connection with the place. The hubs around which village communities traditionally cohered have disappeared – changing demographics leading to school closures, pubs shutting, and many churches struggling to attract any but a tiny percentage of the population.
Other elements have contributed to a profound change in village life. The rise in car ownership, the loss of agricultural jobs, accelerating property prices and the proliferation of television programmes selling a false dream of country life have all had an impact.
(I heard recently of a farm situated in the centre of a village near Lewes being sold off after the famer grew sick of constant complaints from the residents of a new estate about tractors leaving mud on the road and his cows smelling. The “idea” of living in the countryside had obviously appealed to the incomers, but the reality didn’t quite measure up. “Perhaps”, the farmer was quoted as saying, “They’d have preferred cardboard cut-out cows and fields full of effing primroses.”)
Hope for the future
It’s easy for nostalgia for the past to lead to an idyllic view of rural Sussex, and a focus on all the good things lost. In reality, village life was often insular, judgemental, and deeply conservative.
And yet… analysing what lay beneath Dan’s heartfelt complaint all those years ago, what emerges is the importance of community, of human connection, of shared memories, of places where people can come together. Villages that have developed organically over centuries and are still flourishing can tell us a great deal about how we should be thinking about the design of new communities, both urban and rural.
There are many examples in Sussex of villages where people have come together to fight the “hollowing out” of their community. They have clubbed together to buy the local pub or village shop, they have fought the threatened closure of their school, raised funds to build a village hall and created community orchards and wild spaces.
There is an enormous amount to be learnt from these initiatives and from the positive coming together of village communities to confront change and create a positive view of the future – as long as we remove those rose-tinted glasses.
By the same author
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