Although I was born in London, I’ve lived in small towns and villages since the age of eighteen months and consider myself a sort of country mouse. Of course, I’ll never be a ‘local’ since I don’t at least three generations of family in the graveyard.
I have no idea therefore what it’s like to live in a city. Would people really step over you while you expired on the pavement (which was my mother’s view when she married Dad and moved into inner London)? Do city dwellers ever notice anything their neighbours do? Most importantly, are there any handy wisewomen in an inner city ready to do the necessary?
At sixteen, when I lived in a village and went to school in a nearby town, I developed a wart on my knee and was very distressed, as it was obviously going to ruin my chances of ever getting a boyfriend.
I was distressed enough to consider consulting one of the girls at school, whose mother was rumoured to be a wisewoman. Allegedly she could remove warts by the time-honoured method of putting a steak on it, then burying the steak at midnight at full moon.
99% of me doubted that (a) this would work and (b) anyone would spend a small fortune on steak for supernatural purposes. It wasn’t a rich area, and I could imagine locals offering her a slice of Spam maybe, but steak was/is rather too expensive and delicious to waste on ‘a rounded excrescence’.
Anyway I had no money, and doubted my parents would give any some for vain magical purposes. Furthermore, the girl lived in another village entirely and the buses stopped running after 9.30 p.m., so how would I get myself, the wart and the steak to her for midnight?
Fortunately for me and my love life, one day I was late for the bus, tripped over the kerb in my hurry and fell flat on my face moments before it arrived. I limped aboard, waved my pass and sat down only to realise that the wart had been knocked off. It never grew back.
Ten years later I was living in a completely different place. This was a small town rather than a village, and the wisewomen were rumoured to hang out in specific parts of a forest a few miles away. However I do sometimes wonder.
One day I was driving to work and had a minor accident. (Minor for me – I only had a whiplash injury, not so minor for the car which was my sister’s and had to be written off – I think she still holds this against me.) I was five miles from home and ten miles from the wisewoman forest. Nevertheless, about a week later after the neck brace had come off, the milk lady (doorstep deliverer of pre-ordered milk and eggs) came round for that week’s money. Now bear in mind that the dairy was in a village in a different direction again.
‘Good evening,’ she said. ‘Heard you had an accident in [name of village] last week. You OK?’
Pre social media and mobiles for anyone but the rich, how did she know?
When we married, my husband came to live in that town with me. As a lifetime city dweller, he rather scathingly referred to it as a one-horse-chicken town or an S-bend with chip shops. I got fed up with this (it was an S-bend with chip shops, plus Indian and Chinese takeaways duh) and was highly amused when some family genealogy discovered that a quarter of his ancestors originated five miles from this one-horse-chicken-town (broadly in the direction of the wisewomen’s wood) and had been buried in that graveyard for about fifty generations before one of them had enough and moved to the ‘big’ city (Gloucester) and their descendants to bigger places.
After about eleven years, the opportunity came up to move to a different county entirely, and we looked on this as a sort of adventure. I initially found it very difficult adventure but that’s another story – let’s stick to the nice stuff which by far outweighed the hard stuff.
My husband rented on his own in a village for a few months till the end of the summer term when the children and I joined him. We lived there while we sold one house and bought another. Until we turned up, I don’t think my husband had really seen anyone in the village because he was working long hours several miles away and came back to us at weekends, but literally moments after I moved in with the children we had a series of visitors.
The first was a lady from the Women’s Institute armed with home-grown vegetables and jam, inviting me to join the group. The second was a retired vicar inviting us to church and the children to Sunday School. The third was someone with information about things on at the village hall. It was rather heart-warming, but there was a tiny bit of me that worried that we’d moved into an episode of ‘Midsummer Murders’ and wondered whether we were going to be victims or witnesses.
By the time we moved again, just before Christmas, into our (hopefully) forever home, it was teeming with rain, the house was freezing and our washing machine packed in. Although it was upsetting at the time, it was the kindness of virtual strangers – people I’d known for a total of three months – who chipped in to help with laundry, emergency child minding, endless coffee/tea/cake, plants, school lifts and most importantly friendship while we adapted.
Country life is also entertaining. Would the following happen in a city? You’ll have to tell me.
Several years ago, old, yellow, disintegrating bones appeared poking through the grass outside the parish church. They were reported to the police and a young PC turned up and spoke to the church secretary.
‘We’ll have to get a pathologist and the coroner and who knows what,’ he said. ‘I mean it could be a murder.’
‘Unlikely though possible,’ she said. ‘But you’re hardly going to catch the murderer now.’
‘How do you know? They’re human bones!’
‘Yes, but look behind you – it’s the church. Look round – it’s the church yard. Those sticking up stones with writing on date 1790 and 1801 are – oddly enough – gravestones. No one has been buried here for two hundred years and those bones are very very old. I’ve no idea how they’ve got to the surface but…’
‘Oh. Yeah. Well. It’s protocol innit.’
A couple of weekends ago, I met a friend for lunch in yet another country town. He’s recently moved away but this was the town he originated from and he was back visiting family.
He was running late because he was walking into town in the rain, and while waiting I was engaged in conversation by an elderly man at a nearby table who wanted to know where I was from and if I’d travelled by bus.
Being me, I started feeling guilty about the fact that I’d driven there, even though the bus service is generally terrible. Then the man listed all the main buildings and businesses he could think of in my town and asked if they still existed.
I informed him that a café was now an optician and an Italian restaurant was now a Gurkha restaurant and was totally blank about somewhere I’d never heard of. He seemed to view this as my fault. I think he was about to move on to how many of my ancestors were in my local graveyard – and be disgusted when I said none that I knew of – when thankfully my friend turned up.
Afterwards, I offered my friend a lift back to his family’s house (as it was still raining) and we walked back to the carpark via an upmarket supermarket because I needed to pick up a few things. He said ‘Do you know, I lived here most of my life, yet I never recognise anyone in the street.’
I said, ‘Do you know, I never come here without meeting at least one person who seems to be the result of three hundred years of inbreeding. Present company excepted.’
‘It’s not really that bad,’ he said with an unconvincing chuckle.
We then went to an upmarket supermarket and waited in the basket only queue. An oldish man came up to me and more or less shouted in my face ‘Where’s the tea?’
I said ‘Er… I don’t know but there’s the coffee [pointing] Maybe it’s there.’
‘OK,’ he said, then stabbed a finger at a small crate that was nearby waiting for staff to unload things onto shelves. It had a banana on top of it alongside a packet of biscuits. ‘See that banana?’
‘Er yes.’
‘That’s my banana. Don’t let anyone touch it. If anyone touches my banana I’m gonna, I’m gonna… no I can’t tell you what I’m gonna do. You’re a lady.’
‘Er OK.’
He wandered off and I said to my friend ‘I rest my case’ and then went to be served.
Now bearing in mind this is an upmarket supermarket, where one might expect superlative customer service, the woman behind the till, like the Tar Baby, she said nothing. She simply stared as if waiting me to mindread. I waved my loyalty card under the scanner and waited for her to say something to confirm it had worked.
She said nothing.
‘Has it scanned?’ I said.
She nodded slowly and deeply and then with the sigh of someone who’d been asked to ladle sand with a sieve, scanned my two items of shopping then waited for me to mindread again. No ‘That’ll be £2.78’. No ‘Card or cash?’
She said nothing.
So I waved my bank card, feeling somewhat unnerved. She pressed a few buttons and eventually the payment went through. Then with evident disgust at having to utter, she barked ‘Receipt?’
I said no, walked out, turned to my friend and said ‘I rest my case again.’
OK OK. So as far as I can establish, my Scottish ancestors lived in a tiny area for generations before one of them got fed up and moved to a big city (Glasgow) and met someone doing the same from a different tiny area. I am also still totally confused about my Kent ancestors, who probably also swilled round in the same area until it was absorbed by London. So what with that subconscious knowledge and what I’ve learned over years of living in small towns, I’ve long decided not to do anything dubious, as there’s a reasonable chance that everyone in a ten mile radius will know about it within ten seconds – possibly before I even realise I’ve done it.
So I think back to my mother talking about her loneliness, aged twenty-three, moving to North London when she was newly married, feeling as if she could die in the street and no one would care and I felt very grateful.
I know that if I collapsed in my town, not only would people care but everyone in a ten mile radius would know before the police did and post it on social media.
And for the record, just in case I develop a wart again, I know where a wisewoman is too! (Although she’s most likely to tell me to get a grip and have a glass of something nice and forget the wart, than ask me to waste a steak or spoil a midnight walk at full moon. Plus she’s vegetarian and I’m not sure it would work with tofu. Then again, I haven’t actually asked her…)
Copyright Words (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. Not to be used without the author’s express permission. Image: Illustration 185276076 © Galyna Novykova | Dreamstime.com
