Through the unknown, remembered gate

Roger Fry, ‘Village in the Valley’ (c. 1926)

Earlier this week, about an hour before dusk, I was out for a walk, my thoughts lingering on the still green water of the Avon. I shook the day off and slipped into this strange world of intense greenness. From this point of the river, now that the trees are in full leaf, my view of anything manmade is nearly cut off, only the uppermost part of the spire of Holy Trinity church reaches high above the horse chestnuts and oaks that line the bank of the river. I could be anywhere in England and at any time in the last 500 years.

I am lulled briefly into a strange blankness of mind, cast out from within into a world of thick, sleepy stillness, smelling of meadow and grass. Time passes and before I know it May seems to have flowed by me. It is the death of something; the month, a moment, a memory, a vision of oneself that will one day be looked back on, as if through murky water or a layer of fine dust on a mosaic. These glimpses do not come without qualifications, not without the contingency of their ephemeral nature.  “A thing is beautiful to the extent that it does not let itself be caught…"

High above me in the window of blue, a swift screams against the sky, barrelling and twisting on a steep after some unseen insect like a Spitfire chasing down an enemy, this reminds me… one of the books we are now preparing for print is a republished edition of ‘England is a Village’ by C. Henry Warren; a snapshot memoir of English village life in 1940. The book opens in January, one of the bitterest winters on record, as snow blankets the houses and lanes of ‘Larkfield’ village (which is really Finchingfield in Essex). The circumstances are as bleak as the weather as Britain stands alone in preparation for total war against a ruthless Nazi regime marching across Europe. Despite all this, community and kinship abound, recorded with careful and perceptive observations by the author and though the outlook is grim, the inhabitants carry on with quiet resilience. Grand narratives of history, especially WWII, are never in short supply but they often paint an incomplete picture and it is in the quotidian details of life that we often gain a real perspective of how people were living.

Gilbert Spencer, ‘Troops in the Countryside’

Warren's writing captures the lives of ordinary people facing extraordinary times. His descriptions of daily routines, local customs, and the small yet significant acts of friendship among villagers provide a vivid portrait of a community determined to persevere. The children still play in the snow, the blacksmith continues his work, and the village pub remains a place of gathering and gossip, even as the world outside is engulfed in turmoil.

This republished edition not only preserves Warren’s invaluable account but also offers contemporary readers a chance to reflect on the continually relevant themes of community, resilience, the destructiveness of war and the importance of nature.

The sun dips over the hills and I wander back through the winding lanes, canopied with elderflower, up the steep hill to our house that looks out over the town. Night comes like snow, silent and swift and the houses twinkle in the valley below with orange lighted windows. Roses festoon the facades and a black cat glances at me with amber eyes. Ines has been painting in the garden; a painting of the unchanging house. Now it is a charcoal smudge against the darkening sky, just as it was on a summer’s evening in 1940 or 1697 when it was built. ‘History is now’ said T. S Eliot. Upstairs, with the windows wide open, timelessness wafts in with the sound of the bells striking ten and the call of a tawny owl. A neighbor calls in her cats and the hum of a car rises and falls to silence. It’s all so perfectly interesting that one might never go to bed.

Jo March ‘Overgrown Path’

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

-          T.S. Eliot ‘Little Gidding’