The Good Life
Taken from a longer essay ‘Blurred Boundaries’, short listed for The New Welsh Review
Mowsley
In the 1970s, when my mother was still valiantly defending Montello Priory, I was living in a small, Leicestershire village. Mowsley was definitely small, but very beautiful: just a main street – called Main Street – a church, a pub, a village hall and a school. It is mentioned in the Domesday Book and as recently as 2001 still only had a population of 212. Mowsley’s economy had always been agricultural but all of the incomers to the village who moved into its twenty or so new houses in the 1960s and ‘70s used it as a place to commute from, away to work in nearby Leicester, Lutterworth and Market Harborough. My new husband and I were no different. We quickly made friends with other young couples, most of whom already had small children. The mothers had given up work and it was the men who set off each morning to drive through the surrounding villages and into the city and outlying towns. Unlike the older residents who were all involved with agriculture, we treated the village at first, as a (very) rural suburb. I don’t remember a bus service of any kind though I recall a joke about there being a bus once a week. Our new houses had good-sized gardens, a neighbourly fence to lean over and views of open fields. However the half-floral, half-vegetable pattern of my childhood had gone out of fashion.
Leicester had an open market and a large Asian community; our local town, Market Harborough had an excellent vegetable shop. Now for the first time I could buy exotic fruits such as aubergines and avocados, glamorous spices and a variety of herbs, though I wasn’t sure what to do with any of them; I had only just graduated from Katharine Whitehorne’s Cooking in a Bedsitter. I forgot that tomatoes and runner beans used to be seasonal; only earnest political self-righteousness governed my selection of produce in the new supermarket, followed by a new concern about chemical spraying.
I had always associated gardening with the older generation; my mother-in-law would frighten me with Latin names for common plants such as foxgloves and wallflowers, but now I was a grown-up, I felt I should be growing something other than grass. The men felt the same, so five of them, including my husband Gareth, applied for allotments. However something was in the air. The waiting list for allotments had recently trebled and there were none at all within ambling distance of the village.
What was in the air was Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful – a study of economics as if people mattered. It had been published in 1973, followed in 1976 by John Seymour’s A Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency. The Good Life first appeared on television in 1975, and it was in 1976 that Jay Goddard, an older resident of Mowsley, offered to sell the disappointed allotment seekers a small field of just over two acres, close to the centre of the village. He had been in The Staff of Life one night and had overheard their disappointment. It cost each of the five families a thousand pounds and a deal was struck over a handshake that the field would become the property of the last surviving member.
What did we think we were playing at? Looking back it all seems like a game and many of the real farmers must have been chuckling to themselves, though Walter North did lend us his ‘tup’ each year – how eager we were to learn the local terminology – in return for a bottle of whisky. Only one of us had grown up in the countryside and for the rest of us, village life was a complete novelty, but at first we didn’t intend to become self-sufficient. The men had no intention of giving up their day jobs, though the women all did so happily, as one by one we became pregnant. Oh we were young and fertile and strong of wrist and arm, and our field was fertile too.
Even if we had planned to live the ‘good life’ as depicted in the popular television series, we had more in common with middle-class Margot and Jerry than Tom and Barbara. In 1976 there were ten of us: three full time mothers, a lecturer, a teacher, two solicitors, an accountant, a surveyor and a machine-tool engineer. The only one of us with any real experience of living off the land was my next-door neighbour Pauline, who was a farmer’s daughter. But there were books to consult. Home Farm: Complete Food Self-sufficiency by Michael Allaby and Colin Tudge became a favourite and we dusted down copies of books from the 1940s, which still had good advice, even if we were no longer digging for victory. What were we digging for?
Our field was a narrow strip of pasture, which ran between blackthorn hedges from Dag Lane in the east to the backs of houses on Main Street to the west. It had probably been enclosed at the same time as the village in the second half of the 18th century; the undulation of the old ridge and furrow pattern was still visible. There was a water tap by the gate, which opened onto Dag Lane, the dried-out remains of an old pond in one corner, and a large, wooden shed. At first, all we wanted were five good-sized allotments, one for each family. We borrowed a tractor from Walter and ploughed half of one side of the field, but there was still a lot of field left.
Looking back now I am intrigued by how ‘traditional’ our roles were. It was the men who did all the heavy work, the double digging of our virgin plots or the laying of a water pipe alongside them. They drove any borrowed machinery; but it was the women who did the picking, the podding, the blanching and the freezing. Ironically, my main memory of our allotment is of being inside, tied to the kitchen: a daunting pile of unpodded broad beans on the draining board, a crawling child at my feet, scrubbing my nails to try and get rid of the brown vegetable stains. There was probably a copy of The Female Eunuch propped up on the boiler as well. I remember reading it in that kitchen and gasping with surprise and delighted recognition.
Just as the presence of at least one car on the drive in front of our homes enabled us to earn a living and live in the countryside, so the existence of a large chest freezer in all our garages enabled us to become almost self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables.
We weren’t purists; we didn’t try to bottle our produce, though I did try making my own jam one year. I would run out of beans and carrots as early as March but the less appealing items, such as beetroot, lasted much longer. I think I resented the hours of washing, cooking and skinning it took before they could be frozen. However I can forgive a carrot anything even today: how wonderfully sensual and even exciting it is to tug its green feathers and ease a perfectly formed and blight-free carrot from the ground!
There was something addictive about this sense of self-reliance and soon we women were foraging further afield. While our men were out ‘hunting’ we’d take the younger children with us to gather blackberries and collect mushrooms. We put our faith in Pauline’s experience growing up on a farm and she never failed us. A beefsteak mushroom was enough for a family meal and cost us nothing. The addiction became competitive: how cheaply could we live?
Chickens came first; the field shed housed them cosily and later they had their own coop. They would lay Cadbury’s Crème-filled eggs on Easter Sunday especially for the children and provided the rest of us with so many eggs most of the year that we used them for bartering. I once paid an elderly Mowsley resident two dozen eggs and a lift to Market Harborough, in return for a huge horseradish root, which I also had to dig up myself. I think she had the better part of that bargain – the sauce I concocted made my eyes water and my nose run for days.
True to what had now become almost a religion, I tried to cook one of the old hens when she stopped laying. It must have cost as much in electricity as a fresh, young one from a butcher. I also drew the line at rabbit. They reminded me of our lettuces: multiplying so quickly and growing so fast – we had gluts of rabbit. A freshly skinned rabbit in the fridge does, as I’m sure has been observed before, look like a dead baby. No matter how much garlic I used or how long I cooked it in a fierce, homemade, red wine, I could still taste the smell of the rabbit hutch on the back of my tongue.
There was plenty of space to rear Ross Cob day-old chicks and they became a favourite source of meat. They did have an alarming tendency for their legs to give way, probably because they grew so quickly, but after three months they would weigh as much as nine pounds, oven ready. How to make them ready for the oven posed the first ethical dilemma. On the night due for their execution, the men decided this was their job. They met in the dark and bitterly cold shed – we had fattened the cockerels up for Christmas – and after some serious deliberation, slunk away to spend the evening in The Staff of Life. Eventually, the deed was done a few nights later. I believe it involved a broom handle across the necks and some quick jerks of the legs. Thankfully the men took it on themselves to do the plucking and gutting.
On Christmas day in 1978, I cooked my first ‘field dinner’: roast cockerel, broad beans, runner beans, carrots, beetroot, blackberry and apple pie and peapod wine. It had snowed heavily and Mowsley had been cut off, so my parents and in-laws stayed away. In a cot by the side of the table lay our new baby, Tom. To say that I felt like an Earth Mother, rather than just a new mum that day would still underestimate the power of my feelings. I felt sure I was in tune with the universe!
Soon the field was grazing a few sheep, which lambed with the help of our neighbouring farmer, Walter North. He was happy to lend us his lambing expertise, in return for our muscle power when he was calving. Sharing the butchered remains of three lambs equally between five families was a female task. We’d stand around Pauline’s kitchen table and try to divide twelve legs by five, avoid too much scrag-end of neck and we’d swap recipes for the cheaper cuts.
If we mirrored what was happening in The Good Life – I thought at the time it copied us – then of course we had to make our own alcohol. Elderflower, its berries, and blackberries were plentiful in the local hedgerows and we were all eager to experiment. A demijohn glowing like a ruby with the sun behind it, sat on top of my kitchen boiler as we eagerly awaited our first blackberry wine; next to it was another filled with a sludgy, green fluid made from peapods. To my surprise the ruby nectar was completely undrinkable but when it cleared, the peapod wine had a delicate, amber taste. Drinking our experiments was always exciting: there was an element of Russian Roulette as we never bothered to measure its strength and I can still remember crawling on all fours up the stairs while the ceiling swerved viciously above me after two small glasses of next door’s peapod. However elderflower champagne was ‘safe’ as, surprisingly, was elderflower cordial:
Fill a large plastic container with elderflower wine and place it in the freezer
When frozen let it thaw a little and drain off any liquid into a screw-top bottle
Repeat the process until only ice remains in the plastic container
(This can be served as a mildly alcoholic dessert)
The liquid in the wine bottle is distilled genius.
I’m not sure if this is legal…
What did we think we were playing at?
The field turned into a smallholding it’s true: geese and beehives later added to our livestock, but I don’t recall that we were making any kind of political statement. We never intended to live an alternative lifestyle. Why should we when we had the best of both worlds, town and country? We didn’t want an alternative technology: we needed our cars and our freezers. Nor do I think we were part of a ‘back to the land’ movement. If the cabbage white butterflies or pigeons found a way under the net covering our wintergreens, we weren’t going to starve, there was always Leicester market. If the carrot fly attacked our carrots or the fox killed one of our geese, it was disappointing, but in the natural order of things. More seriously, Pauline developed a severe allergic reaction to bee stings after looking after them for several years, so that was the end of our field honey. But despite the reputation of the 1970s as a time of industrial and trade union unrest, despite the oil crises, our power stayed on – most of the time. We brought the abundance of our field inside our homes and the freezers preserved it. My childhood fear of the outside coming in was long forgotten.
In a sense we were playing at being rural: we didn’t depend upon the land for our survival and field was really a shared hobby. It was a place to go on fine evenings throughout the year, there was always something to pick or weed or dig, and there was always someone else there to talk to. It worked because there were enough of us ‘field folk’ to share its duties so that it never became a burden. Each couple was on duty one week in five: this might simply involve feeding and watering any animals we had at the time, collecting and distributing the eggs and locking up the chickens and geese. It was a safe place for our children to play together – just like their parents really. They made dens in the hedges, watched the new lambs being born and learned what could grow from small beginnings.
Am I romanticising all this? From a distance of forty years it would be easy to forget the negatives, but I think we stumbled, accidentally into a ‘good’ way of living. Perhaps the imprint in the field of the old ridge and furrow pattern called us to act out some of the positive aspects in the lives of our peasant ancestors.