FROM THE TOP road, the village of Bisley, with its church spire and ancient blond houses, nestles in a cleavage of green hills like an insurance poster promising a serene and happy retirement.
The promise is not an illusion. After twenty-five years in London, we moved here four years ago. There have been no regrets, probably because we were incredibly lucky. Some villages are unfriendly and soulless, others hopelessly intrusive. But we have stumbled on a magic one, where the old are cherished, the widowed or divorced comforted, and the newcomer welcomed. When we arrived, a local hostess even gave a big party to introduce us to everyone.
There is such a strong community spirit, however, that they do prefer new arrivals to settle here, and contribute something to the life of the village. During our first year, I had frightful flak which totally mystified me. Every time I walked up the High Street, someone would come up to me and sourly accuse us of planning to move on.
This, I eventually discovered, was because everyone in the doctor’s waiting room was flicking through the tattered copy of last year’s Country Life which had originally offered our house for sale. Not checking the date, they automatically assumed it was on the market again.
The acid test, however, was whether we were going to live here, or just use the house as a weekend retreat. Weekenders who strut around in ginger tweeds, force up the prices of cottages beyond the purse of young local couples, and don’t use the local shops, are not popular. There was great glee last winter in a nearby village, because some arriving weekenders turned their car over a few miles outside. No one was hurt but their Jaguar was irredeemably impregnated with imported curry destined for Saturday’s dinner party.
Not that anyone needs to import anything here. Besides a marvellous hairdresser, an excellent garden centre and a superb restaurant in the High Street, there is an amazingly sophisticated village shop which sells everything from videos to vine leaves, and attracts custom from miles around.
And there’s so much to read in their windows: ‘My pet chicken is missing,’ says a current notice. ‘He is four, and has vanished from my garden. He is very frenndly and is cawled Mary.’ [sic] And you only have to pop inside the shop to find out anything – whether your daily or your secretary or even your husband is about to leave you. The gossip is so good, in fact, that a local peer implored the owners to install a chaise-longue so he could lie listening all day.
Most villages thrive on gossip, but are outwardly unfazed by it. No one betrayed any excitement four years ago, when a handsome Marquess and his beautiful wife moved into the big house, but when the leaves came off the trees, it was noticed how many of the locals had taken up bird-watching.
Equally in my brother’s village in Northamptonshire, there was wild excitement when a member of Shawaddywaddy moved in and, even better, decided to get married in the village church. On the day, the police put yellow cones along the High Street and gathered in force to hold back the crowds. My brother, intent on weeding the herbaceous border, got very tightlipped when my sister-in-law, my two nieces and my mother, aged eighty, all clambered up a ladder on to the flat roof of the garage and settled down with deck-chairs and several bottles for an afternoon’s viewing. To their disappointment, only six guests and no rock stars showed up.
Back here in our village, they’ve recently introduced a Neighbourhood Watch Scheme, which gives everyone a splendid excuse to snoop legitimately. Jeff, our Saturday gardener, who, in between bursts of frenzied weeding, sleeps in his car in the drive, was outraged recently to be roused from deep post-elevenses kip by the police who’d been alerted that a suspicious-looking character was parked near the Coopers’ house casing the joint.
But if you’re not into snooping, there’s still masses to do here: skittle evenings, pony club discos, clay shoots, men-only chocolate cake competitions at the local fête, lectures on glass blowing at the W.I. and wonderful tobogganing and skiing in the winter.
Indeed it’s a good idea to wait a few months before joining anything when you arrive at a village. A bookseller friend who retired to nearby Oxfordshire, and was worried he might be bored, got himself on to every village committee in the first six months, and spent the next ten years extracting himself.
Although my husband has joined the British Legion and the Cricket Club, which slightly makes up for my nonparticipation, I still feel guilty that I don’t have time to run up a sponge for the Distressed Gentlefolk. Recently I went along to their Nearly New Sale, and found the usual lack of charity which surrounds charity events prevailing:
‘Look, look at that lovely bargain I got for 50p,’ said a fat woman brandishing a tweed skirt.
‘You’ll never get into that,’ said her friend, crushingly. ‘That was mine.’
Living here in Bisley in fact is rather like being in an overseas posting in the army. Not only do most of us wear the khaki uniform of Barbours and green gum boots, but just as you can’t afford to have a screaming match with the Major’s wife over the bridge table, as you’ll meet her at the Colonel’s drinks party that evening, in a village you can’t sack or fight with someone, as you’ll find yourself stuck beside them in the hairdresser’s next morning.
Nor can you bellow at some dog walker for trespassing on your land, because ten to one, you’ll have to eat humble pie because your own dog has used their guinea pig as a cocktail snack. A friend nearby, whose Jack Russell ambitiously seduced a prize winning Airedale, tried to placate the enraged owner by offering to whizz the Airedale down to the vet and pay for an injection to abort the puppies, only to be told that the Airedale’s owner was Roman Catholic and passionately disapproved of abortion. The row continues.
People in the country have a slightly different attitude to animals. If a pheasant waddles across the road, they are not above urging you to accelerate; and their dogs tend to sleep outside, and, bored and cold, start wandering round the village. One, howling recently in the High Street at midnight, was pelted with pickled onions by the woman living opposite. Unfortunately, the following day, an old lady slipped on one and broke her leg.
Village life is happier too if, again like the army, you stick to a few rules. Keep to the footpaths; look after the badgers; don’t cut down trees unless they’re dead and you intend to plant some more; pay all local bills on the nail; say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in the village shop or you won’t get bread saved for you when the village gets snowed up. Don’t hide your notice applying for planning permission under the honeysuckle, so no one sees it, then put up some hideous modern house in the middle of the village.
Attempts to preserve the unspoilt quality of any village, however, can land one in trouble. Recently, an absentee landowner applied for planning permission to build a house and two garages on his field next to us. Egged on by some locals, I wrote a powerful letter to the council, larded with purple phrases about the rape of the Cotswolds, and how the hearts of generations of wayfarers had been gladdened by an unimpeded view of the village, which roughly translated meant I didn’t want a lot of yobboes throwing crisp packets on to our land.
Planning permission was duly refused. Imagine my horror, at a dinner party a week later, when I discovered the handsome, but rather bootfaced man on my right was the returned and very present landowner.
Most villages are resistant to change. Our village idiot, much beloved, remains the village idiot and not a seriously disadvantaged rural person. Gays of both sexes are regarded with suspicion.
‘I wouldn’t go near ’er, Jilly, she’s basstard quee-eer with another woman.’
And because the Cotswold lanes tend to be full of black labradors rather then black people, when a policeman from a nearby village took up with a glorious coloured girl, there was much huffing and puffing. Finally a local worthy headed the protest saying he had nothing against those kind of people, but why couldn’t she go back to where she’d come from.
‘Come off it,’ said the policeman in amusement. ‘She was born in Stroud.’
Similarly when our revered landlord retired after twenty-five years from the Stirrup Cup (known locally as the Stomach Pump) the new landlord got the job principally because he was the one applicant who said he didn’t intend to change anything until he sussed out what people really wanted.
The Stirrup in fact is a mini Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Here you can learn how to increase your marrows, decrease your docks, and dispatch your wasp plague. My husband endeared himself to the clientèle early on by trying to grow the first U-turn carrots in a seed box.
Here you will meet the great local legends, the doctor, so loved that a road was named after him when he retired, a farmer who was so good at imitating the cuckoo that he had local Colonels writing to The Times every January, and Leo Davies, a huge bear of a sheepdog, known as the Dogfather, who has sired most of the puppies in Bisley, and always howls at the church bells.
Here too the Cotswold Hunt meet, once a year. Four stalwarts have to block the doorway to stop the gaunt, greedy hounds charging the bar counter and wolfing all the plum cake and sausage rolls, and everyone catches up on hunt scandal: how a handsome husband has changed packs from the Beaufort to the Cotswold to ride beside his new, much married mistress; how the village lecher has been banned from the Hunt cocktail party for lurking in some comely lady rider’s garden at dusk.
But if gossip circulates at Bisley so do presents. Open your front door on a Saturday morning, and often, covered in dead leaves, blown in by the bitter winds, you’ll find pots of chutney, half a dozen Japanese anenomes, or a newly shot pheasant or even a hare. A copse of poplar saplings given us by our next door neighbour when we first arrived is now over twelve feet tall.
Soon after the trees arrived a local builder rolled up with a dustbin in which swam a huge golden fish, poached from a nearby Abbey for our pond.
‘It’s an orfe,’ he said. ‘We called it Eff.’
Some villagers are more reluctant to receive. An old lady refused some sticks of rhubarb recently because she hadn’t got a dish long enough to cook them in.
But there’s always something to laugh at here. Currently the great excitement is that Philip Howard (of Graduate Gardeners), the local landscape gardener, has moved into a new house, where he’s building a splendid U-turn drive with an underground car port, flanked by a huge wall, known locally as Howard’s Way.
‘How high is the wall going to go?’ I asked my very good friend, the milkman.
‘High as possible,’ he grinned. ‘His mother-in-law’s moving in opposite.’
But the laughter is always gentle. Pretension is chiefly what makes people chunter in a village, like the male half of a couple (who work for a weekending video millionaire) referring to himself as an estate manager, when there’s less than two acres to manage; or like a local snob (nicknamed Tugboat because he chugs from peer to peer) who, on being asked the other day if he had any ducks, replied: ‘Only on the upper lake.’
In other villages people take fearful revenge. One Wiltshire landowner hated his neighbour so much that on learning his neighbour’s daughter was getting married and holding the reception in the garden, he deliberately moved three hundred pigs into the next field on the wedding day. Another villager in Hampshire, who’d been ordered not to take a short cut across her neighbour’s field, organised a sponsored walk along his footpath of two hundred dogs who hadn’t been let out all day.
In Bisley, to warn neighbour not to fall out with neighbour, there is a tiny lock-up, built in 1824. Here, too, Nemesis proceeds at a more leisurely pace. The ex-landlord of the Stirrup, who was also the village undertaker for some time, was ruminating the other evening about a local schoolmistress who’d bullied them all unmercifully when they were little boys.
‘I got my revenge in the end,’ he added with quiet satisfaction. ‘It was me that laid her out and buried her.’