In the country

Saturday, March 20th., Trinity Hall Farm, Hockliffe.

Out early this morning after a decent night. Nearly five hour first sleep. Feeling pretty fit and very glad to be away from towns and cities, though they pull me still. I suppose it is to do with having been raised in an urban setting. Though I feel happy here I shall never feel that I belong. I am tolerated and humoured by the people I meet locally. They are too polite to tell me I am not one of them, but I know it.

Speaking of belonging, I have just finished reading an excellent short novel which has that as one of its themes. "A Month in the Country" by J.L. Carr. I think it spoke more clearly to me living here than it would have done had I been still living in London or, God forbid, Paris. It is a remembrance by a man named Birkin of a golden summer when he was a young man, not long back from the horrors of the War. He is a restorer of wall paintings in old churches and is commissioned to a job in Yorkshire. There he meets another ex-soldier, lives in the belfry of the church, becomes involved in aspects of local life, and falls in love with the vicar's wife. All in the space of a few weeks of summer. Carr draws his characters for us sparely but sufficiently. We can feel Birkin coming alive again before our eyes. It is a portrait of an ideal, imaginary, England such as we would like to believe in, inhabited by decent people, a place of hope and comfort. Hopelessly nostalgic of course but none the worse for that; I was happily absorbed by it. Only a novella really though presented as a novel in the edition I read which was additionally beautifully illustrated (engravings) by Ian Stephens. A pleasure to read and to look at.