The Place

Ours are not Housman's blue remembered hills as such, more slight risings from a plain, or undulations that have an up and a down but nothing to trouble the butcher's bike. But if not so prominent then, for most, we are still a land they have left behind; perhaps even so long ago that they cannot remember the leaving of it.

George, landlord of the Dragon Inn, - do not mock him for that - says the rounded faces here are not from eating too many turnips, but from an preponderance of Scandinavian genes. In my own family archive there is a faded Victorian photograph of Old Tom - great, great grandfather - leaning against his beached fishing boat next to a slight, round faced indeed, Swedish wife 'caught' on an obviously successful trip across the North Sea.

We have not been a tall family ever since, but we have been sufficiently Nordic in look for Aunt Florence to have been spat at by an old Cretan at Knossos in the 1960's for looking German. Aunt Florence's reported response of thwacking her assailant with her umbrella-cum-sunshade was, it is said, met with some vigorous applause by Cretan wives happy that one of the over-lording men had met an avenging Fury.

There has been some - in recent years much - emigration away from the lands to towns and cities. As farms have mechanised, young men and women were left workless and, latterly, homeless with the surging house prices being paid for summer lets. I doubt many would have stayed anyway; their hearts were not in corn or barley, but in other perhaps falser golds.

We who have remained may have done so more from inertia than rootedness. I myself tried a decade in the South, being so busy with business among people who never once in ten years smiled spontaneously at a stranger. I can recall on returning to the village I hastened away on hearing my name being called out in the street, fearing foolishly that this must be a con or a scam - some preparatory mugger's move. Poor Edith thought I had lost my hearing, but it was only my sense, which mercifully is easier to recover.

[Daughter Ericka says I am now sounding too, too maudlin and - an ironic tribute from one's off-spring - "so gay." Apparently gay now means anything bad, and I've simply not the energy to engage with her on how gay is not to be used that way for fear of offending well-meaning Liberals who wouldn't dream of being homosexual themselves, but who are glad some men are so that they don't have to be.]

So here we are then, we who remain, open to the world though not often called upon. Our view is over The Wolds and for that we give thanks.