“I think you’re going to be miserable until the day you die,” said the man to my left at a dinner party last week. What had I said to prompt such a vehement reaction? Was I asserting the futility of all endeavour, the pointlessness of life itself? No, I had simply mentioned in a quiet voice that my eight years of country living had not made me particularly happy. OK, I said it had made me unhappy. In fact, I had grown to hate it, and my sin was in saying so. Never question the bill of goods once you’ve been sold the myth of the rural idyll. The neighbours don’t like it.
As I write, I sit in a magnificent pile of rose-festooned, elegantly decaying 17th- century bricks in an isolated position high on the Berkshire Downs. The property is owned outright by my solvent and distinguished boyfriend and, thanks to his efforts, the garden is a blowzy, natural, slightly overgrown colour-supplement illustration of the good life.
It gets better. I live here rent-free with my son and enjoy all the privileges of a rich housewife. I do not have to go to work if I don’t mind total financial dependence on another, and I am not troubled by traffic, pollution, crime or bad schools. Our little slice of up-scale Berkshire is much sought after. Newcomers, often fleeing London, can be identified by the manic gleam of achievement in their eyes. It’s a look that says: I’ve arrived, I’ve cracked it.
Oh yes, it’s beautiful, unspoilt, exclusive, rich. All the things you want your country home to be. So why isn’t it working for me and why would I advise those happy newcomers to proceed with caution? The answer is simple (although it’s taken me eight years to work it out): social isolation, boredom and the long, slow death of the spirit due to a lack of stimulation.
Those who do well here have an occupation that purposefully occupies them in the working countryside. Farmers, farriers, coal merchants and septic-tank clearers all thrive. The rest either commute ridiculous distances to their place of work or stay at home looking at the kitchen clock and wondering if 11am is too early for sherry. I am fortunate because I have a job that I can do from home, and can look after my son with only part-time childcare. Ideal, isn’t it? You wouldn’t think so from the far-off expressions on the faces of the women with children around here. We are a bemused-looking bunch who can’t quite figure out why we’re so disjointed and lonely. We spend long days trying to occupy our children, filling in the time until our partners get home from work with news of the outside world.
Socially and economically, the countryside can be divided into two main groups. The people who live in the big houses; and those who live in the council houses and clean for the people in the big houses. At toddler groups, I can mix either with the women in the velvet headbands who drive Range Rovers, or with the tattooed fat birds in the shell suits. I grew up on a council estate, so temperamentally I’m drawn to the fat girls every time. But economically (owing to a leverage of my position through no effort of my own), I am definitely a velvet headband. Neither group trusts me completely. I don’t fit in and, while they will insist otherwise until they are blue in the face, nor do most of the other women who moved here in search of their country-cottage dreams.
Those who survive here do so by getting the hell out at every opportunity. My illustrious boyfriend, who has lived here for more than 30 years, staunchly defends his love of the countryside and his determination to stay. Fair enough, but only severe illness or a train strike will keep him from going to London four days a week. Of the two friends I have made, one survives by running a business in South Africa, to which she has to travel frequently. And the other has such a saintly disposition that you could stick her in a war zone and she’d find something nice to say about it.
“It’s so wonderful for the children, so much freedom,” is the habitual cry of rural defenders. But think about it. Is it really? Yes, it’s a thing of joy and beauty to watch your child run up a country lane with his dog, the cow parsley billowing in the breeze. But do it every day because there’s nothing else to do, and it soon begins to pall. And what about when they get older and the nearest sports centre is 12 miles away? Do country children retire to their rooms with improving books? No, they do not. They do what bored children everywhere do – smoke dope and ring each other on their mobile phones.
Undoubtedly, my son will experiment with drugs and be a mobile-phone user, but there are survival skills I would like him to pick up along the way. Such as how to get on a bus or a train. How to deal with the homeless and street aggression. I don’t want him to go into a pub at 18 for the first time in his life and be horrified when a fight breaks out. I want him to do a bit of underage drinking and clubbing, like youngsters in towns all over the country, and learn how to handle himself.
And I’d like him to see a few faces that are not white. My son is mixed race and has already made friends with the one other mixed-race child in our exclusive little slice of England. A bit of diversity would be nice. A bit of tolerance wouldn’t go amiss, either. The landlady of our village pub disapproves of the coupling of black and white human beings on the grounds that it is unnatural. “Pigs don’t have sex with cows do they? It’s disgusting.”
And what about me? Aided and abetted by a genetic disposition, country living has turned me into an alcoholic. Boredom and loneliness don’t seem nearly so bad the other side of two bottles of wine a night. Now the highlight of my week is attending a local AA meeting on a Friday night.
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