Notwithstanding (32 page)

I began to write these stories, only to be flummoxed by Tim Pears, who, in 1993, and very much under the influence of the same Latin American writers who had influenced me, published
In the Place of Fallen Leaves
. It is a beautiful book, set in the English countryside, which will one day be considered a classic. I wrote to him saying something like
‘A
pox upon you, varlet, you’ve written the book I was just about to write’, and he replied, ‘I’ll keep England if you keep abroad.’ In the front of my copy he wrote: ‘To Louis, fortunately busy abroad.’ I have stuck to this agreement until now, and I hope that Tim forgives me for breaking it at last. His book obliged me to approach mine differently, but I hope that it is worthy to be somewhere near his on the shelf.

These days I live in a village in Norfolk, a place where there was only recently a man who lived in the woods with his animals. There is someone else who is a crack shot with a shotgun even though he has only one arm. This village is closer to its past. The dialect and accent just about survive. The names on the graves and war memorials are the names of families who still live here. I hope that one day my son and daughter will feel the same way about their childhood village in Norfolk as I do about mine in Surrey. In these stories I celebrate the quirky people I remember: the belligerent spinsters, the naked generals, the fudge-makers, the people who talked to spiders. I have not written what did happen, but what might or could or should have happened, and at one point I have ventured into a more distant past. Some of the stories I heard turned out to be false, as village rumours often are, but I kept them anyway. The moment I began to write I found that my instinct for fiction rapidly overwhelmed my respect for the truth,
so
that this village might be any village at all. Either way, the literary truth lies not in the details, but in the flavour.

The invisible background, of course, remains precisely that. I mean the imminent prospect of nuclear annihilation, the industrial strife, the inflation, the class warfare, the threat of petrol rationing, the terrorist bombs and the destructive ‘generation gap’ which meant that children no longer wanted to be like their parents, and parents felt hurt and bewildered. Literary writing then, as now, was almost entirely metropolitan. I don’t mourn these things, any more than I mourn the discontinuation of death by appendicitis. I mourn the people, and I mourn my lost youth, which I entirely wasted through not having enough fun.

I have refused to romanticise the countryside in the sentimental way that seems obligatory in England. After all, the first things that strike you upon coming back from living in a town for any number of years, is the truly shocking amount of roadkill, and the late-winter horror of myxomatosis. Those who grow up loving the countryside do so in the same way as they grow to love their parents. I have aimed to capture the feeling of the times, and I do so remembering not so much the village as those who have been translated into the graveyard of St Peter’s Church, and would otherwise have been forgotten. May they not rest, but live. Inter alia: Mrs Booth, Martin Carroe,
Connie
and Cecil Chapman, the Churchills, Rev. Elton and Eileen, Molly Gabb, John the Gardener, Bernard Grillo, Sybil Harcourt-Clark, Alan Harper, Joan Herman, Mrs Hopkins, Molly Hyde, Lavander, Dr Strang McClay, Alan, Douglas and Brenda Maclachlan, Major John Major, Mrs Marriage, General Martin and Jean, Beetle and Tony Nation, the Nicholls, Mary Parker (memoirist of the village, and fellow Morris Minor driver), Peggy, Mrs Robertson (who once spent several days in the bath), Dicken and Ruth Steele, Trotty and Ted Sutton, Rev. David Thompson, Jack Thorn, Buzz Walford, Dennis Wieler, Beryl Williams, Yeoli and Kit Wilson. And Eric Parker, soldier, village patriot, indefatigably enthusiastic naturalist, and literary father of the village. I wish I had known him.

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