Green Fields and Pavements by Henry Williamson.
Probably best known for Tarka the Otter, there exists a Henry Williamson Society. The website is at pains to state it is non-political. It has reason to be nervous his politics are not something to dwell on, but they are difficult to put to one side.
He was a fascist and with that knowledge you are always reading between the lines of his text. This book is a collection of newspaper articles written between 1941 and 1944 on aspects of a his rural farm in Norfolk.
A complex and flawed individual.
Reading this book, and I intend to read others, was prompted by a desire to fill in some blank spaces on the map around Norfolk, as I intend to go there for a few days. It is nice to feel some depth to the soil beneath your feet, and populate lanes with characters gone, and largely forgotten.
A common theme is too much tax, how much more profitable farms were in Napoleonic War and how cheap imports were ruining Britain. It is a common enough theme, just set in a different time frame.
Some of the work in this book is hack stuff really, you know what is going to happen to “Cheepy” the little chicken long before the end of the tale, it really is one long cliché. The other recurrent theme of town not understanding country and the illiterate farmer grates when there is not sufficient gap between pieces and other news crowding it out. These are afterall newspaper articles hammered out after a long day at work on the farm.
At its best though, and the work certainly has its best, it brings to life a lost England written during a time when perhaps England was going to be lost. The pages really sang when Henry went to Devon, East Anglia was very second best and even the most dull reader of the newspaper at the time surely would have noticed.
His hopes for a future England as expressed in this book (which has no overtly unsavoury politics) were never going to materialise, it seems a shame he had to live till 1977 by which time it would have been clear how far from his hopes things had gone. He died the same day that the film crew killed his most famous creation, “Tarka the otter”.
When I was on Exmoor, “The Tarka trail” was a well worn bit of heritage industry which I made every effort to avoid. Norfolk is not so big into the heritage industry so hopefully there are some ghosts left in their natural environment not made to dance and prance for an audience.
His literary output was prodigious, his politics and the active part he played in it probably means he is not as widely read or recognised as he should be, it casts a shadow over his work.
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