Periodical: In his preface, Ian Jack, Granta's editor, admits with wry self-regard to being a secret reader of Country Life, the magazine renowned for its weekly portraits of those "girls with pearls".
Its articles on wheelwrights, small English breweries, and hedgerow birds offers, he suggests, a comforting utopia even for London lefties like him who dream of purchasing a rural retreat from their increasingly anxious city lives.
The vision of country life presented by this miscellany is often an anthropological one, sketched out by the city intellectual touring the shires with his or her notebook. The Canadian writer, Craig Taylor, is one of the few to engage directly with the profound changes in farming which have resulted from the Common Agricultural Policy.
He does this simply by returning to the village in Surrey so richly documented in Ronald Blythe's 1969 study of English rural life, Akenfield. By talking to the original interviewees alongside younger farmers and new arrivals to the village, the precarious nature of English rural enterprise becomes quickly self-evident, whether it is an orchard foreman explaining why he can no longer make a living from selling apples to the supermarkets, which require a perfectly sized cox's pippin with 25 per cent flush colour, or the retired seaman who wonders whether red hot chilli peppers might make a viable winter crop.
As Tony Blair insists that the Common Agricultural Policy needs to be renegotiated under his EU presidency (apparently forgetting that the most radical reforms of the last 20 years are being implemented as he speaks under the Fischler proposals), "country life" offers not some retreat to arcadia, but a livelihood as much dictated by the vicissitudes of world trade agreements as any other industry. Kathleen Jamie's exploration of an abandoned mining village where her great grandmother lived in Dickensian squalor among the slagheaps on the moors above Ayr, maps out the evidence left by this economic history on the rural landscape. As might be expected from one of Scotland's foremost poets, it's a beautifully crafted meditation on family history that powerfully evokes the strangeness of the place. Jeremy Seabrook also looks back to the exigencies of domestic life in a downbeat appraisal of his own provincial town where the "nostalgia for self-reliance" after the second World War persisted even in the street names of Upper and Lower Thrift Street. A photograph of cheery teenage girls with bantam hens tucked into their oxters taken on a farm visit in 1933 is included among a series from the Daily Herald archive that show how close an interdependence the working classes in town and country enjoyed before their recent divorce under late capitalism. The crowds of hop-pickers arriving in Kent off the London train with their heavy suitcases in the 1940s stand in sharp contrast to the empty fields lamented by Craig Taylor's interviewees.
Given Tim Adams's telling statistic that 275 hours of British parliamentary time were spent debating the ban on fox-hunting when only seven were allowed on the decision to invade Iraq, it is appropriate that his own article "Fantastic Mr Fox" provides the centrepiece for this issue. Realising that the Hunting Act would retire huntsman and saboteur equally when it came into force on February 19th this year, Adams spent the last day chasing over the Surrey downs on the heels of the veteran but super-fit campaigner, Aubrey Thomas.
It's a nicely balanced piece of documentary that traces the curious symbiosis between proponents and opponents of the ban as each has found their life's purpose in afternoons of hot pursuit over the English countryside. When Thomas agrees to exchange hunt stories with Bob Collins, keeper of hounds, over a pint, it's hard to disagree with Adams's closing assessment that "the banning of fox-hunting, was, it seemed, about as close as Britain had lately come to a revolution."
Other treats of this issue rather tendentiously assembled under the tag of "country life" include Doris Lessing's marvellous account of trying to re-upholster an old armchair; a short story by Helen Simpson set on Hampstead Heath, a Studs Terkel interview with Bob Dylan, and a somewhat startled account by Matthew Reisz of his grandmother's affair with sexologist Havelock Ellis.
Selina Guinness is lecturer in Irish Literature at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire. Her article, These Derelict Fields, on the future of farming, appears in the current issue of the Dublin Review (19)
Granta 90: Country Life Edited by Ian Jack Granta, 254pp. £9.99