Godless in Eden - Fay Weldon

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partners, but is not likely to stick with them: somehow she outranks them. And she knows well enough that if she has a baby all this will end. And so, increasingly, she chooses not to. The fertility rate, 3:5 in 1901, is now down to 1:8 and falling, below replacement level. Which may be okay for the future of the universe, but isn’t good news for the nation. We lose our brightest and best.

      And the fourth thing that happened was that in the last fifty years we stopped being an industrial nation and turned into a service economy, and male muscle became irrelevant. I remember the days when they said women would never work on camera crews because of the weight of the equipment. Now there’s the digital Sony camcorder. Put it in the palm of your hand, your tiny hand, no longer frozen. Anyone can use it.

      

      Adam and Eve and Tony Blair, we all have a lot to cope with. And Pinch Me’s always hiding just around the corner, of course, waiting to spring: changing his form all the time, like the Greek god Proteus, to avoid having to tell us the future.

      On being asked by the Features Editor of The Daily Telegraph to write a piece, in the wake of the Countryside March, in the early spring of 1998, to defend the city against the country.

      The countryside is pretty.

      It’s pretty because there are so few people in it. There are so few people in it because there are so few jobs in it. And that’s the nub of the matter.

      

      Yes, you can have a mobile office. Anyone can work from home in these the days of the computer, e-mail, fax, phone and scanner. Who needs the soap-opera of office life? Who wouldn’t want green trees not concrete the other side of the window. So move out. Except it’s insanity, isn’t it? For aloneness, read loneliness. And the blinds stay down to keep the sun off the computer screen. And when the crunch comes you’re the first to go. If the boss has never seen your face why should he bother about the look on it? And try getting the dole in the country: it’s so personal. They don’t just dosh it out like they do in the city: no, they read every word you’ve written on the form you’ve just filled in, and compare last week’s answers, and look everything up in the book – they’ve got time – and say no. And you don’t belong.

      The countryside is relaxing.

      Yes. You can tell from the clothes of the people who come up on the Countryside March. They don’t have many full-length mirrors in the country; countryfolk being either too haughty and grand to need them or else the ceilings are too low to fit them in. That must be it. The countryside’s not for the vain – heels sink into the mud, like the heels of little Gerda’s pretty red shoes in the Hans Christian Anderson story. Down and down they pulled her, ‘til she stood in the Hall of the Mud King. The countryside’s all practical woolly mufflers and crooked hems and garments it would be a wicked waste to throw out. The country’s full of good worthy people. A good girl in the city is a bad girl in the country. In the country the hairstylists like to turn you out looking like their mother. Well, they do that anywhere in the world, but you get the feeling in the country that they don’t like their mothers very much. Not that it matters; go out for the evening and the place is hardly jumping with film crews and flashbulbs. Who’s to see you?

      The countryside is healthy.

      No. It isn’t. But it’s unkind to go into that one. Let’s just say, organophosphates have made fools of us all. What goes onto the crops and what goes into the soil? We moved to the country once – kept a tranquil flock of rare-breed sheep which roamed our fields, in the most natural of natural ways. We fed them sheep nuts by hand. What was in the sheep nuts? Ground-up protein from more than one animal of origin. ‘Dip them!’ said the government. We built a trough and pushed the startled, innocent animals in, one by one, dripping and shaking and spluttering, nerve poison all over the place. Oh, thanks!

      

      Pollution drifts over the countryside from the cities, lingers over the valleys. And the pollen count! Good Lord. Just listen to the countryside sneezing and wheezing. The cottage hospital closes. The trauma ward’s an hour away. People live longer in the cities.

      

       And yet, and yet! I know. The warm glow of the setting sun on the old barn walls. The brilliant acid green of early spring. The blackness of night, the great vault of the firmament. The sense of a benign and fecund nature, of being part of the wheeling universe.

      But what’s weakness, irrationality. Let’s get back to the brisk facts of the matter.

      The countryside is our heritage.

      Fact is, it’s shrinking and shrinking fast: suburbia creeps out from the towns. Forty-one percent of British marriages end in divorce, and rising. Twenty-eight percent of us live in single-person households, and rising. We have to build houses and build we do. No choice. And where are the bus services to get us to work, from our new ‘countryside estates’? Not down our road, that’s for sure. And work still stays in the city, so travel we must, and travel we do, and use the car, and know every radio presenter by heart. The countryside becomes somewhere to go, not somewhere to be. A car park here, a car park there: this way the castle, that way the old oak tree, and a fast-food snack as you go! Oh, goodbye, countryside. What rats we are, to leave the sinking ship!

      You’re not cut off when you move to the country. Friends will visit.

      Well … the friends from the city who came down at first don’t seem to come any more. For a time they overlooked the fact that you’d deserted them, ran out on them, which is what you did, come to think of it. Nobody likes that. looked down your nose at their way of life and left them. So soon the inconvenience gets to them: the overnight bag, the traffic, and the hours that stand between you and them, your strange new friends with straw in their hair wearing long strands of New Age beads, and no proper signal for the mobile, and you’ve been nowhere and seen nothing except the back of the Aga. They settle you in, and their duty done, abandon you. Serves you right.

      

      And the friends who do persist just seem to want a free weekend (well of course they do: what did you expect?) with you cooking and washing up because now you’re in the country that’s the kind of thing you do, isn’t it? Back to nature, back to the sink, and what, no home-made bread? Friends who seemed perfectly civilised for the length of a dinner, reveal over a weekend all kind of gross personal traits. Eat breakfast in their pyjamas, or smoke dope in front of the children, or complain about no dry towels, and quarrel with your neighbours, knowing you’re stuck with them and they can leave.

      Let’s compromise. Let’s try a country cottage.

      That one used to work, and very well, when husbands had nine-to-five jobs and wives stayed home and looked after the kids. But that’s in the past. Then there was time and energy to work out the logistics of transporting a family, its goods, its bedding, its games and toiletries, to a place some scores of miles away on Friday nights and the reverse process on Sunday evening. Plus guests. And it was lovely, if you were skilled at logistics, that is. Log-fires and cheerful talk and mild drunkenness and happy flirtations and country walks and pink cheeks and a ploughman’s lunch at the pub and no-one worried about drink-and-drive. Oh paradise.

      

      But nine-to-five drifts to eight-to-eight. And Saturday mornings too, and women are working, and the mobile phone and the laptop turns Sundays into Mondays, and the traffic’s worse, and they’ve tarmacked the track and lopped the trees and it’s sensible, but the romance has gone. There’s a strong steel fence where you used to nip under the wire, and the badger set’s been cleared for fear of TB, and what’s that smoke on the horizon – surely not a funeral pyre for the poor dead cows? Or else the Right-to-Roamers

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