Although I grew up in various English villages, both in the North and South, I never really thought about the nature of small communities. I just took it from granted. On my recent trip to the UK, I was reminded how delightfully timeless and whimsical village life can be, and looked at it with fresh eyes.

In Devon I stayed with my friends Monica and Jonathan in Chawleigh in the heart of Devon. It’s a small village with two pubs and a shop surrounded by tiny lanes with high hedges; I am glad I wasn’t driving – all that reversing to a passing spot requires a very flexible neck! I didn’t explore the village as such – we only had one fine day in three (the UK experienced its wettest July for years!), and that was spent doing a glorious circular walk on Dartmoor.

But their house is a voyage of discovery in itself. The Grade II listed farmhouse, with its smart thatched roof,  dates from the 17^th century – some of the house possibly earlier – and, atop the front door, is the crest of the Earl of Portsmouth – the house would once have been part of his estate. Walking into the house you get a visceral sense of the palimpsest of history: flagstones worn by footsteps over the ages; the sloping and uneven floors; the heft of the of the cob walls (walls made from mud, chopped straw and horse hair, a common practice before 1850); the elegant 12- and 8- pane sash windows; the 19^th century glazing evident in the whorls and imperfections and the thin glass (modern sashes have thicker glass); and the early 17^th Century plank-and-muntin screens.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of these screens. The name alone is fascinating – Google informs me that muntin is a corruption of montant and, in some early spellings, mountain, a word applied to various upright dividers. That makes sense, these screens are an early form of partition wall. The screens in Monica and Jonathan’s house are made of oak and full of holes – and, to add to the intrigue, on the screen by the front door there are initials carved into the wood dated 1941 – most likely by some evacuees.

Then there’s the outdoor privy with an adult-sized seat and a child-sized one – that made me smile – a barn, a well and a former piggery. The apertures carved into the cob wall under the thatch were for pigeons to nest, and are known as pigeon boles. Back in the day, pigeon meat and eggs featured on the dining tables of the gentry.

What an experience it was staying there. It’s the kind of place where things could go bump in the night. Unfortunately, Monica was chatting to me about a podcast about ghosts and mentioned something about a ghost cat and the study door slamming shut. That was enough to fire my fertile imagination. Lying in bed, I kept bobbing up and and down like a meerkat, craning my neck around as if to challenge any spectral forms!

A country fair has taken place in the neighbouring village of Chulmleigh every year following King Henry III’s approval in 1253. What luck that this year’s fair coincided with my visit. We arrived in time to see the procession of vintage tractors and cars filing through the bunting-lined streets. Modern tractors just don’t have the same class as the old ones, their sputtering, chugging engines evoking days of yore. And the cars, among them, Austin Healeys, Triumph Heralds and Stags, Wolseleys, Hillmans and Morgans all belong to an era of fine craftmanship before the production line and robots took over.  Wonderful stuff.

As the rain advanced, we headed out of the village to the cricket field where all the tractors and vintage cars were lined up for closer inspection, and a DJ was playing Golden oldie hits – I couldn’t resist singing along to the Beatles Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. I got cornered by a farmer telling me how much his badger-faced breeding sheep cost – alas, I was not in the market, but I enjoyed watching them being assessed by the judges. I felt I’d walked onto the set of All Creatures Great and Small...

Given the wet conditions we grabbed some lunch from one of the food vans and sheltered in the main tent where all sorts of home-grown, home-bottled and home-baked produce was on display to be judged – from rhubarb vodka to heritage tomatoes, Victoria sponge cakes and scones. In the crepe queue, I got talking to a local, a woman probably in her mid to late 60s, who has lived in Switzerland and Australia but now calls Chulmleigh home. She was waxing lyrical about the activities on offer in the village – the historical society, keep-fit and line-dancing, you name it!

While I’d probably love all the activities and goings-on, there’s nowhere to hide in a small village, everyone knows your business, and there are not that many people to go round. Good boundaries would be essential. Even so, you could quite quickly get Cabin Fever.

That can be the drawback. In my mother’s village in Nottinghamshire there is a village hall but no shop or pub and there’s not much going on. Mum’s house is down a lane leading to the surrounding fields, and she notes the various comings and goings and who’s who. Her running commentary, while not scripted, brings to mind Alan Bennett’s TV Monologues, Talking Heads, which all all feature single women – one a vicar’s wife (that one is quite dark), one a poison pen letter-writer, and one recently widowed woman – you get the drift. Thankfully Mum’s narratives, while full of conjecture and a bit curtain twitchy, tend to be highly amusing.

There’s the man over the road who lovingly cleans his car daily, and takes an elderly relative out for trips, an immediate neighbour who endlessly practises his golf strokes in the garden (the ball making an irritating click noise) while his wife sunbakes on garishly coloured plastic sun loungers in between putting out the washing. The absence of washing on the line usually means they’ve taken off to somewhere in the Mediterranean in search of more reliable sun. That and the dust gathering on their car bonnets in the driveway. Similarly, Mum works out when the people behind her house are away as there’s no noise from the kids and their searchlight doesn’t beam into her bedroom at night. As it happens, she was convinced the light was some kind of special heat lamp on a timer for their chickens, but it turns out it’s just a very sensitive sensor light triggered by a gust of wind or a bird. Then if the lovely neighbours on the other side don’t draw back their hall curtains, she worries one of them must be ill. What again? I say, incredulous. You thought they were ill last week too – maybe they are just feeling private!

But curtains have their uses. Mum always draws the curtains on her top landing which faces the street. Three very kind neighbours know that if those curtains ever remain drawn during the day there’s a problem. It’s a very simple form of Neighbourhood Watch, the kind you only get in small, tight-knit communities. I find it comforting to know they are looking out for her.

This post is dedicated – with great love and affection – to Mum who turns 92 today, 12th September, 2023. Despite battling the frustrations and degenerative effects of old age, she’s going strong and living independently. She doesn’t even have a cleaner! And two weeks ago she was in London helping out with my sister’s grandsons, Mum’s great-grandsons, bathing them and reading stories etc. Go Mum! Go Granny! Go Great Granny! We love you.