Coming from a family of county council tenant farmers in Suffolk, I loved Rebecca Smith’s article (Here’s what’s missing from the history of rural Britain: the hidden stories of women who shaped it, 30 August). But I can’t help worrying that most people who live in the farmhouses and cottages that once homed multiple generations of one family will be far too busy choosing Farrow & Ball paint colours for their spare rooms to sit down and read Smith’s book.
To the new inhabitants of rural England, the farms worked by my great-grandparents, grandparents and parents before the council sold them off are mere commodities: “period properties” with “great potential”.
In the last years of her life, my dementia-suffering grandmother, who could not remember what had happened 30 minutes earlier but could remember in vivid detail events from 70 years ago, spent hours telling me about life on my great-grandparents’ farm and then my grandad’s. She told me about the chickens that were her responsibility, washing eggs in cold water, and gleaning after harvest for their grain. I heard about potato picking, frost on the inside of windows, the exhaustion of wash day, and the daily battles against mud. And I listened to stories about the pranks she played, the jokes people shared, and the dances, whist drives and parties.
Smith’s book pays tribute to the great characters of the rural working classes. But, I suspect, the new inhabitants of rural England will prefer to continue to imagine those they’ve ousted were all as dull, simple and humourless as they’ve previously been portrayed.
Amanda Harvey
Westhorpe, Suffolk
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