by Tim Maby)
Louis de Bernières wrote this collection of stories over several years, perhaps whenever he needed a little emotional comfort, about a village similar to the one in which he grew up in rural Surrey, in the good old days before commuters and yuppies.
The name, Notwithstanding, like the stories themselves, is a bit twee – in the manner of HE Bates' Darling Buds of May about Pop Larkin's cheerful life with his neighbours in rural Kent. De Bernières is not as funny as Bates, but he has his laugh-out-loud moments. There's a convent of nuns who keep appearing as they drive madly through the lanes. And there's vivacious Bessie Maunderfield: "If it rained, she held a tray over her head to protect her black curls, and, if the worst came to the worst, she had a canvas cape that was well smeared with pork lard… It was very effective, but it smelled dreadful, so the housekeeper would make her hang it up on a nail in the stable."
It's a book I found on a hospital swap shelf, and read through the night while sitting at my mother's bedside. It has warm stories about largely decent people of all ages, who try to do the right thing when faced by challenge or adversity. There's an 11-year-old boy with a pet rook, who finally manages to catch the village pond's legendary Girt Pike, and falls in love with the sad pretty woman who asked him to stop the monster eating all the ducklings. She dies young from cancer and he secretly buries a letter to her in her grave: "Dear Mrs Rendall, I am sorry you have died because you were so pretty and so nice, and you let me catch the Girt Pike, which was the best thing ever…"
Some might accuse De Bernières of being mawkish, as he has a taste for sweet sadness. He likes old military gentleman with soft hearts, such as a major who is reminded of a mercy-killing on the battlefield when he has to put down a rabbit suffering from the horrors of myxomatosis. There's also a general so distraught when his wife dies that he keeps wandering into town without his trousers.
De Bernières also has a penchant for the unexplained, possibly occult. In one story, the rector meets an old woman in his church who tells him he must go and give communion to a dying parishioner. He finds the man perfectly hale. After the parishioner dies suddenly that night, the rector remembers that the old woman left no footprint in the snow, and realises she was a ghost from the man's past.
What makes the book more than soppy is that De Bernières is campaigning. "I cannot help looking back on it all as a rural idyll," he writes in the afterword. "The old social structure had gone, along with the old trades, but the countryside was intact… I was out in the fields every single day that I was at home… I know where the bluebells and kingcups are."
He does not like the pond being prettified and made safe. He has two wise old countrymen play a complicated trick on a retired city whizz-kid who tries to bully and short-change them for their work. It involves golf and rabbits and so shocks the city slicker that it drives him back to where he came from. De Bernières wants us to know that even in the 20th century, Surrey was still a county of rural communities, with many different characters doing their best to get along with each other.
De Bernières was roundly ribbed for his cosiness when the book was published, but that's what makes it a comfort read. The eccentrics are interesting, rather than crazily dangerous, as they might be seen in a city. He argues that he has not romanticised the countryside in a sentimental way. There is for instance a "truly shocking amount of roadkill".
He has since moved to Norfolk, to "a place where there was only recently a man who lived in the woods with his animals….The village is closer to its past…The names of the graves and war memorials are the names of families that still live here. I hope that one day my son and daughter will feel the same way about their childhood village in Norfolk as I do about mine in Surrey."
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