TWO Village Cricket People – Rodmell, Sussex
‘Rural England is the real England, unspoilt by factories, financiers, tourists and hustle,’ wrote A. G. Macdonell in England, Their England, his classic 1933 novel. The book concerns the exploits of a young Scotsman, Donald Cameron, as he tours southern England and some of its more conservative byways. The most famous episode in the book is a blow-by-blow account of a cricket match between a gang of First World War invalids from London and a team from the village of Fordenden, still hailed by many critics as one of the greatest pieces of sports writing. The episode was, though, anything but fictional. Literary historians have established beyond doubt that the match Macdonell describes actually took place in the village of Rodmell, in Sussex, not far from Brighton.
‘The entire scene was perfect to the last detail,’ Macdonell wrote of his visit to Rodmell. ‘There stood the Vicar, beaming absent-mindedly at everyone. There was the forge, with the blacksmith, his hammer discarded, tightening his snake-buckled belt ready for the fray.’ According to Macdonell, the locals in this idyllic hamlet sat around the cricket pitch with tankards of ale while ‘blue and green dragonflies played at hide and seek among the thistledown and a pair of swans flew overhead. An ancient man leaned upon a scythe, his sharpening-stone sticking out of his velveteen waistcoat. A magpie flapped lazily across the meadows. The parson shook hands with the squire. Doves cooed. The haze flickered. The world stood still.’
After my experiences in Richmond the world of Conservatism just appeared a bit sad to me. The party and its followers hardly seemed worth writing about, except, perhaps, as an exercise in gloating. A year passed, during which I saw off a near fatal illness, which got worse before it got better, and which had made my life such a misery during the 2005 election campaign.
Meanwhile, David had been off on another project, investigating the world of Sierra Leonean war criminals and, on the side, writing about the lifestyles of gangsters and the super-rich for glossy magazines. After the 2005 election Tony Blair’s government had become so unpopular that the Conservatives, still unpopular themselves, started to creep up on the inside of Labour in the polls, giving them an outside chance of once again forming the government of the country. Michael Howard stepped down from the Conservative leadership and handed over to the much younger, more media-friendly figure of David Cameron. Cameron began to work his magic, at least at the level of national politics and television, and the Conservatives looked like coming to life once again as a force in their own right. What interested us was whether things were changing at the grass roots of the party and, more broadly, in the attitudes of ‘small c’ conservatives who might support the party.
A second stage of our Tory journey thus began, and it was to take place against the backdrop of the growing unpopularity of the Labour government and incessant talk in the national media of a rightward shift of the political tectonic plates of the country. We had entered what was for us the alien world of Conservatism through the front door of my local Conservative Association office. We now planned to re-enter by the back door of day-to-day life among conservative people. Our itinerary was to include gatherings of the Women’s Institute, bank holiday pilgrimages to Winston Churchill’s house, agricultural shows and village fetes, polo matches and summer garden parties, rubber chicken circuit fund-raising dinners, and immersion in a ‘Nimby’ campaign in Oxfordshire. This, we felt, was the ‘real’ or ‘small c’ conservative England on which the fortunes of the Conservative Party ultimately rested. Rodmell, the focus of Macdonell’s journey seventy-five years ago, seemed the best place to start – especially as we’d learned that the village still had a cricket team. So we went to the village to watch Rodmell play a one-off invitation match against a local Sussex league side called, of all things, Blackboys.
In 1933, Macdonell described Rodmell as a village of red-roofed cottages gathered around the flint tower of the church, set in meadows bursting with wild flowers and buzzing with bees. It was still a lot like that, at least along the tree-lined lane leading away from the main road and down towards the church, school, graveyard and cricket pavilion. Here, cottages were of the picture postcard variety with clouds of roses around the door and riots of wisteria and other climbing plants. One cottage had a perfect thatched roof, set off by crisply painted white wooden clapperboard exterior walls. Others were of ancient red brick set in wooden frames.
The 1939 census, taken on the eve of war, six years after Macdonell’s novel was published, put the population of Rodmell at 359 people living in 101 occupied properties. At that time the village had two farms, a shop, a post office, a petrol forecourt, a blacksmith’s forge and a school as well as the pub. ‘Today,’ said a booklet produced recently by a local historian, Rodmell was a ‘commuter/retirement village with a similar population but with little employment in agriculture’. The independent farms had hit financial ruin and had been merged. The resulting larger farm had, in 1999, moved to a complex of industrial-looking modern ‘crinkly tin’ sheds outside the village. The shop and post office had closed long ago. The blacksmith’s forge was still there, but now, from what we could see, it was essentially a car body repair shop.
The village primary school had almost closed at one point, but was now thriving and was highly rated in the school performance league tables. This, we gathered, was because kids were bussed in by thrusting middle-class parents from urban areas a few miles away in Brighton. Few of the children in the school were connected with Rodmell, the chairman of the parish council told us, since so many of today’s inhabitants of the village were well beyond the age where they were bringing up young children. The younger executive-commuter types living in the village tended to send their children to one of the many private schools to be found in the area.
The village notice board was festooned with leaflets giving out information of use mainly to older people with a lot of time on their hands: watercolour painting exhibitions and classes; classical music recitals in churches in surrounding villages; a forthcoming midweek evening concert in the pub to be given by a folk combo called the Wayfarers – who were apparently an ancient Peter, Paul and Mary tribute band.
Inside the renovated cottages, instead of going to church and getting ready to play cricket, people were watching Sky Sports or playing computer games on giant plasma TV screens. Some of the cottages had garages built on the side, tastefully done to match the original brick, timber and tile work, their weathered oak-style doors left open – ostentatiously, we thought – to display a variety of gleaming Porsches, BMWs and top-of-the-range Audis. It was unlikely that the owners of these luxurious cottages would be seen dead consuming scampi in a basket in the village pub, or in the church, which looked underused and served, mainly, it seemed, as a tourist attraction and a local monument.
Many of the first wave of incomers to the village had been hippies fleeing urban areas, and semi-bohemian and intellectual people connected with the University of Sussex, which had expanded in the 1970s. In Rodmell a process had occurred similar to the ‘gentrification’ of the inner cities – squatters and bohemians had made once-dilapidated areas like Islington and Spitalfields trendy and well-off professionals had followed later.
One of the cottages we visited was home to an arty type who had opened it to the public, advertising the fact with a newsagent-type A-frame sign erected next to a single brightly coloured floral deckchair. The deckchair constituted an al fresco café at which ‘Sussex cream teas’ were available for £3.50. The deckchair was not provided for people to sit in – it was being used as a sign in the lane, advertising the cream tea deal, a neat combination of surrealism and hard-nosed commercial nous. This open-door policy meant that we were able to get inside one of the Rodmell cottages and thus reveal the truth about what goes on behind the figurative net curtains of rural Sussex.
We entered, stooping to get through a doorframe originally designed for medieval peasants bent double by a lifetime of toil in the fields. The building was a low-ceilinged former hovel, now gentrified, consisting of a small front room, a small back room, an upstairs and an outside toilet. Discreet handwritten
