Memories of memories: the Great War

A few conversations between the old and the young take us back centuries. When I was a teenager, I knew two old men who had fought in the Great War. One I knew when I was a volunteer for the Visiting Service for Old People in Birmingham. He had joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment just after the start of the war in 1914, after lying about his age. He spent most of the war in the trenches of the Western Front, but was later transferred to the Italian Front. He had been wounded, was sent to the field hospital and missed some action. When he returned to his squad, he found that all his friends were dead. The second old man was a next door neighbour in Shirley. He too had been on the Western Front, and after the Armistice had advanced with the Army into Western Germany. He told me that he and his fellow soldiers did not like the French civilians they met, and were amazed when they occupied Germany to find people who seemed far more like themselves. “We’ve been fighting on the wrong side”, the soldiers said. 

These are memories of memories of events almost a hundred years ago. Both these men, when themselves teenagers, also may have talked to old men who in their youth had fought in distant wars: perhaps the Crimean War or the Indian Mutiny. Assume a 50 years span of memory for such conversations, and only seven link me with someone who saw Shakespeare perform at the Globe, and the first settlers leave for New England. The past is closer than we think.

Living next to savages

My wife and I still live in the first home we moved into after we married, in Autumn 1983. This is in the village of Martley in Worcestershire, and is the third of four bungalows in a short unadopted road with the bungalows on one side of the road facing woodland on the other. At the end of our road, where it joins one of the main roads through the village, is a small green where children can play. In 1983, our neighbours were an elderly single lady on one side, and a pleasant family with two young sons on the other. The family left within a year and the Savages moved in. Mr and Mrs Savage were an elderly couple who had moved to our village after living in Devon. Devon, they told us, was an awful place. There was an erratic water supply, the roads were full of tourists, and the locals were unfriendly. Martley was much better.

It was not long, however, before this positive opinion began to change. The Savages totally opposed the idea that children could play on the small green at the end of the road. The noise of children playing, they said, made their life unbearable. This became a public campaign which involved shouting at children and demanding people sign a petition against their use of the green. Few, however, signed it. Indeed, their only supporters were their other neighbours, also an elderly couple. The lack of support from the rest of the village was a sign to the Savages that its inhabitants did not meet their own high standards. Mrs Savage told me “This village may be full of three and four-bedroom houses, but they are not three and four-bedroom people”. Another time, she complained that the village was little better than a slum. At the time, I was planting flowers in my front garden, under the dappled sunlight coming through the trees. Eventually, the Savages could bear it no longer and left for another village where, they assured me, people were far nicer and where they would be much happier. I thought this unlikely and suspected that their life followed a repeated cycle of optimism, disappointment, anger and evacuation. I therefore felt sorry for them.

I suspect that every village in England has at least one couple like the Savages: incomers who complain about church bells, the sound of cows mooing and sheep bleating, the noise from tractors in fields, and the happy sounds of children playing. This might be a product of the way country life is depicted on television, as an idyllic escape. In fact, one programme at present is called ‘Escape to the Country’. People who have experienced distress in a city may mistakenly come to believe that a village offers a life of absolute quiet, without the need to deal with other people. However, I think a more probable cause in some cases at least is subclinical paranoia. The person experiences noise as a kind of invasion of their identity, which they are unable to control. Children present particular problems for such people because children are spontaneous and joyful.

From my house, I can hear the children when they have their playtime in the village primary school across the fields. I can also hear the church bells on Sundays, at weddings, and when the bellringers practice on Friday evenings. These are all the happiest sounds I know. How sad are people who can not bear them.

Confessions of a parish councillor

It is now well over a year since I became a parish councillor for my small village in Worcestershire. Like most of my colleagues, I was co-opted to fill a vacancy. Most such vacancies arise, I suspect, because new parish councillors find that this unpaid post demands impossibly large amounts of their time. But another factor may be the complexity of the issues facing parish councils, despite their almost total lack of powers. Planning is the most complex of all, not just because planning laws and regulations are difficult to grasp for non-experts, but because the operation of the planning system utterly contradicts the common sense of local people.

The centre-piece of the planning system is the so-called ‘local plan’, prepared by the planning departments of the district council. I use the term ‘so-called’ because local plans are anything but local. In my part of the country, three district councils have prepared a joint ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ (SWDP). This covers an area of 1274 square kilometres and a population of over 286,000. Local plans must conform with the Government’s National Policy Planning Framework and a plethora of other regulations. But most important of all, they are required by law to meet nationally-determined targets for building new houses. These in turn are estimated by the Office of National Statistics from predicted population trends and rates of ‘household formation’.

So the SWDP begins with statements of aspirations which meet current government policies such as energy saving, better waste disposal, and the mysteriously-vague term ‘sustainability’. This is followed by lists of sites judged suitable for ‘development’. These include sites for employment and retail, but most are for new housing estates to be built by one of the big housebuilding companies. In most cases, they will have already purchased and promoted these sites for development. Finally, the SWDP identifies the implications of proposed developments for employment, roads and other local services.

Parish councils do not have the power to vary these ‘local plans’, but they can comment on them as part of a formal process of consultation. The plan is then forwarded to a planning inspector who holds a quasi-judicial hearing to rule on whether the plan is ‘sound’ (ie internally-consistent and in accord with national policies). Developments on individual sites, even if positively-identified in the local plan, still require planning permission from the district council. Once again, parish councils can comment on these before a decision is made. If the district council refuses planning permission, the applicant can appeal to a planning inspector, who will conduct a hearing and then make the final decision.

This system, at first sight, looks rational and fair. But the discussions at parish councils and with its citizens illustrate a real conflict of culture and belief. Parish councillors are usually people who are longstanding residents of their community and know every road, hedge and ditch and (between them) almost every resident in the parish. Parish councillors’ sense of identity is therefore strongly connected to their parish. They are aware of what makes their community distinctive and different from others. In a country parish, they will therefore try to maintain its familiar local features and its rural character while also striving to improve the services available to its residents.

District planning officers have an outlook that is almost the exact opposite of that of parish councillors. Planning officers are professional local government officers who are responsible for ensuring that the local plans they help formulate are in accord with national policies. Many planning officers are transient: they know that promotion will often depend on moving elsewhere - perhaps to the other end of the country. In a rural district, they are responsible for many dispersed communities, and can not hope to have the kind of expert local knowledge possessed by a parish councillor or a local resident. Lacking a long-term commitment to a particular community, they probably regard parish councillors’ passionate defence of their village against development as a self-interested protection of property values. At worst, we are seen as backward peasants standing in the way of ‘progress’.

By contrast, the building corporations speak the planners’ language. Their planning applications meet the complex requirements of national and local planning policy, and are backed up by various specialist reports on drainage, environmental impact, transport impact and so on. These specialist reports are commissioned by the developers from various consultancy agencies who (I suspect) generally support applications by those who pay their fees.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that local plans end up proposing lots of new housing, and that individual planning applications to build new estates and supermarkets are usually passed by district councils and (should there be an appeal) by the planning inspectors. The planning system, in other words, is part of an great unstoppable engine of government which works to make all parts of the country look the same, to empty our high streets, and to destroy what is special and unique about each town and country in England.