As was apparent from my last post, living in a village does not make me the happiest bunny in the world. Ironic really given how many bunnies there are around here. Yes the house is beautiful, the garden is beautiful, there's a separate annexe, a summer house, a garage, a drive, two garden sheds, a vegetable garden and a hexagonal greenhouse. There is an extra piece of land where I've started a small sculpture garden. This is just across a path to the station where I can easily get on a train back to my beloved. (I.E. London). So what am I complaining about?
From the outside it looks idyllic. Factor in that old chestnut of British, or is it more English, cultural aspiration and it looks like I've really made it. I have the detached house in the countryside and in the kitchen I even have that marker of contemporary, middle classness - an Aga. I'm a success. I'm a pleb made good. I can now wander off into the rural sunset content in my coloured wellies. I can drop all that complex baggage of background, class and family trauma. If it isn't visible to anybody else why draw attention to it?
Aye... there's the rub.
People from poor backgrounds, especially women who escape their still rigidly predictable class trajectory, become very good listeners and quick and comprehensive learners. They ask questions in order not to have to answer them. They learn how to blend in by not drawing attention to themselves. They move with stealth, make sure they are good at whatever job needs to be done to keep them moving, and are usually easy going and fun at parties. Strategically, that last one helps a lot.
Having negotiated an adult understanding of the pain of being perceived negatively in formative years, and having learned how to swallow that anger, means they are not generally judgemental themselves. They are fluid and discreet and very few people get to know them very well.
The first legacy of a poor background comes when you realise how much knowledge you have not been exposed to and thus your ability to communicate is severely curtailed. You cannot talk confidently about what you know because that will expose you and you know from experience that your reality is best kept obscure. The second legacy, of an often chronic lack of confidence begins here. It is compounded as you move through life and find that your view of how things are is so different from your majority, middle class counterparts that you believe you must surely be wrong.
So here I am in the countryside looking like a success story and feeling utterly miserable. For the first time in decades I am revisiting some of those class insecurities. I am back in the vicinity of my birth - a place I never wanted to return to. I am not here because of a considered decision about being tired of my international city life or wanting to signal my achievements with that detached house in the country. I am here because my brother took his own life and then, somewhere in the profound, emotional chaos that followed, I lost mine.
I am here. Isolated. Bored. Anxious. However, I seem to function and from the outside it seems as if I've blended in here too but I feel nothing. I do nothing. I cannot get any traction. Everything moves slowly and often does not move at all. Three decades of international urban life - my life and all that contributes to the person I think I am - is irrelevant. It's as if the life between leaving and returning to the same geographical space never happened. I feel like a stranger to myself in a compensatory property.
It would of course be easier with children and grandchildren. Being childless is particularly tough in a village where conversation, connection and belonging revolve so much around family life. Tried blending in with a dog for a while but that was disastrous. Rescue dog + rescue human was never going to work in this case.
I'm increasingly concluding that I'm just not cut out for life in a village. In a city you can be anybody, or nobody, just like everybody else. There are beautiful strangers and the strangest beauties. Numerous, spontaneous and random moments of humaness. There is movement and colour, life and surprises. Most of all there are possibilities and there are people like me.
I will never be tired of London but I am often tired of life these days. Will someone please buy me a flat in a London postcode. Any postcode will do! I'm not fussy.
