Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 240

This is a book about a world which has all but disappeared. A former teacher and academic, Mrs Masheder is now in her eighties and here presents us with an account of her childhood in rural Oxfordshire. Elegantly and persuasively written, the book reveals a memory as clear as the morning dew. Men and animals long dead, kindly and eccentric vicars, tramps slumbering in haystacks, gaily coloured gypsy caravans, and a world dominated by order and regularity and the endless cycle of the seasons; all are recalled with astonishing clarity.

What Elsfield lacked in physical sophistication (dark, dank, if picturesque, houses, no electricity, stand-pipes and long-drop privies) was amply compensated by the vibrancy of the community and the sense of belonging and communal harmony which prevailed. There may have been few alternatives to farm labour or domestic servitude for the sons and daughters of poorer families, but this situation was generally accepted until the 1930s when economic opportunities broadened and the deference born of dependence began to evaporate. Before this, though, parish church and village school propagated the idea of a rigid social hierarchy which tended to be paralleled in the alarming pecking order of the school playground. If many children from labouring families were educated in the village school rather against their will, they would have taken some solace from the knowledge that, however poor they might be, they were eminently superior to those lesser breeds in the Empire who daily counted their blessings as subjects of that most benevolent of Emperors, our dear King George V. The celebration of Empire Day was always great fun for young people, as were the village outings, fairs and fetes, and the shenanigans associated with seasonal festivals. To the unfortunate child growing up in today’s febrile emotional climate and subject to the unwholesome dictates of political correctness and risk averse ‘healthunsafety’ fascism, life in 1920s Elsfield would seem paradisical. There was tea to be taken in hay and harvest field, trees to be climbed and ponds and streams to be fished, birds’ nests to be sought, rabbits to be snared, gardens and allotments to be played in and kisses to be stolen in wood and meadow. And there were darker things to be learned. Closeness to animals may have engendered a respect for certain values, yet when kittens were drowned and pigs slaughtered, a child soon awoke to the nature of mortality and the transience of earthly things. The same child would learn something of the hypocrisy of a society which so passionately and cruelly condemned illegitimacy and even something of the nature of sexual deviancy through unwonted contact with the occasional exposers and molesters who lurked in all communities.

One of the great virtues of this book is its freedom from nostalgia. If, like me, the author deprecates the inevitable abandonment of the English village by its indigenes and the almost total severance of the village’s link with the surrounding farm land, she does not make a big issue of it. The old, stable, well-ordered community has gone, and whatever the efforts of some advenae to revive seasonal festivals, it will never return. After all, Maypole dancing, like Morris dancing, is a wholly ludicrous activity when disconnected from the realities of the agricultural and vegetational year.

Mrs Masheder’s book is a valuable contribution to the growing volume of published recollections of the earlier inter-war period. I am sure I will not be alone among her readers of a certain age in noting that much of what she describes in the 1920s would have been readily recognizable to a child of the 1950s. The old village was a long time a-dying.