Granta 166 by Thomas Meaney

Author:Thomas Meaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2024-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

At the last census, the population of the wider parish was three hundred. Ninety-eight per cent are white, the majority over fifty, and most identify as Christian (the Islamic faith is represented by a single self-identified Muslim). As though to allay any doubt as to the parish’s denomination, a man-size timber crucifix stands at the crossroads. It used to be a source of great local pride, until its centuryold, metre-tall, solid bronze statue of Jesus – complete with bronze ‘holy nails’ for rivets – was stolen several years ago. The Jesus heist was no hack job, I learned, but had been carefully planned, and the culprits are rumoured to be local. Not local local – it’s inconceivable that anyone’s immediate neighbour would have committed such heresy – but from one of the less affluent towns nearby.

The closest bank, supermarket, post office, and doctor’s surgery are located in a much larger riverside town five miles away, which is almost completely inaccessible except by car. There is a bus, but it makes just one journey to the town per day, departing at an ungodly hour in the morning and returning at noon. Despite this economical schedule, it is so unreliable that no one bothers to use it. In short, this is proper country – or ‘the sticks’, as my stepdad would say – isolated and relatively cut off.

When I arrived in autumn, the village was undergoing two seismic changes. First, the landlord of the pub and his family were leaving the area for good. This barrel-chested, blue-eyed, ruddy-faced innkeeper – the kind of man for whom several pints would constitute an aperitif – had helmed the pub for many years, and his departure was lamented. The pub lay empty for a month before the new landlords moved in, a younger, married couple from Bulgaria. The gravity of the second change to village life can hardly be overstated: a family of Travellers had bought a plot of land from the farmer up Love Lane, behind the pub, and established residence, precipitating an immediate, parish-wide panic.

Anyone who has spent any time lingering in ‘proper country’ will understand this point. The Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities are the target of a seething, unconcealed racial hatred, and pejoratives and slurs directed towards them flow freely from the lips of even the most progressive ruralite. With the Travellers’ arrival came discussion and debate. How many were there? Had the landlord left because of them? Were the Bulgarians somehow wrapped up in it all? In this mire of confusion and suspicion, the hand-wringing wetwork of local government got going, and the council sought legal advice to evict the Travellers. The Bulgarian landlords, meanwhile, were met with a frosty reception. In a Scrooge-like, cringing retreat, the villagers withdrew their patronage in those dreary winter months, leaving the future of the pub uncertain. It was a potentially disastrous act of community self-harm. A pub, after all, is one of the few ‘British’ institutions whose reality often lives up to its

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