People of a Village

By Danny McAllister

This is the story of a village told through an intricately woven web of the lives shared by its people.

Whilst village life has changed over the years, we see from these stories that much about this village, and many like it, remains the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley
• Release date: Aug 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463208328

Danny McAllister

Danny McAllister was born in Glasgow and served in the British Army, retiring as a Major in 1984. After leaving the army, he joined the prison service where he spent 27 years in roles including Governor of Whitemoor High Security Prison and Director of High Security Prisons for England and Wales. Upon his retirement from the prison service in 2011, he worked as an international consultant, advising foreign governments on prison matters. Danny was awarded a CBE in the 2009 New Year’s Honours List. He lives in a small village in Leicestershire.

Book preview

About the author

Danny McAllister was born in Glasgow and served in the British Army, retiring as a Major in 1984. After leaving the army, he joined the prison service where he spent 27 years in roles including Governor of Whitemoor High Security Prison and Director of High Security Prisons for England and Wales. Upon his retirement from the prison service in 2011, he worked as an international consultant, advising foreign governments on prison matters.

Danny was awarded a CBE in the 2009 New Year’s Honours List. He lives in a small village in Leicestershire.

***

Dedication

To Sue and the weans

***

PEOPLE OF A VILLAGE

Published by Austin Macauley at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Danny McAllister

The right of Danny McAllister to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

PEOPLE OF A VILLAGE

available from the British Library.

www.austinmacauley.com

ISBN 9781788484848 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781788484855 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781788484862 (E-Book)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

First Published in 2018

AustinMacauley

CGC-33-01, 25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ

***

***

Contents

Chapter 1: Villages

Chapter 2: The Woman

Chapter 3: The Fool’s Son

Chapter 4: The Priest

Chapter 5: The Mistress

Chapter 6: The Last Priest

Chapter 7: The Soldier

Chapter 8: The Publican

Chapter 9: The Whore and the Navvy

Chapter 10: The Landowner

Chapter 11: The Officer

Chapter 12: The Teacher

Chapter 13: The Coward

Chapter 14: The Hero

Chapter 15: The Farmer

Chapter 16: The Child

Chapter 17: The Operator

Chapter 18: The Trader

Chapter 19: The Governor

Chapter 20: The Professional Villager

Chapter 21: The Dog Walkers

Chapter 22: The Claimant

Chapter 23: The Huntsman

Chapter 24: The Church Warden

Chapter 25: The Widows

Chapter 26: The Retirees

Chapter 27: The Village

Chapter 1

Villages

All over England, there are thousands of them; all the same, all different, all coloured by the people who live there, who lived there. Some are grand with grand, even pompous, names. Some are humble with simple names. All claim the title ‘village’; they vary in physical size, in population size but they are all called ‘village’. Even when population growth and the built environment have, by any sensible definition, made them too big to be villages, they still call themselves ‘village’. They have little in common; they have everything in common. Some villagers are proud to live in a village, and some villagers do not know that they live in a village; it is just where they live, this place.

Over time, people move into, and out of, villages for many reasons, both ways. Over time, people change the physical shape of villages for many reasons; need, vanity, rapaciousness, capriciousness, and, of course, carelessness. Over time, the character of villages changes mostly due to the people who live there, or have lived there. Villages take time, can take centuries, to evolve, and never really finish evolving. Attempts to make new villages, quickly, always fail, for it is the unique interplay, over time, of people, politics, the landscape, and the will to survive, or even prosper, which make a village. Planning decisions do not make villages; people, time and events make villages. Villages are organic, not planned.

If you look up ‘village’ in a dictionary, you will find many and varied contradictory definitions. Most do agree that it is a ‘small, built environment, usually in a rural setting’. Then they differ, with some insisting that a village must, variously, have a church, a pub, a shop, and, of course, an idiot. All right, I made the last one up, though some villages still do have one. There is no one size fits all, nor a clear set of conditions to be met which will allow the label ‘village’ to be appended to a group of dwellings. Villages are often portrayed as communities, compared to the soulless and impersonal cities. But communities are not made by ‘small, built environments in a rural setting’, but by people who may happen to live in ‘small, built environments in a rural setting’, or may not. There are, undoubtedly, communities in cities. Sometimes much is made of the mutual dependency of smaller groupings. My experience is that you are just as likely to meet a disagreeable, selfish person in a village as you are in a city. Indeed, if you meet such a person in a city, you can choose to lose them in the greater population. If you meet them in a village, there can be no escape; you are stuck with them.

Another difficulty can be that some people who live in villages believe their own propaganda, in that they believe they have the monopoly on cosy niceness: they don’t. People are people, and there are nice ones and horrible ones in villages and in cities. There are altruistic people and there are selfish people everywhere. Where people live is not the defining factor in their character, certainly not when pit against life chances, parenting, upbringing and financial situation. So the idea that villages are cosy, and cities impersonal, is probably a chimera, or at least a wish, developed and broadcast by some who happen to live in a village.

Not everyone wants to live in a village. If you are seventeen and stuck in ‘Little Middling’ without a car, or access to public transport, well for ‘Little Middling’, read ‘Gulag Ennui’. If you are poor or lonely, it can be an exacerbating feature that you are poor and lonely, and stuck in bloody ‘Little Middling’. The idea of the cosy village only works in so far as the people with whom you share the ‘small built environment in a rural setting’ are friendly or compassionate, caring and responsive; it may not always be so. If there is no dilution of the human traits of unfriendliness, lack of feeling and so forth, then you are stuck with them, cheek by jowl, in your village hell. I just do not accept the ‘village good, city bad’ tosh.

Having said the above, I write from a small village in Leicestershire where I quite like it. I was born in a big city, not even in England, and I spent most of my adult life as a work directed nomad. It was only by pure accident that I wound up in this little village, pretty much bang in the middle of England. I didn’t plan it or particularly want it. For the first fifteen years in the village, it was a dormitory for my wife and me. We slept here, and spent our weekends here, but for the world of work it was a different story. Monday to Friday, and some weekends, we woke up in the village, had breakfast, went out of the gate. I turned right and drove fifty miles to work and my wife turned left and drove fifty miles to work. If we were lucky, we would meet at our house in the village ten hours later, eat, then sleep, and repeat the process the next day. There were variations in this, in that sometimes we commuted to London, by train, from the station three miles from the village. The common link was that everyone has to live somewhere and most people have to work somewhere, and in our case it happened that we lived in the village, but in reality spent as much time apart, out of the village. This was not planned, nor steeped in a family tradition but just happenstance; it wasn’t a result, it just was. And that is the nub of what villages are. They are not set in stone, though they might be built of stone; they are not unchanging bastions of niceness in a cruel world. They are dynamic, pragmatic, endlessly changing places. If you want unchanging sweet places to live, you should contact Pixar or Disney. For most people who live in villages, the village is just where they wound up. I do not deny the attractiveness of many villages as places to live but village life is available in a thousand places across England, in thousands of forms. You can get it in ‘Little Middling’ or in ‘Much Chuntering’. It is stupid to believe that any one of these villages is the best, though this does not stop the persistence of competitions to claim this spurious title. A village is only the best if it is the best for you and yours at this stage of your life.

In every village there are families who have lived there for centuries, whose forbears fill the graves in the churchyard and whose names are written large in this small world. They are, or have convinced themselves and locals that they are, significant players in this ‘small built environment in a rural setting’. They are world famous in the village. I have found it is best to leave them to it as they seem happy and happy is a good thing. Just don’t confuse happy with a life well lived.

And my point is? Villages are shaped, developed and stunted by the people who move through them much more than the buildings they contain, the land around them or indeed, just the people who have lived there for generations. It is not the big fish in the small pond who make a village, but, rather, the little fish in the pond who might or might not have been born there, lived there and died there, and the ‘blow ins’ who come to pass through the village. If it were not so we would find villages frozen in time, and they are not.

I live in an unremarkable little village and I quite like it. I do not delude myself that it is special but, in general, I like it here.

Thorpe Langton is one of five Langtons. There is Church Langton, Tur Langton, West Langton and East Langton to complete the Langtons. All of the Langtons are separated by a mile or two of fields and pastures. The history of Thorpe Langton, indeed of all the Langtons is not in the village but rather, in the people who have populated the village over centuries. In trying to describe, imagine, Thorpe Langton, I suppose I have tried to imagine any village in England. It is not special where I have lived with my wife and family for the last eighteen years. Not because I love it, nor feel any special attachment to it but because it’s all right. This is not about Thorpe Langton. It is about the all too ordinary people who happen to have lived here in a ‘small built environment in a rural setting’, over time: the villagers.

***

Chapter 2

The Woman

She was the last. She knew that because she had walked every inch of the village, time after time, searching for others. As if, if she kept looking, there would be someone, anyone, but there wasn’t. They had all gone, run away or dead. Over eighty souls, she wasn’t sure of the actual number as she hadn’t counted, didn’t know how to count, but eighty was about right.

She was cold and hot. She shivered and sweated and knew it wouldn’t be long. She worried that there would be nobody to bury her; nobody to say a prayer and nobody to weep. She worried that if it wasn’t done right, or done at all, she would not get to see the children again, or even Walter. She missed the children and even Walter a bit.

The dog was nearby; she sensed it rather than saw it. Her sight was blurred but she knew the dog was nearby. She wished it would come to her, just the comfort of a living creature in this place where there was no other living creature. Just to hear, to feel, its breath. The dog did not come to her.

She was from here, born here and spent her whole life here. Married here, borne nine children here, seen six of them die and buried them here, dead at birth or soon after. She had raised three of her nine children here, the surviving children. She had grown to love them, to feed them and to need them. They gave her joy in a joyless world. Even these three were now gone, resting not twenty paces from where she now lay, on the step of St Leonards, which she still thought of as ‘the new church’. The church was not locked but she couldn’t go in, couldn’t bring herself to go in, wasn’t sure if it was allowed to