You’d think setting your interwar years novel where you live, in rural Devon, would make research easier. Not necessarily so, as Vanessa de Haan found out; the lives of ordinary people in the 1920s and 1930s hadn’t seemed worth recording. Walking the country lanes and talking to people was an important part of her research, but it was the work of local historians that gave her the breakthrough she needed.
“Can’t you set your next book in the Mediterranean?”
So asked my husband and children, not necessarily because they were interested in the history of that region, but because they had spent two years being dragged around Navy ships, blustery dockyards and the West /Highlands for my first novel, The Restless Sea.
Sadly I did not have the time or money to immerse the family in the Mediterranean. Instead I went for the next best thing: Devon, where I lived – much easier to research on your doorstep, I thought.
But I was not prepared for how difficult it would be to find out about rural life in the 1920s and 30s. It was different with my first novel: there is a plethora of WWII information – meticulously documented by veterans and historians – and, best of all, I was able to interview men and women who had actually been there.
But A Time to Live begins in 1918 and ends in 1939, an era all but forgotten in living memory.
Researching urban life, I found it easy to investigate online the colour thrown by gas street lights or even what the 1920s miners of Bristol wore. There are museum archives and endless reports written for councils about how many people shared a privy, or tramway routes through cities and towns.
I imagine it is similar for novels set even further ago – from mediaeval times to life in the Tudor court, history was recorded by secretaries, courtiers and diarists.
But for life in the countryside of the Roaring Twenties or the Threadbare Thirties? Were the fields of England filled with flappers and jazz? My uneducated mind could picture only stately homes and tuxedoed aristocrats, a bustling housemaid, a dour butler, and perhaps a local doffing his cap. But I needed to know what life was like in the cottages and lanes.
I turned to books and television: fiction and non-fiction. But what could I find? Cazalet Chronicles and Mitfords, Downton Abbey, Brideshead Revisited – parties and peers – useful stuff when you read between the lines. But where was the real countryside, the dirty, messy, natural one, where people still collected water from a pump or dumped their waste in the village midden?
Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie was almost there, though sunset-tinged and arguably too idyllic.
Really, there were two sets of fiction that stood out: Tim Pears’ beautiful West Country Trilogy and Henry Williamson’s A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (despite his odious links with fascism, his writing on landscape as well as the psychological effects of war is powerful, and he should be read, if only for the fantastic titles: A Fox Under My Cloak, A Test to Destruction, The Innocent Moon).
In non-fiction there was barely anything that wasn’t about industrialisation, champagne or politics (useful, of course, for setting the scene).
Nor did I seem to find much in the way of gritty journalism other than George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris in London gives a good account of life on the road, which was a reality for many).
But what happened when tractors took over your work? When fences went up and jobs went down? How about the living conditions of a wheelwright or what a knife-sharpener ate as he trundled from house to house?
Then I stumbled across Richard Jefferies, and at last got closer to reality. Though he was writing in the late 1800s, I imagine rural life was not much altered by WWI — probably worse, given the lack of men to help, and then the mass migration to the towns.
Like Orwell, Jefferies was a writer who understood what it was to be soaked to the bones in a downpour or the back-breaking work of farming; rural life in its glory, but also its stinking, muddy poverty. His work also apparently inspired Henry Williamson to take up writing.
I gleaned what I could online – my favourite discovery was the Heritage Lottery-funded Somerset Voices Oral History Archive – fascinating for regional accents as well as snippets of forgotten history: the willow harvesters, cider makers and tanners.
Then there were the old tithe maps, which give an idea of apportionment of land, as well as how people spoke (fields with names like Yonder Stoney Piece, Turf Moor, Starve Acre); censuses (good for names, sizes of families); auction listings; pamphlets; dissertations; and occasionally a website put together by a family member.
Why was it so difficult? My personal view is that not many people thought it ‘worth’ recording the countryside then – politics and society were interested in where the majority had headed: the towns and cities. I’m afraid I think it’s pretty much the same these days, although there are good number of naturalists who are documenting our depleting flora and fauna, there are not so many recording rural society.
Given that I was living in the place I was writing about, I did what I always intended to do: I went outside and searched for the history myself. I like to do this anyway – folding myself into a landscape to get a real feel for a place. It was then that things began to fall into place.
I learnt from an estate agent that footpaths and bridleways were originally there for labourers to find work – which is why they often pass right through farms. I googled a property we viewed (we were looking to move) which led me to some amazing photos of local rural life in the 1920s at the Blackdown Archives. Like a detective I scoured backgrounds to take in clothes, shoes (if any), the state of the cottages, how a cart horse’s harness was put together.
At the local Spar in Sampford Peverell I picked up a little book, A Village Childhood, edited by the Sampford Peverell Society: the memoirs of an old resident, Dennis Cluett (another Heritage Lottery-funded project).
It was a revelation, filling the 1920s lanes with onion sellers from Brittany and the stone-crackers who created heaps of stones to fill potholes, a pitiful and dangerous job which left some blinded in one eye.
Walking the dogs, I chatted to neighbours who remembered hand-weeding oats, and milk churns being collected on carts. At Otterhead Lakes a visitor board provided photos of the grand house that used to be there – now entirely disappeared – and I battled through undergrowth to gaze at the series of ornamental lakes that still remain (and feature in A Time to Live).
Then there were the local museums in Tiverton and Taunton – with their collections of wonky waxworks and farming implements. I got a sense of how heavy those were (the blisters!), how cumbersome to use.
The most exciting part of my research was going to see the Ottery St Mary flaming tar barrels, a tradition that still goes on today, and can’t be that dissimilar to a century ago (apart from the occasional safety marshal in a high-viz jacket): the smell of burning tar, the faces lit by flames, the chaos of people charging around those narrow streets with burning barrels on their backs.
But the most affecting moment was during the local WWI centenary celebrations. There were events in the local churches, and families dug out photographs and diaries for display.
Most haunting of all were the black silhouettes of soldiers that sprang up outside houses that had lost a father, son or brother.
Before long there was one outside almost every house in the village – from the smaller terraced houses to the grander ones, from the larger village at the bottom of the hill to our little hamlet at the top.
It was only then that I had a glimpse of what the real issue was around that time – not industrialisation and the onset of intensive farming, not the crumbling stately homes or the migration of people to cities – it was how that war truly affected everyone – those who fought and those who stayed behind.
Grief struck down entire communities. And finally I could try and make sense of their response to that: how they might have rebuilt their lives and bravely shaped some kind of future – the future that I was living in.
A Time to Live by Vanessa de Haan is published on 31 August, 2023.
Read more about Vanessa’s book.
Vanessa de Haan is on Twitter and Facebook.
Images:
- Devon signpost: Pxfuel (public domain)
- Dredge corn harvest at Ralph Hoare’s farm at Staverton, Devon, 1942: Imperial War Museum © IWM TR 116
- Mid Devon: Chevithorne Barton: © Lewis Clarke for Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Breton onion seller, 1920s, by Glenys Thomas: courtesy Sampford Peverell Society
- A Village Childhood by Denis Cluett: courtesy Sampford Peverell Society
- The Poppy Trail, 2018: courtesy Sampford Peverell Society
