The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village.  I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years’ life.  The change came late on our Costwold valley, didn’t really show itself till the late 1920’s; I was twelve by then, but during that handful of years I witnessed the whole thing happen.

Myself, my family, my generation, were born in a world of silence; a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty landscapes and the long walking distances between them; of white narrow roads, rutted by hooves and cart-wheels, innocent of oil or petrol, down which people passed rarely, and almost never for pleasure, and the horse was the fastest thing moving.  Man and horse were all the power we had—abetted by levers and pulleys.  But the horse was king, and almost everything grew around him: fodder, smithies, stables, paddocks, distances, and the rhythms of our days.  His eight miles an hour was the limit of our movements, as it had been since the days of the Romans.  That eight miles an hour was life and death, the size of our world, our prison.

Then, to the scream of the horse, the change began. The brass-lamped motor-car came coughing up the road, followed by the clamorous charabanc; the solid-tyred bus climbed the dusty hills and more people came and went. Soon the village would break, dissolve, and scatter, become no more than a place for pensioners. It had a few years left, the last of its thousand, and they passed almost without our knowing.