Free Everyman's England by Victor Canning Page B

anything you like about their jobs and you will have a ready answer. Ask them if they have ever heard of Arnold Bennett, and do not be surprised if they look at you with polite blankness.

CHAPTER 7
THE SMALLEST OF THE FAMILY
    What is there about small things which excites our interest and our sympathy, and evokes an excess of kindness which takes control of us before we have time to be ashamed of it?
    Sheep are dull, stupid creatures, which in flocks achieve a certain picturesqueness, but individually have little interest save for their shepherd. Is there any man or woman, however, who has not felt something stir within at the sight of a young spring lamb, butting at its fellows and arching its back in tiny leaps? Grace, beauty and overflowing life; it has them all to make us feel happier at the sight of it. Kittens; fluffed-up young thrushes, trying their wings for the first time; a puppy working itself into a frenzy as it chases its own tail… is there anyone so occupied with his own cares that he cannot stop to smile at these small creatures?
    We can always find a place in our heart for the smallest of things, and if I love Rutland it is perhaps because it is our smallest county, and not so large that a man cannot come to know it without years of exploration. Yorkshire we must love in parts. It is too vast to claim an entire affection. England is so small that to love part of it is to love all of it.
    If anyone asked me which county in England is least spoiled, I should answer without hesitation – Rutland. In some miraculous way it has escaped the horrors which have attacked other counties. Its greatest quality is its unobtrusiveness. There is nothing to excite or alarm you in Rutland. It still retains that quiet leisurely English atmosphere which was typical of the eighteenth century. It would not have surprised me to have discovered a Rutland Sir Roger de Coverley leading his grumbling parishioners to church and daring any to sleep through the sermon but himself, or that the cottage wives flout the aid of modern therapeutics and give the juice of crushed snails to their children to cure them of whooping cough, or prescribe a dish of minced mice to ward off the Evil One.
    I cannot tell you where to go and what to see in Rutland, for there is nowhere to go and nothing to see. If you want to understand Rutland you must just go to any village, picked out at random, and there leave your bicycle, bus or motor car and without consulting a map strike away in the direction which appeals most to you. You will never be disappointed. Within a mile you will be lost in old England, an England where the news of the battle at Bunker’s Hill in faraway America might still be being told from cottage to cottage, where the only sounds to disturb the peace of the morning were the sudden winding of a hunting horn from a copse and the crisp beat of hooves across dead grass…
    Somewhere in the county there is a little, grey-stoned cottage, not unlike the cottages of the Cotswolds, with sprays of yellow jasmine guarding the doorway, and friendly hens pecking between the unfolding daffodils of the flower-beds, while from the roof pent white fantails pursue their courtships with more noise than nicety.
    I cannot tell you where the cottage is – for I do not know. I only know that it is somewhere in Rutland, and that when I first saw it I welcomed it with all the joy of a wanderer. I was lost. This may appear impossible, but in Rutland it very easily happens. For what seemed like hours I went along narrow roadways and lanes, twisting up wooded heights and dipping down into wide river-paved valleys. Once I came to a small village that straggled along the roadway, graced by a tiny, untidy green where a donkey was grazing half-heartedly, ignoring the persistent attentions of two small boys.
    I went into the post office to enquire my way to Oakham and found that I had wandered right out of Rutland and was in Northamptonshire.