Perdy

Forty-seven years ago this morning, in a hole dug under a fallen tree, a small cream-coloured puppy was born, and found a place in our hearts that she still holds: the dog against whom all others are measured, against whom only one has ever even come close.

Perdy's mother was our yellow Labrador Vicky, a large kind dog who had already had two litters of puppies, one legitimate, one not. This time, it was my fault, as I'd left the door open and she had met a dog from the village, a 'Labrador type' who, to judge from his offspring, must have had greyhound and golden retriever in him as well. When her time was near, Vicky began excavating under the fallen tree, and every time she was let out would take refuge in it. She got so distressed when we tried to persuade her out of it when labour began, that my parents thought it would be best if she had the first pup in the hole, and then they could persuade Vicky back to the official maternity ward in the house. This worked, but every time they opened the door to see how things were going, Vicky stood there with the puppy in her mouth, desperate to go back to the hole and have the rest. In the end, she was overtaken by events, and the five remaining puppies were born in the right place: a total of two girls and three boys, plus one girl who didn't survive.

'101 Dalmations' was our favourite film (I'd seen it six times over the summer holidays) and so it was inevitable that they would be named after dogs in the film, regardless of the fact that ours didn't have spots: they were all varying shades of yellow, from cream to ginger biscuit. So we had Perdita, Pongo, Lucky and Prince, and the other girl was called Carmen because she was so vocal. Gradually they all found homes, except for Perdy. She was smaller than the others, her ears were set funny, she looked a bit odd. It was obvious that she was very intelligent, and my sister and I loved her dearly. At one point there was talk of sending her to be a guide dog, but eventually, almost by default, we kept her.

That winter, 62/63. was one of the hardest ever, and Perdy had numerous escapades. She fell through the ice on the kitchen garden pond. She learned how to chase deer. On one of the coldest nights, my father let the three dogs - Vicky, Perdy, and my aunt's poodle Puff, who was staying with us while she was in hospital - out last thing, and only two came back - Perdy was nowhere to be found. He searched for her in the snow for over an hour, without success. Eventually my mum thought to check my room. She had sneaked back inside, and crept into my bed, under the clothes, without waking me, and Puff had then curled up on top of her!

No doubt of it, Perdy was a bit of a tearaway. Dad tried to train her as a gun dog, alongside her mother, but with limited success. She would enthusiastically retrieve the pheasant, but obviously thought it was hers: however, she didn't like the taste of feathers, resulting in 'instant pluck'! Several birds came roasted to the table looking a little the worse for wear, with toothmarks in them. Once he stashed a pheasant six foot up in a gnarled tree for collection later: Perdy went back, climbed the tree and pulled it down. She used to take herself off for walks on her own, or disappeared chasing deer: I must have walked miles, and trespassed quite a few times, in pursuit. She also liked chasing the small Shetland Sheepdog belonging to one of my aunts: my sister and I loyally assumed she thought it was a rabbit, but it led to some family bad feeling.

One one memorable occasion, she and Vicky went off together - two dogs are a pack, my mother always said, and do things they'd never do on their own - and were gone all day, and into the night. We called and searched all over the park, without success. Eventually, long after dark, there was a phone call from the people in a house a mile upriver. Perdy and Vicky had fallen into the disused dry dock near them. They had heard barking and gone to investigate: the two dogs were standing on a pile of rotten wood, while the tide was rising around them. They had to be rescued by the Fire Brigade. Fortunately, they had our phone number on their collars.

After three years of this sort of thing, we thought that becoming a mother would quieten her down, and Perdy duly produced a litter of six. Shortly after the birth, she disappeared for several hours. We were just trying to find something to feed the poor little things with when she returned to do her maternal duty, with noticeable reluctance. As soon as they got teeth she gave up on them altogether, and Vicky, always a very kind and motherly dog, took over with enthusiasm, doing everything except feed them until they went to their new homes. Perdy did calm down a bit, but she was still very naughty. She chewed all sorts of things, specialising in the Sunday papers, which always arrived while we were at church. Once she ate my champion model yacht, Typhoon, which had beaten all comers in the swimming pool races. When burglars called, the dogs posed absolutely no threat. But her lovely, loving nature, her intelligence and her willingness to join in her games ensured that we were all devoted to her, despite her faults, even Dad! She accompanied us on our camping holiday, and encountered cattle for the first time when one stuck its head through the tent flap: Perdy tried to hide in my sister's sleeping bag. She was also chased by a herd of them, in the field above the camp site. In Shropshire, we entered her in a dog show: the judge kept trying to pull her ears forward into proper Labrador position, and they kept folding back! Her speed, her ears and her deep chest and narrow loins all pointed to more than a touch of greyhound.

When my father became headmaster, we had to give up the Buck House, the house in the grounds where we had always lived, and moved into a flat on the top floor. Perdy, by now middle aged, proved a huge hit with the boys. She used to lie in the sun on the floor of the South Hall, and every child who passed gave her a hug or a pat. Several of them used to compete to take her for walks. When my sister moved to Geneva for a year, she became briefly 'my dog' and slept on my bed: I usually woke with her pale yellow face on the pillow beside me. But when I left home as well, to live in Oxford as a mother's help, Perdy pined. She grew thinner and thinner, and cancer was diagnosed. I came home for a couple of weekends, and she regained some of her old energy and enthusiasm. But not long before my employment ended, I had a sad phone call from Mum: Perdy had had to be put down. She was only nine, and I cried for her far more than I had cried for anyone else I'd lost, including my grandmother.

But forty-seven years after that fateful day, I still remember her with huge affection. Of all the dogs I've known since, only Rowan looks back at me with the same love and intelligence, the same knowingness. I could write much more about Perdy, but for the sake of space I'll stop here, and quote a verse from Rudyard Kipling that says it much better than I could:

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!);
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone--wherever it goes--for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart for the dog to tear.

Homesickness

It's the sort of thing that afflicts the young: the child on an overnight school trip, the teenager backpacking abroad. You shouldn't feel longing for somewhere else, somewhere you haven't lived properly since you grew up. By the time you get to fifty-something, you should be above all that. This is my home now, my house in Wiltshire, large and rambling and untidy, which will probably hold the same place in the affections of my own children as the place where I grew up does in mine. I'm very fond of this village, the boys have lived in it almost all their lives, we have many friends here, I know its landscape and history intimately. I love the downs, the huge views that you could never get in Suffolk. It's wonderful to stand on top of Roundway and see the Priddy Mast, on the Mendips thirty miles away, or King Alfred's Tower above Stourhead, nearly into Dorset. On a clear day four counties are within sight. And there are no less than three World Heritage sites (Avebury, Bath and Stonehenge) within half an hour's drive.

And yet ... and yet ... I still sometimes dream of the Buck House, so called because it was originally an outhouse in the park where deer carcasses were butchered and hung, before my parents converted it as newly-weds. Just the other night, I washed the windows and tidied the garden of a house I haven't gone near for over a year, and woke feeling sad and nostalgic. Partly, I think, it has to do with the sea. We lived within sight of the Orwell estuary, a mile-wide, ten mile long inlet of water and mud that ends at Ipswich, and if you stood on one of the high points of the park (this is before the trees grew up) you could see the thin grey horizontal line that was the North Sea, out beyond the river mouth. On foggy winter mornings I remember lying in bed and listening to the Cork Lightship, snoring out on the sandbanks off Felixstowe like a vast slumbering animal. 'Uuuur-uh! Uuuur-uh!' When I was about six or seven, my grandmother moved back to Aldeburgh, where she had spent much of her married life, and lived in an old people's home, run by a relative, right on the sea front. We visited her every week for many years, so the ridged pebbles and grey, forbidding waves of Aldeburgh beach was the sea I knew best. We swam in it in the summer (I remember being slammed face down on the pebbles one rough day), hunted vainly for amber and cornelians, and resented the fact that there was no sand. Later, when we were older, Mum used to drop my sister and me off at Thorpeness Meare, a mile up the coast. This is a wonderful place, a huge boating lake like an inland sea, with islands, reeds, wildlife and places to moor and explore. Mum had rowed on it as a child in the 1920s, and it's the perfect place to play at Swallows and Amazons, or pirates (there's a fort, complete with cannon). We fell in regularly, but as the water is barely two foot deep, only our pride was ever hurt. Sometimes we walked back along the coast road (squelching a little), with the sea behind its high shingle banks on one side, the flat marshes on the other, and ahead of us the huddled houses of Aldeburgh, the remaining part of a town half lost to the waves. All along that coast the sea takes with one hand - from Aldeburgh, Dunwich, Walton - and gives to the other, the other in this case being Orfordness, that extraordinary spit of shingle, ten miles long, that shepherds the River Alde down to Shingle Street before allowing it to flow into the sea. The Great Flood of 1953, which happened when I was a baby, was a salutary reminder of how precarious life can be on the edge of the land. On one of our regular walks along the river shore, we used to play in the ruins of cottages that had been devastated by the surge of water coming up the estuary on that dreadful January night.

It's not just the sea that I miss. The hugeness of the skies above the desolation of the marshes: the birds calling on the river in the dark: the distinctive houses with their colour-washed walls, ridged tiles and dormer windows: the local accent, that even professional actors can't imitate (somehow it always comes out Somerset). And more specifically, the park at Orwell, a place where as a child I knew every stick and stone: the cork tree, with its fantastic bark: the pigeons cooing in the old trees around the swimming pool: the tantalising glimpses of Pin Mill across the river: the Buck House, long and low, covered in wisteria, surrounded by trees, a place so inextricably meshed with our family memories that no matter what happens to it in the end, it will always be ours.

I had always assumed that we weren't 'true' Suffolkers, but incomers: my father's family come from East London, and before that they were Protestant refugees from France. My mother's ancestors hailed from Northumberland, Ireland and, more distantly, Portugal and the West Indies. But when I was researching my family tree, I found that my great-grandmother, Dorothea Gooch, was descended from a very old Suffolk family who had gone to Northumberland to become ironworkers and engineers. The thought that a very small part of my DNA came from the people of East Anglia, of St. Edmund and the Wuffings, Boudicca and the Iceni, made me feel ridiculously pleased. Stupid though it may seem, now I know that the land of my birth really is my home.

Village Vegetables

Rest assured, this is not about the kind of people you see comatose in the corner of the pub just before closing time. This is a village devoted to market gardening, and carrots and cabbages, broccoli and leeks, have been grown here since the 19th century. Apparently, when the weaving trade collapsed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the villagers turned to growing vegetables in the light, sandy, hungry soil, and made such a success of it that the business is still thriving today.

As a historian, I find it very interesting. Here, in the 21st century, is a place where people are still visibly working on the land. They're not insulated in cosy tractors (well, most of them aren't), but out in all weathers, apart from hard frost and snow, pulling carrots, cutting cabbages, harvesting potatoes and onions. Parts of the process are mechanised - sowing the seeds, setting out the young plants, spreading muck and fertilizer - but you won't see any of those huge contraptions they have in the Fens, the moving tents/conveyor belts/soil looseners/washers under which the workers spend all their time. Our farm workers pick and bunch the carrots entirely by hand, working in groups of three or more: they wash them off using a hose or a trailer full of water, and pack them in boxes ready for Sainsbury's (I was thrilled to see some of our carrots on sale there a few weeks ago). I think the supermarket contract must be fairly recent, but it's obviously lucrative, as suddenly carrots in various stages of development are being grown everywhere.

Not just carrots, of course. Over the eighteen years I've lived here, I've seen pretty much every outdoor crop being grown in the fields around us. I had an old book, a soil survey of the village done by the Min of Ag sometime in the 30s, which basically said that yields would be a lot better if only these ignorant yokels could be persuaded not to plant so many potatoes. There are still plenty of them, alongside everything else. Sometimes you wonder whether there's a demand for it. Who still eats marrow in that sort of quantity these days? Do they actually sell all those pumpkins in the brief run up to Hallowe'en? Why does that farmer grow so many beetroots and then fail to harvest them, year after year?

There's a lot of waste, of course. Forget how much is thrown out by the supermarkets: here in our fields there's enough to feed half the country, just lying discarded. Sometimes you can tell why: green spuds, forked carrots. But quite often there doesn't seem to be any reason why some veg fails to make the grade. I know of at least one person in the village who used to run a market stall purely on what had been rejected at the packing warehouse. If you're discreet (walking around with a bulging plastic bag is not exactly tactful), you can create a whole meal with what's thrown away in the fields. We had some very nice stuffed round courgettes a few weeks ago, salvaged from a heap dumped beside the path, and my 'pick-up soup' is very popular in the winter months. Other people are less scrupulous. A few years ago one of the growers experimented with unusual vegetables, including purple brussels sprouts. My husband, walking past, took some off one stem to try (they tasted just the same as normal ones). I mentioned the purple sprouts to the farmer when I met him a couple of weeks later. 'And you know what,' he told me in disgust, 'some bugger had the whole row a few nights ago.' Even though Steve had only taken two or three, I didn't know where to look. Needless to say, the purple sprouts didn't appear next year, but the black 'Tuscan' cabbage has been widely grown recently, along with lots of different types of squash. The only crops I've never seen on a large scale are peas and beans: they do well in the soil (I have them in my own garden) but maybe the hassle of supporting the plants with sticks and poles is too labour-intensive.

I think the fact that there has always been plenty of work available on the land has kept many of the old families in the village. It's not quite the 'place with only three surnames' but when Hugh started at the school, ten per cent of the pupils went under the name of Paget, and if you counted the ones whose mothers had been born a Paget, it was more like twenty per cent. Apparently they all go back to one 19th century couple with about six sons who all stayed in the village. Some other Wiltshire villages have 'local names' but not to this extent: every time the blood donation people come to the Social Centre, they run a sweepstake on how many Pagets will turn up. There are Fennells and Mortimers, Kings and Hughes and Amors as well, and some of them have ancestry in the village going back hundreds of years. This, I'm sure, adds to the thriving community spirit here: unlike the place I grew up, where all the houses have been sold to people who work elsewhere, so that it's become a dormitory of commuters who don't know each other, and don't care.

The old fashioned farming methods affect the landscape too. Most of the village is built on a plateau, but on the western side the ground falls away steeply to a narrow river valley, where one of the mills once stood, and which is still known as the Common, though it was hedged long ago. Here there are pasture fields full of sheep, cattle and horses, as you can find in thousands of places up and down the country. But above them, on the flat sandy soil between the hill and the valley, the vegetables are grown as crops were grown in mediaeval times, in long strips divided by tracks and banks, with very few hedges or trees: so few, in fact, that the rather ordinary mature oak in our field is covered by a preservation order because of its contribution to the landscape. A local artist once did a picture, which we gave to a friend leaving us, of the lines of cabbages disappearing into the distance, leading towards the graceful Perpendicular spire of our church: it summed up everything I love about this unusual, delightful place that has been our home for more than eighteen years.

If You Don't Have A Kid, Get A Dog: Or, How To Become Part Of Your Village Community

I meant this to be the next post after 'The School Gate', but in all the Ashes excitement I delayed it. This is my second tip for those people who want to 'Escape To The Country' but are worried that they won't 'fit in'. Well, you don't have to wear green wellies and ride a horse: nor do you have to go around saying 'Ooh arrrgh' and drinking cider. If you have children, send them to the village school: and if you don't, get a dog.

Of course, this doesn't apply to people who think that regular exercise is what you do when the TV remote has been mislaid, or to those who come out in a rash at the very thought of fur, or who have chronically weak stomachs. For them, I'd recommend the am dram group (there's one in every village, for conoisseurs of forgotten lines, rogue props and plummetting scenery), or, for those who like to be big fish in a very small tank, a stint on the village hall committee. But if you like animals and the outdoors and fresh air (and let's face it, if you don't, what on earth are you doing in the country?), then a dog is ideal.

I have to admit to bias here - I grew up with dogs, mostly genial Labradors, and to me a house without animals is incomplete. I know they can be a tie, and it's a pain when the perfect holiday cottage is flagged 'No Pets', but for me the benefits vastly outweigh minor incoveniences, though I wasn't thinking that way when I came downstairs a couple of weeks ago and discovered that Rowan, our normally strong-stomached Irish Water Spaniel, had eaten something that had violently disagreed with her. Still, that's what husbands are for, so I told poor Steve, and he nobly cleared it all up. Fortunately, the effects were temporary, and I could soon walk Rowan again without worrying if two poo bags would be enough, or whether I should take the whole packet to be on the safe side.

Where was I? Advising you to get a dog. Well, assuming I haven't put you off the idea entirely, this is why. With a dog in tow, people will almost always stop and talk. If they have other dogs who are similarly good natured, then your dogs will play, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes, while you chat. Not only does this mean that your dog will need less exercise and you can curtail your walk (useful if it's cold, or raining, or there's something good on the telly), but it ensures that you make friends. An elderly lady of my acquaintance moved to the village some years ago with her husband, who died suddenly, leaving her alone in a place where she knew very few people. She got a dog, and her world opened up: not only did she have someone else to look after, she had to get out to take him for walks, and when she was out both she and her dog made friends, myself and Rowan included. When her little dog died, she told me that her daughter had tried to dissuade her from getting another, because she felt it would be a tie: but she was adamant. "I made so many friends when I went out with Ross, and I really miss it without him," she told me, and soon afterwards Chloe appeared on the scene, to everyone's delight.

In fact, there's only one trouble with living in this village, with its beautiful scenery and its many miles of footpaths, and that's the small but vociferous 'anti-dog brigade'. To listen to some of them banging on, you'd think Rowan and Chloe and the others were only one generation away from wolves, dangerous and destructive beasts who have to be kept under fierce control at all times. We're not even supposed to walk the footpath across the village field with a dog that's not on a lead, despite the fact that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, there's no-one else on the field at all - so what harm can it do? Dogs have been blamed for damaging crops, running across the protective sheeting that covers the carrots in early spring, and of course for fouling the footpaths. Quite apart from the fact that most of the dogs I see loose in the fields belong to the farmers themselves (and they're all viciously yappy Jack Russells who shriek at Rowan as she trots past), I suspect that in a village with a lot of wildlife, much of the alleged damage has actually been caused by deer, rabbits or badgers, and the fouling could well be done by foxes.

So we're back to poo again (I'll spare you a description of how you can tell dog from fox from badger). That's another thing that dogs have in common with children - somehow, the topic always returns to the basics. But I'm proud to own Rowan, with her soft brown fur and her lovely friendly nature - yappy Jack Russells apart - and over the years she and her predecessor, a huge white Labrador called Maddie, have made me many friends here, human and canine. I've followed in their pawprints up hill and down, watched them stroked by admiring children, left them outside shop and post office, school and pub, and enjoyed every minute of it, even in the rain and snow, because walking seems pointless unless you have canine company.

Yes, a dog is for life - and a dog is also for all the exercise you'll take, the fun you'll have, the people you'll meet, the places you'll go, and above all for the love and loyalty that looks back at you from those intelligent golden brown eyes (just before you realise that the remains of the roast chicken have disappeared off the table). And unlike the kids, you can put it in the boarding kennels while you go on holiday.

I Don't Like Cricket ... Much!

Heretical, I know, when you consider my family background - my father played for Essex before the war, and for Suffolk after it. My earliest memories of cricket are of sunlit days, playing with my toys behind one of the stands at the Felixstowe ground, or at Saxstead Green in the shadow of the windmill. Later, attending a boys' school, I had the chance to play, but proved useless - a single run was my biggest score. My sister, rather better at sports than I was, was the only child in the youngest group able to bowl overarm. When the First Eleven played, on Saturday afternoons, we all had to watch. In my case, it meant that I could roll up in my rug and surreptitiously read - until one day I was hit on the head by a boundary I hadn't seen coming, and my shameful secret was exposed to all. Going to a girls' school, at the age of thirteen, meant I was able to exchange the boredom of cricket for the horrors of hockey and netball. Honestly, I don't know which was worse.

Cricket came back into my life with my two sons. My dad's sporting ability - he played cricket, golf, football and squash to a very high level - had passed me by entirely, but surfaced in Hugh and Patrick. We bought a cheap set of bat, ball and stumps and I began playing with them in the garden. My neighbour, knowing nothing of my unusual childhood, thought it was strange that I knew the right terminology and the rules, until I told him why! It soon became apparent that both boys were good, though not exceptional. Dad was impressed with Hugh's bowling, and gave him some coaching and much confidence. We joined Devizes Cricket Club, and began the summer routine shared by parents across the land: training sessions one evening a week after school, matches every Sunday. One of the nicest things about playing in Wiltshire is the lovely locations of many of the grounds. Erlestoke in a walled garden nestled beneath the hills: All Cannings at the foot of the downs: Bishop's Cannings down a little country lane: Devizes itself with lovely views, and a ringside seat when the police helicopter took off. Both boys were enthusiastic players with potential: both, surprisingly, bowled left-handed but batted with the right.

Alas, to my Dad's disappointment, their cricketing careers fizzled out. For two consecutive seasons, Hugh didn't play: appendicitis one year, a broken collar bone (diving for a catch!) the next. Then he had back problems and was unable to bowl as fast or as accurately as he once had. Patrick was a good bowler with a rather eccentric action (if not reminded, he tended to throw), but unfortunately the club changed to a more competitive league and the team was rather cliquey: he went for match after match without either batting or bowling, which would sap the enthusiasm of the keenest player, and eventually he gave up altogether. I was sad for them, for I always thought that with better coaching and regular match practice they would both have done well in adult teams, but selfishly didn't miss those long, tedious hours with the Sunday paper, hoping vainly that Patrick would at last be given the chance to shine, or that Hugh wouldn't slog it straight to slip.

And now it's the Ashes again, and it brings back bitter-sweet memories - because exactly four years ago my mother died very suddenly, leaving my dad alone for the first time in his life. In the agonising days between her death and her funeral, the final Test provided a very welcome distraction for my poor father, who did not know what to do with himself. For hours I sat and watched it with him, and in the process learned far more about the finer points, technical and tactical, of what he called 'the beautiful game' than I ever had before. And when, eighteen months later, he gave up the miserable struggle to live without her, I wrote this poem for him in tribute to a true English gentleman, and it was read by my nephew Matt at his funeral:

A GOOD INNINGS

The shadows are long and the day's play has ended,
The last ball bowled to his crease.
But though he is out we remember the glory,
And rejoice that he now has found peace.

He's said his goodbyes and gone home to his wife,
But the pavilion still rings to his name,
How, winning or losing, he always played fair,
And without him it won't be the same.

It's a beautiful game, he said once to us,
And though it was cricket he meant,
His life was the same and he never gave up
Whatever the bowler had sent.

So he's had a good innings, one of the best,
Filled his time with success great and small,
And as we look back at his long happy life,
We salute him with bat and with ball.

If England win this weekend, I'm sure that somewhere, he will be smiling.

I think he is.

The School Gate

You can take a girl out of the countryside, but you can't take the countryside out of the girl ... After years of living in towns, seduced by the convenience of being able to walk up the road and go into proper shops and restaurants, I bowed to the inevitable and persuaded Steve (brought up above a hardware shop in Balham High Road) that green fields and fresh air were what we wanted, especially if we were planning to start a family. So we moved to Wiltshire, selling my three bedroom semi in St. Albans and buying a detached bungalow with half an acre of garden - and had enough change to do it up and buy new furniture.

Threee years and our first baby later, we moved to our present house and have remained here ever since - the longest I've ever lived anywhere. It's also the only time in my life that I've truly felt part of a community. I grew up in a small village on the other side of the country, but didn't mix with the other inhabitants - my father was headmaster of a private school, which held itself aloof from the hoi polloi, apart from graciously hosting the local flower show every year. Unless the villagers did our garden, cleaned our house, serviced the car or (like poor Mrs. Brown), washed my nappies, I didn't know them. And as I went to my father's school and then on to another private school in the nearby big town, I didn't know their children either - apart from some deeply embarrassing forays to the youth club (for which I wore ski pants - with my thighs! Aagh!). I was shy, they doubtless thought I was posh and stuck up, and no lasting links were ever forged.

Even in our first Wiltshire village, we never felt part of it. This was mainly down to the bungalow's position, right on the outskirts, with a half mile walk across the fields the only safe route to the pub. But here, things are very different. Why?

Well, first of all, there's a lot going on, not just Jam and Jerusalem. There are groups to cater for every age and taste (even, so rumour had it, a wife-swapping ring, though we never sampled that!). But even in a socially thriving place like this, you have to go out and meet your opportunities, they won't come to you. And we had the perfect key to open the door to community life - our children. Toddler group, playgroup, and then the primary school, led us and the boys to new friends, new experiences. I'd always said that the school (at the end of our road, about 10 minutes' slow amble) would have to be Dotheboys Hall before I didn't send the children there. It wasn't, and off they went. At the school gate, at the end of the day, I usually arrived five minutes or so early, and there was always someone else to chat to. Parents came from every social class - even, for a couple of years, the child of the 'big house' - and on the whole the children mixed together very successfully, though once, I and another mother had to bribe our sons to go to the birthday party of a boy in their class who came from the 'pariah' family in the village. I joined the playgroup committee, then the PTA, helped at the school and when my younger son turned 11 and went off, with the children he'd known all his life, to the local 'bog-standard' comprehensive, I had to give it all up with some relief, but also with real regret. I still see my closest friends on a regular basis - we meet every Friday morning for breakfast in each other's houses - but occasional encounters in the village shop or post office or at the Carnival are no substitute for the easy, friendly camaraderie of the school gate.

About ten years ago, a small family moved into one of the houses in our road, stayed a year or so, and then left, saying they'd never felt part of village life. To me, the reason for this was blindingly obvious - they hadn't wanted to move their little girl from her existing primary school, so they missed out on the community readily available to them fifty yards away at our school gate. I feel sorry for all those other children who, for whatever reason, live in the village but go to school elsewhere. Some of them attend the shabby private school a few miles away - it has limited facilities, but only a dozen in a class, so people think it must be worth the exhorbitant sums it charges - and others the spanking new state primary in the next village, getting the benefit of showy pristine surroundings but surrendering the benefit of being able to walk there, and to learn alongside their friends from playgroup. I've never regretted sending my sons to our own school, where they mixed with children from a wide variety of backgrounds, learned to get on with all sorts of different people, never thought of themselves as privileged or superior, and could walk or cycle there, when old enough, on their own.

So, if you want to take a full part in village life, get a kid! And, if this is not possible, get a dog - which will be the subject of my next post.

In Praise of Bombastic Rock Groups

I've toyed with the idea of doing a blog for a while, though I already write a daily diary. That, however, is done from a historian's perspective and tends to be a record of what's happening, rather than what I'm feeling and thinking. But I went to see U2 last night at Wembley, and I wanted a record of it that was a bit more than a couple of lines of tiny scribble at the bottom of my page for August 14th, 2009.

In over 40 years of gigs, this was the biggest. Nearly 90,000 people, apparently: looking down at the solid mass of people clogging Olympic Way as they shuffled home towards the tube, I could well believe it. Even Glastonbury, the one year I went (1981 - I couldn't remember who was headlining and had to check online - it was Hawkwind). I'd bought pitch standing tickets on ebay, and was petrified that (a) they wouldn't arrive and (b), if they did, they'd turn out to be fake. When I pressed mine against the barcode reader and the light went green, I was somewhat relieved! Steve and the lads (Hugh, 19, Patrick, 16) also got safely in. Hugh had told me that U2 were deeply uncool, but he hadn't turned down a free ticket! He expressed surprise at the crowd. 'There's lots of young people - I thought they'd all be about your age!' I'm 57 (God that sounds old), and Steve's 50. Not that much older than U2 themselves, in fact. And it wasn't more than five minutes before the boys disappeared into the throng, anxious to get to the front (or to put as much distance between themselves and their uncool parents as possible).

Elbow were playing, but due to transport problems we'd arrived late (4 hours it took us from home) and we missed all but their last song, which was 'Rise'. A shame as I like the little I've heard of them and the reason we chose to go on Friday rather than the Saturday was that they were in support. Our lateness also meant that most of the food (but not the drink) had run out, and the only sustenance on offer was a khaki brown shiny bratwurst in a stale bun. It had the look of plastic, and reminded me of those hot dogs that you used to get in cinemas in the 60s and 70s. Well, it filled a hole, as my mum would have said. We fortified ourselves with a pint of Coke each, and launched ourselves into the fray.

More by default than anything else, we ended up just by the left hand claw. Did I mention the stage? It was surrounded and surmounted by a vast 4-pronged structure which supported the lighting, sound and a huge central video screen that could be lowered and raised. There's been a lot of criticism of this but I think it misses the point - that a rock band in a stadium like Wembley will be tiny doll-like figures to 95% of the audience. Something this big acts as a focus for those people who can't get close enough to the action, a visual spectacle to enhance and complement the music. And it certainly was amazing - colours, pictures, smoke, clips of the band, even, at the end, the impish, chuckling figure of Desmond Tutu, appealing for our help in Africa. It didn't matter that, being under 5 foot 6, I could only see Bono if I craned my neck and if the idiots in front didn't start waving their hands in the air and jumping up and down. I was there, and he was singing, and the Edge was playing, and everyone else was singing too, a community for one night of nearly 90,00 people.

I've liked U2 ever since I watched Live Aid and was blown away by their performance - I'd never heard of them before. Joshua Tree confirmed it, with moments, all too rare in music, that lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. With or Without You has been in my top three favourite songs for more than twenty years - God, he sings it sooo sexily - and although I don't like all their output One and Beautiful Day come pretty close to it. Hugh had called up the playlist for earlier gigs in this tour online, so we knew what was coming, and weren't disappointed. Perhaps the sound quality could have been better, but it was pretty good down by the claw, the Edge played amazingly, Bono sang his heart out, and two and a half hours of standing flew by a lot quicker than it does in the library.

The best, the most awe-inspiring, the most wonderful moment, was when they began I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. He sang a line, two lines, and we all joined in - ninety thousand people who all knew the words, and the tune, and the phrasing. Amazed, delighted, they stopped playing, and we carried on, unaccompanied, for a whole verse. I will never forget that moment: I've watched recordings of it on YouTube today and it still tingles the blood.

So, yes, it's all huge, overblown, a tad ridiculous. It cost a fortune to stage, and will make a rich band very much richer. But it made us richer too, in a different way. Rock groups have to be larger than life, or there's no point to their existence. That's what we want to see: we want to make them gods for an evening. And for one verse, we became gods too, under the Wembley arch.