In 1933, Macdonell described Rodmell as a village of red-roofed cottages gathered around the flint tower of the church, set in meadows bursting with wild flowers and buzzing with bees. It was still a lot like that, at least along the tree-lined lane leading away from the main road and down towards the church, school, graveyard and cricket pavilion. Here, cottages were of the picture postcard variety with clouds of roses around the door and riots of wisteria and other climbing plants. One cottage had a perfect thatched roof, set off by crisply painted white wooden clapperboard exterior walls. Others were of ancient red brick set in wooden frames.
The 1939 census, taken on the eve of war, six years after Macdonell’s novel was published, put the population of Rodmell at 359 people living in 101 occupied properties. At that time the village had two farms, a shop, a post office, a petrol forecourt, a blacksmith’s forge and a school as well as the pub. ‘Today,’ said a booklet produced recently by a local historian, Rodmell was a ‘commuter/retirement village with a similar population but with little employment in agriculture’. The independent farms had hit financial ruin and had been merged. The resulting larger farm had, in 1999, moved to a complex of industrial-looking modern ‘crinkly tin’ sheds outside the village. The shop and post office had closed long ago. The blacksmith’s forge was still there, but now, from what we could see, it was essentially a car body repair shop.
The village primary school had almost closed at one point, but was now thriving and was highly rated in the school performance league tables. This, we gathered, was because kids were bussed in by thrusting middle-class parents from urban areas a few miles away in Brighton. Few of the children in the school were connected with Rodmell, the chairman of the parish council told us, since so many of today’s inhabitants of the village were well beyond the age where they were bringing up young children. The younger executive-commuter types living in the village tended to send their children to one of the many private schools to be found in the area.
The village notice board was festooned with leaflets giving out information of use mainly to older people with a lot of time on their hands: watercolour painting exhibitions and classes; classical music recitals in churches in surrounding villages; a forthcoming midweek evening concert in the pub to be given by a folk combo called the Wayfarers – who were apparently an ancient Peter, Paul and Mary tribute band.
Inside the renovated cottages, instead of going to church and getting ready to play cricket, people were watching Sky Sports or playing computer games on giant plasma TV screens. Some of the cottages had garages built on the side, tastefully done to match the original brick, timber and tile work, their weathered oak-style doors left open – ostentatiously, we thought – to display a variety of gleaming Porsches, BMWs and top-of-the-range Audis. It was unlikely that the owners of these luxurious cottages would be seen dead consuming scampi in a basket in the village pub, or in the church, which looked underused and served, mainly, it seemed, as a tourist attraction and a local monument.
Many of the first wave of incomers to the village had been hippies fleeing urban areas, and semi-bohemian and intellectual people connected with the University of Sussex, which had expanded in the 1970s. In Rodmell a process had occurred similar to the ‘gentrification’ of the inner cities – squatters and bohemians had made once-dilapidated areas like Islington and Spitalfields trendy and well-off professionals had followed later.
One of the cottages we visited was home to an arty type who had opened it to the public, advertising the fact with a newsagent-type A-frame sign erected next to a single brightly coloured floral deckchair. The deckchair constituted an al fresco café at which ‘Sussex cream teas’ were available for £3.50. The deckchair was not provided for people to sit in – it was being used as a sign in the lane, advertising the cream tea deal, a neat combination of surrealism and hard-nosed commercial nous. This open-door policy meant that we were able to get inside one of the Rodmell cottages and thus reveal the truth about what goes on behind the figurative net curtains of rural Sussex.
We entered, stooping to get through a doorframe originally designed for medieval peasants bent double by a lifetime of toil in the fields. The building was a low-ceilinged former hovel, now gentrified, consisting of a small front room, a small back room, an upstairs and an outside toilet. Discreet handwritten signs on lilac notelets with tiny drawings of flowers said PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH, forbidding the unknowing punter from laying a finger on the sort of items that were standard fare at any car boot sale. As soon as we crossed the threshold there was, I felt, a wrinkling of the nose, a sign of distaste at our presence. ‘Can I help you?’ said the owner of the nose, a self-styled water-colour-artist-cum-instructor, willow-thin and probably about fifty, as she emerged from the back room with a look of alarm in her eyes.
An unconvincing dialogue ensued about a furry portrait of Virginia Woolf, made from bits of old carpet sewn together and stuck in a wooden frame (£350). We could feel the owner’s eyes drilling into us as we surveyed the artfully arranged wares, principally examples of pink-tinged wholesome chintzy niceness. On offer were handmade silk pincushions, homemade paintings of flowers, gingham tablecloths, an Isle of Wight tea towel and scented candles set in tiny flowery china teacups.
Our hostess was suspicious of us and understandably so. David, tricked out in combat pants, dark glasses and a baseball cap, was the walking, attention-grabbing essence of the inner-city criminal (as the Richmond Tories used to put it). In the rural world-view there was just no credible explanation as to why a black man would travel to a village in Sussex to inspect a £70 pokerwork representation of a windmill, or peer through wraparound shades at a purple silk tasselled macramé plant potholder on sale at the bargain price of £22.50. David later said that the cottage owner might well have taken us for a gay couple up from Brighton for the day.
It was just a short walk from the artist’s cottage to the field where the village cricket pitch lay. Set into the hedge surrounding the field was a concrete machine-gun bunker dating from the Second World War. Puzzlingly, the field was relatively flat. The pitch described by Macdonell had a slope on one side with such an incline that, as he described it, when the bowler started his run-up he could not be seen by the batsman at the crease. In Macdonell’s day the bowler would only come into vision, like a distant ship appearing above the horizon, as he puffed up the incline ready to deliver the ball. The pitch also seemed far smaller than that described in 1933, and further away from the pub, which, in the twenty-first century, was not adjacent to the pitch but on the other side of the village.
Rodmell Cricket Club had erected a brick-built pavilion – complete with flagpole – in the 1980s. There was an arrangement with the local council whereby the council mowed the field and local schoolchildren could use it for sports days and the like. On the day we visited, the wives and children of the Rodmell cricket team had gathered in the pavilion to make cucumber sandwiches. The consensus among them was that the England, Their England cricket match had taken place in a field now known as Cricketing Bottom on the other side of the village. The likely site of Macdonell’s cricket match now had the ‘crinkly tin’ farm buildings on top of it, erected to replace the old ones in the centre of the village, which had been bought by developers and turned into luxury homes.
The irony hardly needed to be pointed out. The Rodmell of England, Their England had been ‘unspoilt by factories, financiers, tourists and hustle’. Now a charmless, factory-like farm building covered the cricket pitch where dragonflies had once buzzed about the players. The village was now a popular place for financiers to live. Indeed, the farmer’s house and barn was now occupied, we discovered, by the finance director of a very large energy company. In summer, the village was flooded with tourists, many of them visiting Virginia Woolf’s house (she lived in Rodmell from 1919 until her death in 1941). And there was plenty of hustle, too – from the hippy capitalism of the cottage artists to the ersatz country fayre of the village pub and the rampant hype of local estate agents.
The new cricket pitch was in a more exposed position than the old one, but it did have a view across the valley. That was, however, spoilt by the sight of a gigantic white chalk scar on the other side of the valley at Beddingham. This marked the location of an enormous landfill site used to dispose of rubbish from Lewes and most of Eastbourne. Initially, and unbeknown to the people of Rodmell and the surrounding villages, the site had