Cottages in dereliction. Cottages of 1735 with 1935 Critall windows. Cottages with corrugated-iron lean-tos against their limestone walls. Thatch so rotten it's greenish black. Roads deep in manure. Fences composed of bedsteads and twine. Outside privies. Today, there is a national shortage of all of them.
Fifty years ago, they were plentiful, going on the norm. When Harold Macmillan proclaimed at Bedford, "Let us be frank about it ... most of our people have never had it so good," some of those people were still living in caves beside the Severn in Worcestershire.
Troglodytism wasn't a norm, but it's a further indicator of how different rural England was early in the second half of the 20th century, how distant it is from this happy new decade.
At the primary school in a New Forest settlement where my mother taught during the second world war, a child arrived for the winter term sewn into untreated rabbit skins. When I wrote about it fictively in the 80s, her only reaction was: "Why did you leave out the people who claimed their daughter had caught syphilis from a towel?"
Her So'tonian, lower middle-class, urban suspicion of the countryside, its people and their mores, is one I share. It's an attitude prevalent in France, where the English notion of the rural idyll prompts bewilderment. The French regard the country as a workplace. A place for crops, cattle, sylviculture, quarrying, hunting (for the pot rather than for sport), dumping vehicles, murdering children and building alarmingly hideous bungalows. It's like an England that has been erased by the force of a demographic shift.
Landscape is created by humans and the English have transformed theirs over the last half-century. Despite the spread of roads, industrial estates, science parks and housing estates of an architecture almost as execrable as France's, the English landscape is increasingly infected with the artificial perfection of Georgian parkland whose purpose was to delight the eye: cows and sheep were theatrical props. This suave naturalism, supplied by Capability Brown to noble Whigs, has been democratised. The English sticks have been subjected to a makeover, a wash and brush up. Dirt farms have turned into clean farms. Canals in desuetude have been redug and refilled. Cottages have been restored to a state of "authenticity". Advertising hoardings have been proscribed. Rivers have been detoxed. Hedges have been replanted. Water meadows are once more "floated". Shacks built of corrugated iron and asbestos have been replaced by salubrious dwellings of no character. Hardly anyone still lives in former rolling stock.
The idyll has moved from aspiration to actuality. When villages were inhabited by the sons and daughters of the soil the land was a factory without a roof. Now that they are commuters' dormitories the land is an amenity whose looks are everything. England's countryside is today more literally picturesque than it ever was, more conventionally picturesque, more institutionally picturesque.
The National Trust and English Heritage are merely the most prominent agencies involved in turning back the clock to an age which only ever really existed in the brain of Constable and Cotman, Gainsborough and Girtin. The kneejerk antipathy to wind farms, cooling towers, transmitter masts, pylons and so on is bien pensant conventional rural wisdom just as an antipathy to brutalism is conventional urban wisdom. These agencies are instruments of antiquarian prejudice and lobbyists for policies founded on collective nimbyism.
As well as rushing headlong into a fictive past, the English landscape is increasingly managed. That's to say it is subject to countless prohibitions. Do not light fires. Do not park. Do not feed the ponies. Do not drive at more than 40mph. Do not, do not, do not. To which the only response can be: ignore, ignore, ignore. Tidiness is no virtue.