Paddy’s vision of long-lost village life. Time we tried to bring it back | Eastern Daily Press

This column first appeared in the Eastern Daily Press.

I live in Rockland St Mary, on the edge of the Broads.

In a meeting of our local ‘Five Mile Network’ for resilience, I recently had the wonderful privilege of interviewing Paddy Flynn, my village’s local amateur historian, about his life growing up here in rural Norfolk.

It was incredibly eye-opening.

He was born in 1947 and his family have lived in or around Rockland since at least the 1600s.

Talking to Paddy about what life used to be like, one of the most common themes was the self-sufficiency of the local area.

Everybody grew their own vegetables, so much so that the village shop wouldn’t stock veg since there was zero demand for it.

Modern conceptualisations of the ‘circular economy’ were just common practice for rural life back then, it would seem, with human waste being repurposed as fertiliser.

For meat, people mostly ate rabbits.

When asked whether chicken was eaten, Paddy said only rarely: for chickens were valued much more for their ability to produce eggs.

For Paddy, back in his day, everything was localised.

There were two milk deliverers in the village who would come by house-to-house with a big churn of milk from Langley, four miles away.

To deliver it, they would scoop a pint of milk with a jug straight from the churn.

Vegetables and fruit were seasonal, with blackberries, apples, and gooseberries comprising most of the fruit of Paddy’s upbringing.

An orange might be a special treat at Christmas time, whilst exotic fruits like a banana were nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, there were orchards and several market gardens in and immediately around our village.

I think it’s really sad that these have gone.

We should start to bring them back. And we have made a start, by planting 50 trees in our new community orchard here.

Another repeated theme in the interview was a strong sense of community.

Paddy detailed that his grandfather used to grow hogweed to feed rabbits that he kept, and the land where he would grow this hogweed would be set aside for his use, and different people would be using the land surrounding it.

No need for official property or usage rights, only a shared conceptualisation of common land.

When Paddy was ill and unable to attend school for a year, a teacher would come over to his family house for an hour every day and do lessons with him.

She wasn’t paid for this. “She knew that we were struggling, and she gave me time,” he recalled. “That was just the way things were.”

Yet there are reminders in Paddy’s story of progress in the true sense. His father died from tuberculosis when he was just a boy; a disease that now kills only 5pc the number it used to 100 years ago (and that’s before accounting for population growth).

Obviously, we have no great desire to reverse medical breakthroughs that have improved all our lives.

So how we do assess what to let go of, and what we ought to seek to recapture?

Well, the crucial moment in the interview came when I asked Paddy to compare life when he was a child to life today, and to bear in mind that some of the things he mentioned sounded

quite tough (sewers not
installed until 1970s, working in the field for two hours a day after school, no mains gas connection etc).

Paddy’s response to this? “I wouldn’t want to be a child now to be quite honest.”

For although Paddy was, materially speaking, poor in comparison to today’s standard, growing up then was full of fun, adventure and community.

For example, in the absence of pricy and polluting foreign holidays, he and other kids would go off for days at a time and camp out in the local woods, down by the brook.

And not just the teenagers; kids as young as six would take part in this. No adults would be present.

Life in a place like Rockland has transformed in one man’s lifetime. But so much of that transformation has not been real progress.

I reckon it’s time that we thought and talked together about how we can regain so much of what has been lost: the youth clubs, the easy physical fitness that came from being outside so much of the time, the ability to roam, the hyperlocal food grown without pesticides, the sense of community…

Can we make our future one in which Paddy and his generation will be happy to see their great- grandchildren grow up into?