From: SSAA, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On sense v sentimentality in the country
Vicki Woods
Guardian, Thursday October 26, 2000
Last week, I was bombing along the C-class road that lies between my
dripping cottage and New Greenham Business Park (formerly Women's Peace
Camp: Say No to Cruise) when I came across what was obviously a very
minor road accident.
Two cars pulled up on the verge, two young women standing about looking
tense, one shouting on a mobile. I was racing for the London train, but
we neighbourly country folk do not pass by on the other side. "Are you
OK?" I enquired. "Anybody hurt? Need any help?" The one without the
mobile said: "Er, er, I think we'll be all right. Thanks for stopping.
She's called the emergency services, they're coming, they'll be here
soon." Snatches of the mobile conversation blew towards me ("A glancing
blow to the side of the head - no, no - alive - no, not too much
blood") and I said, "Oh, my God!" and leapt out of the car.
"Who is hurt?" I asked, in a soothing but urgent voice. They turned
stricken little faces towards me and said: "It's a squirrel." A
squirrel? For a squirrel she called the emergency services? In the
depths of the country? Who'd turn out for a squirrel? Vets Sans
Frontieres? Here, at the bucolic foot of Watership Down, we have ways to
deal with the hundreds of small animals that routinely fling themselves
under our wheels each week. We despatch them, quickly and
unsentimentally, by a)
wringing their necks or b) hitting them with something heavy. You may
not fancy the idea down Upper Street, Islington, but that's the great
British divide, isn't it?
Town v country. Sense v sentimentality.
Well, that's how it used to be. Not any more. I opened my mouth to utter
something normal, sane and helpful (such as "Shall I knock it on the
head with my car-jack?") but I shut up sharp at the sight of their
white, set faces.
These young women clearly did not want their squirrel despatched in the
time-honoured country manner. They wanted it rescued, and preferably by
a telegenic RSPCA officer in reassuring navy-blue. They wanted it
carried lovingly off to Animal Hospital, splinted and stitched up by a
popular Swedish vet, and serenaded afterwards by Rolf bloody Harris.
Villages like mine used to be full of red-blooded, unsentimental country
people: mole-stranglers, pheasant-pluckers, pigeon-shooters,
rabbit-hunters. They knew that milk isn't crushed from vegetables and
that your best Christmas turkey is the one that is killed for you
personally by the farmer up the back lanes. Now every hill and
hedge-bottom is crawling with milk-fed suburbanites who think animals
have souls and that noisy cockerels can be turned off at dawn, like
car-alarms. Is it too much tarmac or too much television that's turning
the countryside into one vast seamless suburb? Maybe it's too much Tony
Banks. He was roaring and bawling on Any Questions? last week about
toffs and viciousness and medieval barbarism (fox hunting) and being
cheered to the rafters by a Bristol audience. Only 10 years ago, he
would have been cheered and booed on a 50-50 basis. Now it's 80-20. Any
day now, it will only be me and Clarissa Dickson Wright supporting the
idea that half-dead squirrels should be knocked on the head.
When I finally got to London, my friend Julia Reed nearly choked on her
martini when I told her why I was late. "What's happening to you
people?" she said. She's from Mississippi. She once drove me along the
levee at Greenville with a huntin' and shootin' neighbour, Warren. He
told me how to shoot deer ("It's hard - they have a very acute olfactory
sense and they kin smell you") and wild pig, and brought me up short
with the words: "Y'all ever see an armadillo explode?" Er, no. He said
they
have a $20 bounty on them, because they burrow under the levee. "So most
everybody in Greenville has a .22 pistol which they keep for
armadillos." Julia just could not get her head round the squirrel thing.
She said her friend Jessica ran over a raccoon last summer ("Raccoons
are pests. Like squirrels") and took it straight back home to her maid,
"who skinned it in a minute flat, and threw it in the pot for stew. It's
a southern delicacy, coon stew". How very thrifty, I said. "More than
that. She
gave the skin back to Jessica, whose little boy is aged around eight,
and she had somebody cure it and make him a genuine coonskin cap, which
he has never taken off. He loves that thing. In Mississippi," she said,
"we know how to deal with a roadkill."
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