Comment

Stan Grant
Lost in England

Getting lost is one of those antique pleasures denied us in the age of satellite navigation. Occasionally, though, technology fails us and we are set adrift in a world still capable of delight and novelty.

So it was driving through the Gloucestershire countryside last week. I was on my way from Oxford to Cheltenham, making good time, when, without warning, the main road was blocked.

With no alternative routes marked I took a guess and, more in hope than anything, headed down a narrow, tree-lined lane. The navigation system did not account for the road closure and continued to direct me back to where I had been.

Bereft of directions I followed my nose and found myself utterly bamboozled. The roads, already impassably narrow, narrowed even more and the trees and twists and turns made it impossible to anticipate oncoming traffic.

By my luck a massive harvester loomed suddenly in front of me and forced me to drive my car into the long grass, close my eyes and hope the oncoming beast did not scrape the side.

I had well and truly strayed from anything resembling a highway. I drifted farther and farther from Cheltenham and was despairing of ever reaching the antique bookstore I had set out to find.

Frustration turned to agitation. I blamed everyone and everything, from my wife in the passenger seat, to the satnav, to the local council and the roads department. I mean, who in their right mind blocks a road without warning or directions?

Soon I found myself not just far from my destination but in what seemed like an utterly other place and time. The succession of laneways and sheep tracks had put me into some vortex, drawn ever and ever into the whirling centre.

I came out into a village where everyone appeared to travel by horse and cart. A woman in jodhpurs and riding cap astride a stallion five times her size was ambling along the centre of the track. The houses were made of stone and hid behind long stone walls.

Hay bales lined the paddocks. I passed people oblivious to my presence, locked in their unhurried conversation. Then something wonderful happened. I started to breathe. I no longer looked at the clock. I noticed the beauty of the natural world.

My wife and I chatted away more slowly now, pointing out landmarks and remarking on the glorious houses and gently sloping farmland. If John Constable had been raised here and not Suffolk, this is how his paintings would have looked.

I felt blessed that I’d wandered off the main road. I felt so privileged that England could still show this to me. I realised how I yearn for it.

I have spent time here on and off this year, staying in Oxford and wandering the Cotswolds. I have found it inspiring. It is part of my desire for withdrawal. For peace. I love my country, yet sometimes I need to see other pastures.

It is a creative place for me. I came here to unblock my imagination and find new words for a book I am writing. My old words bored me. I was tired of my voice.

Here it is, enchanting. That’s the word. I need to be enchanted.

Australia, God love it, at times can feel heavy. History bears down on me. My language feels laboured, predictable. At worst, it seems a little pleading. Writers should not plead.

I was always enchanted by rural England. When I was a boy I would stare for hours at idyllic pastoral scenes on faded prints on the wall of my great-aunt’s house. I used to imagine myself disappearing into the paintings.

Down these winding lanes in ancient villages of stone, I find a little of what the young me sought. It is romantic. I need that.

It is a world captured in the oral histories of George Ewart Evans, who chronicled the passing lives of village England. He told the simple stories of farm workers, shepherds, blacksmiths and domestic servants.

I picked up one of his books, The Crooked Scythe, in a second-hand store. It is a balm for the too-often breathless language of our time. When I read him, I realise what I find so irritating about too much contemporary writing. Evans is without artifice.

Too many writers today reach too high. There is too much drama. The interior life is too grand. There is too much noise. Modern writers want to be heard. They do not ask permission to be read; they demand we read them.

The people in Evans’s books lilt. It is as though they know they cannot compete with history, so they lower their voices. They smile not too often, just enough, and to the world’s toils they shrug.

For these people, time moved by the sun and not the clock. Lives were seasonal. Pleasures were simple. Evans tells of the houses of local folk, all of them the same: two bedrooms, a small kitchen, dining table, a cozy living room. A battered, comfortable chair. Reliable clothes.

Possessions were practical rather than fashionable.

Evans describes how one could swap houses with another and feel entirely at home. Still there was one touching detail: each house had a small thing of beauty, something all of its own, a china cup, a porcelain doll, an animal figurine.

There must be beauty in life. How much the better if that beauty is modest.

Search George Ewart Evans and you will see a man who looks like his words. He had a genteel manner. He wore clothes befitting simple dignity. Here appeared a gentle soul.

Reading a little about him revealed that, like us all, a pleasant demeanour can mask some inner turmoil. He had his share of disappointments. He apparently battled depression and that’s in large part why he settled in the countryside and told the stories of the people there, living as they were in a passing time.

Do not be led, though, to consider him a nostalgist. He did not pine for old, stately English glory. By accounts he loathed the monied class and his politics leaned left.

Yet in the charm of yesteryear, Evans found lessons for today.

So do I. Do I want to live in the past? Yes, although I wouldn’t want to go back there. I’d likely not be entirely welcome.

It is nice to drive through it for a while, though. Nice to switch off navigation and get lost. Yet even out here among the horses and the hay, they have internet. They can switch on 24/7 news and rail at the world like the rest of us.

The world is coming and one day it will swallow up these little havens as it swallowed up the lives of George Ewart Evans’s villages.

I will be home again soon. Home to my country, Australia – a land bigger, browner, older. I will say hello to history again, my history. My words are better now, lighter, all for having driven off down a country lane.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 2, 2025 as "Lost in England".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.

RELATED READING