A typical witch and a life of one's own.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

After I graduated, I lived in a village for a few years. This wasn’t planned or anticipated; but it was excellent. I read Cowper under a tree by the river Ouse, his river; I raised a duck from the egg; I trained a spaniel from a puppy; when my in-laws’ bees swarmed, I broke my vow of non-involvement and put on a bee-suit and helped restore the queen to the hive. My wife and I had one of the great friendships of our lives with an octogenarian who had been a real old-time hunting, shooting, fishing lady: she drank whisky, ate venison, enjoyed having Dickens read aloud, called her dog a bastard when she was disobedient, and kept a good orchard. I was sent up many ladders to pick plums, or rewarded with a dram for chopping and carrying the fire wood.

She sounds, in brief description like a caricature, a “real character”, and indeed she was, with her tufting white hair around which the air was often blue. She used to hide what she called the “deep litter” of her house behind the curtains, kept crates of apples in the otherwise unused garage, and housed her rescue spaniel in the old stables. Many a story she told about the old Squire, who came to church and loudly pronounced that the punch she made for his party was so good it gave him the best night’s sleep she’d had for years, or how she fell asleep on her horse coming home at dawn after a hunting ball. She remembered the village baker, old Copperwheat (no joke, that was his real name) leaving the loaves on the step at night when she was a child. He was not a morning baker. He rose late, cycled to town to place his bets, and made the bread in the evening. The children sat outside eating fresh loaves when their parents were distracted at dinner parties.

Copperwheat’s daughter still lived in the village, still at the old bakery. These women were deep links to another time. Our friend said, quite seriously, that things had got worse three hundred years ago when town ways took over from country ways. She really did believe what Cowper wrote: “God made the country, man made the town.” She wasn’t witchy, though she had that air about her as she crawled determinedly along on two sticks, but she was full of village lore and cures.

The days when she had been young overlap with the days of Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel about a middle-aged woman taking control of her life by moving to the country.¹