A Mostly Delightful Farming Memoir... with a Chilling Sting in the Tail by Griselda Heppel

I’ve been reading a number of memoirs recently, thanks to Slightly Foxed Editions, the publishing wing of Slightly Foxed magazine. Mostly this has been a sheer delight. While the writing quality may vary, what doesn’t is the fascinating glimpses of detail of people’s lives in the past. 

To War with Whitaker by
Hermione Ranfurly

My Grandmothers and I by 
Diana Holman Hunt

I was going to write ‘ordinary people’s lives’ but that would hardly fit My Grandmothers and I, Diana Holman Hunt’s hilarious account of being brought up by her two grandmothers, one of whom almost dangerously eccentric (guess which one). Or Countess Ranfurly’s determination to follow her husband into battle during World War 2 (To War with Whitaker).

Other volumes in this series don’t have quite the same glamour but provide invaluable accounts of growing up in wartime London, for instance (V S Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door). Or learning traditional farming, complete with horse-drawn implements such as hoe, harrow, plough etc, from scratch, at a time when agriculture was only just beginning to be mechanised, and the English country way of life was still very much what it had been for centuries (Adrian Bell’s Corduroy). 

I say these memoirs have mostly given sheer delight. Because halfway through this last one, Corduroy, I came up against something I didn’t expect. 

You get used to the odd stereotype in books written over 100 years ago: a thoughtless epithet here and there no one would dream of using nowadays. What brought me up short was three whole pages of an extremely unpleasant antisemitism, as Bell notes the arrival of a group from London’s East End to a livestock market in Suffolk. Setting the tone by dubbing the place of the auction as 

‘not a very salubrious spot, the haunt of the higgler and the Jew poultry-buyer’ 

he goes on to depict the Jews as 

‘voluble, of unpleasing countenances’ who ‘all the time chattered to one another and gesticulated,’ and ‘every now and again they started to squabble.’ 

Corduroy by Adrian Bell

Revealingly he describes what they wore, implicitly the Wrong Kind of Clothes: 

‘East End suits and patent leather shoes ornamentally inlaid… a contrast to the breeches and buskins and clod-scarred boots of the rest.’ 

I have to remember Bell was writing in the 1920s, when state-sanctioned bullying of Jews in Germany was just beginning, the full horror of the Holocaust still at least a decade away. He could have had no idea of the terrible things antisemitism would lead to. 

But what chills in his account is the tacit assumption that there’s nothing wrong with othering Jewish people in this way, as not fitting in, not being part of society; barely, from the words used, even counting as human. It shows that the extreme antisemitism of 1930s and 1940s Germany didn’t come from nowhere, but tapped into a latent prejudice spread far more widely than we like to admit. 

And how easy it is for ordinary people, who think themselves decent and humane, to feel it’s OK – for whatever reason – to treat those of a different religious/ethnic group as somehow not deserving of respect or of the same human rights they accord themselves. 

Had I read Corduroy a few years ago, I’d have found this passage shocking but, thankfully, portraying an outdated attitude, long since discredited and discarded. 

I wish I could be sure of that today.