Rural Lives

Organikos

Jul 30

The reviews are in, and you can read some of it to get a sense of it. This book does not appear to be available through any of the online booksellers in the USA, but if you read this excerpt and it does not resonate with you, then no matter. For me it has an echo of my own experience growing up in a kind of equivalent to what author Rebecca Smith describes.

Among the differences between my youth and hers is that while I grew up in a working class family, due to my immigrant mother and long line of New England heritage on my father's side I had a clear sense of the option of, and desirability of, mobility. I never had the oppressive sense of class boundaries. Instead I had the sense, and still do, that I could have chosen to earn the requisite fortune that would have afforded me the luxury of owning my own home in that town. But I chose otherwise, and for plenty of reasons I have no regrets whatsoever.

The view from the author's bedroom window at Graythwaite. Rebecca Smith

Jane Austen's English Countryside Is Not Mine

Often people assume I am someone I am not. My childhood was spent making dens in the hidden corners of the landscaped gardens of a grand country estate in the Lake District. I wandered woods full of baby pheasants being fattened up for the shoot. I roamed the hills listening to my Walkman like a modern Brontë sister. I had lakes to paddle in and a dinghy that we bumped down the path to a private beach.

The author playing in the garden at Graythwaite. Rebecca Smith

But they weren't my gardens. It wasn't my beach.

Until the age of 18, I lived on three private country estates in England. First in Yorkshire, then in Bedford, then on Graythwaite Estate, in Cumbria in the Lake District. In each of these my dad had the job of forester, working his way up until he was head forester, overseeing 500 hectares of woodland at Graythwaite, where the job came with a three-bedroom lodge on the estate.

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