The Old and the Dutiful

My brother visited us three years back. In the old country, he and I were raised in the West Country, with the slow-R accents, the gardening analogies, and a suspicion of anyone from the Forest of Dean. It was his first time in the Berg, and I don’t see him often, so I wanted him to enjoy it.

I suspect that we all like to portray our little valley in its best light, despite the dreadful other things for which our country is famous, and I was no exception. We’re like mothers, aren’t we, wiping their little brats’ noses and licking their wayward fringes flat before meeting the vicar, hoping he won’t notice that their offspring is actually the spawn of the devil.

Anyway, the weather was glorious, the dogs were on their best behaviour, and my brother’s girlfriend managed not to be bitten by a snake, which, given her paranoia of the untamed dark continent, was a major victory.

Sensing I was on a roll, I risked introducing them to the locals at Dragon Peaks’ Wednesday-night special. As we walked into the bar, my brother gaped.

‘I’ll be jiggered,’ he said. ‘It’s Emmerdale Farm!’

This comment hit home: soap operas – I can still hum the theme tune from The Archers – were the mainstay of our mum’s daily entertainment. He was right: in this corner, three old codgers talked about carpentry; at that table, the ladies were wondering whether potatoes were bad for pigs; and the Red Wine Brigade had arrived, waving bottles as if there had been a recent drought.

There were no green Wellington boots or Land Rovers, but hiking boots, shorts, and scruffy T-shirts were adequate to the analogy: big white men in big white bakkies; Ambridge-under-mount.

‘Yeah, I could write a daily 12-and-a-half-minute episode of this place,’ I conceded, ‘and never run out of ideas.’ As if to underscore this, as we poured our beers, I told him my embellished version of Elizabeth Klarer’s alien-abduction tale. In this account, two of the locals witness Akon’s ship landing by Breakfast Stream.

‘Who do you reckon made it, then?’ asked one. ‘Ooh, Massey-Ferguson, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said the other. ‘Well, tain’t much good, then. Look! It don’t cut the grass, it burns it.’

Peter Small interjected, wiping his hands on a towel, ‘but that’s a true story, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course it is.’