What's in a Community?

I've been thinking a lot this week about communities.  It all started on Saturday, as I returned from watching a football match in a nearby town. During my eight-mile drive home, I thought about how much I'd enjoyed the game, and then recalled that the winning team - like many these days - was drawn not from the local community but from a pool of known talent that is transferred from team to team as finances and careers in the sport rise and fall: as skills wax and wane.  By then I was passing through a large village, and passed a couple of men outside the pub, chatting over a late afternoon drink.  I remembered the meal I'd shared with my son a couple of weeks ago, while watching another football match on TV, and I realised what a place sport has in community life, whether it is live, as I'd just enjoyed, or secondary as we'd experienced on that occasion.  I found myself regretting what seemed to be the single shortcoming of my present lifestyle: the absence of a village ambience.

After a relaxing bank holiday weekend (made more so by typical bank holiday weather, which greatly discouraged any going out!), on Tuesday morning I found myself once again in that mid-Bedfordshire countryside, passing through two villages on my way to deliver in a third.  In one, I saw a large open space where, on sunny summer weekdays, as well as at the weekend, it's quite likely there'll be a cricket match in progress.  My delivery was to a pleasant cottage opposite the church; I've been there a number of times, and always marvel at the many antique items that clutter the yard.  It would be a little boy's exploratory heaven!  I wondered about the owner and his history, presuming him to be a former businessman, now able to indulge a passion for such things while spending his retirement in these very pleasant surroundings.

A particularly straight road led through the third village, and from some way off I could see a postman walking from house to house with his deliveries. There was no one else to be seen; it was calm and the quiet was interrupted only by my passing van.  And yet, was this place the idyll I had first imagined? I could see no shops; the nearest doctor was probably some miles away, and for someone without a car, what public transport would be available?  I had seen no school, but towards the end of the school holidays, I hadn't seen any children either.  Without children, where was the vitality of the village?  I noticed some building going on at the edge of the village, but would these be executive dwellings for wealthy people seeking a country retreat in their middle age?  Or would they be the affordable homes that would make it possible for the village's own young people to remain there to strengthen the community?

Today I was offered the chance of a delivery in Norfolk - something I rarely turn down - and loyalty to my native county earned its reward.  I found myself driving through Breckland's narrow lanes (with passing places!) between high hedges, with an occasional gap through which you can see for miles across arable land, meadows, and in the distance are more hedges. Between the few market towns are lots of villages, one after another, each with its shop, a pub sometimes indicating a declining clientele by its need for a lick of paint, its medieval church, and the houses: some of red brick, some of flint, but many more built of a combination of the two.

The former station at East Rudham,
which saw its last train in 1967 after
closing to passengers 2nd March 1959

Many a village has a Station Road which shows no sign of station nor relic of railway, until suddenly, in the middle of the countryside a steep incline is encountered and here is a house by the site of a level crossing, showing those unique characteristics that denote a former station, that served a number of villages and yet wasn't really in any of them.  Some of these sites have retained one or both of the original platforms, but between them now is a footpath instead of sleepers and rails, and in the middle distance a barred gate, beyond which is someone else's section of the former railway.