Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay

"The author, George Ewart Evans, was in many ways one of the pioneers of oral history. Back in the in the late 1940s and early 1950s he took one of those early tape-recorders which were very big and very cumbersome, and he went to talk to old people in East Anglia. These people had memories which went back well into the 19th century. He was almost talking about what seems like a pre-industrial society. He is very good at putting together their memories. The book is actually one of about four that he produced, and I could have picked any one of them, but this is the early one, and it’s a classic. The main difference is that it is a rural culture that Evans is describing. My kids were brought up in the countryside and their culture is based on computers; their assumptions about the world are indistinguishable from the cultural assumptions of their friends who live in towns. About 16 years ago I asked Godfrey Basely (the man who started The Archers on BBC Radio 4), when he was just coming up to his 90th birthday, what the main difference was between the countryside now and the countryside in which he grew up in the 1920s. He made this same point. Education and opportunities are far better in the countryside now than they were then, and the result is that, culturally, rural children are aware of the same kind of things as children from the towns. This has had a major impact on rural culture."