No radio, no telly, no internet. No mobile-phone signal. The stone cottage I’m staying in for the summer lies at the bottom of a steep, curved valley, well beyond reach of the 21st century. The day I moved in, a slender young deer in the next field watched me trundle my possessions down the path in a wheelbarrow. It stood motionless and stared with absorbed interest, as if a human being was a rare and extraordinary sighting.
I’ve been here a week. Unless I climb the path to the car and drive across a boulder-strewn waste to the nearest village, I live in a world in which the only noises are gentle ones supplied by nature. All I can hear now, for example, is the rain softly battering the young leaves, this same bird singing this same song, and the gurgle of a stream, which is the water supply. In the visitors’ book, someone has written that their grandfather lived in this quiet and remote place until 1916, then volunteered for France and took part in the battle of the Somme. Of all the myriad aspects of that ghastly business, it must have been the noise he found hardest to come to terms with. These days people pay good money, I know, to go on silent retreats supervised by whey-faced Buddhists: retreats with titles like ‘Rediscovering mindfulness in daily living’. I have once or twice tried tiptoeing about the cottage and surrounding woods in a mindful sort of way, carefully listening to the discourse going on in my own mind, but to be honest ITV1 would be more intellectually stimulating.
The nearest village of any size is Widecombe on the Moor. I went there yesterday, ostensibly to try to buy stamps and a newspaper, but mainly to enjoy some random human contact. On the village green, in the market square and in the café, everyone was speaking German. Widecombe was swarming with Germans. The village post office was clinging on in very reduced circumstances in a pantry in the café. A charming woman, English, thank goodness, serving cream teas in the café went and fetched the key and served me with a book of stamps. The price of a first-class stamp, now that she was being confronted by it once again, truly astounded her, and she accepted my payment apologetically.
Returning to the cottage, I peeped inside the letterbox fixed to the gate for the first time, just out of idle interest, expecting to see only old spiders’ webs, and was surprised to find a letter — and, what was more, a letter with my name on it. I was not so cut off as I thought. It was a brief note in a shaky hand from someone called Artur. I must excuse his English, he wrote, as it was not so good; but he had my suitcase. It was safe, he said. He’d found it on a station platform. Underneath was an address and phone number.
I jumped in the car and went to fetch it straight away. Artur was at home. He had metallic ginger hair, blue eyes and was Polish. He and his wife lived in a broken-down flat in a desperate part of Plymouth. His hobby was photography. He was photographing the station, he said, and noticed this unattended suitcase on the deserted platform. He showed me the photos he’d taken that day. There it was in several of them, like a mystery object in a photo competition, resting beside the bench where I’d left it the week before. He’d carried it across to the station office, but it was closed. The police station was closed also. So he took the case home with him, composed a letter, and posted it to the address I’d written on the label.
I was pleased to get my suitcase back, and even more pleased, I think, to have someone to talk to, and I jabbered away like a religious ecstatic. It was by far the most poverty-stricken household I’ve been in for a long time, but I parked myself in one of Artur’s comfy armchairs and it felt like home. His wife was at work, so I didn’t meet her. She had speculated, Artur told me in his halting way (with an implied suggestion that coming from his wife it was possibly a load of old poppycock, but he was going to run it past me anyway), that a small act of decency such as his might have positive repercussions for their own lives, for my life, and perhaps eventually for the whole world. I nodded wild yeses. She was spot on, I said. In fact I was already basking in the benefits.
Artur flatly, even aggressively, refused my 50 quid for a drink, so I rolled it into a tube and stood it on the table between us.
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