When my uncle was a boy, he said, he was leading a horse down a hill near North Weald in Essex. The horse was pulling a wagon loaded with cabbages, and my uncle had got down, he said, to assist the horse because the hill was a steep one. The war was on. The hill was on a quiet country lane, so he was surprised to see three limousines approaching together in convoy at speed. As the limousines drew level, they slowed to a walking pace so as not to frighten the horse. Seated in the back of the middle car, his face close to the window, and staring out, curious to see what was causing the delay, was Winston Churchill.
My uncle was nine or ten at the time, and he found himself staring directly into that famous, pugnacious face. The Prime Minister looked him in the eye, grinned and gave him the two-fingered V for victory salute. Then the car accelerated forward and he was gone.
My uncle told me this as we walked back to his smallholding from the nearest village, where we’d waited on the pavement, clutching our little sky-blue prostate cancer awareness flags, to see the Tour of Britain cycling race pass by. (If we’d blinked we’d have missed it.) That Churchill, even in an idle moment, and unobserved, would raise his game to rally the spirits of a small boy leading a horse in a country lane, added to his greatness in my eyes.
Wartime reminiscence continued back in the kitchen, where his elder sister was making herself a cup of tea. During the London Blitz, my grandfather moved his family from the relative safety and tranquillity of the countryside just outside London, into east London, to take advantage of the fall in property prices. Each night, as the family huddled in the Anderson shelter in the back garden listening to the falling bombs, my aunt, who is both fearless and intransigent, remained upstairs in her warm bed, sleeping peacefully. So we gave her the usual chaff about ‘the woman who slept through the Blitz’, which she takes in good part.
But my aunt does not take in good part statements or opinions with which she disagrees. Neither does my uncle. Nor did any visitor to their house during my stay or anyone else I met in Norfolk. I’ve never met such a disputatious set of people. They care nothing for civilised conversation. They prefer argument. Raise a subject, any subject at all, from the United States of America to the design of the pepper pot on the table, and there are only two possible ways of looking at it. It is either a good thing or it is a bad thing. It is right or it is wrong. And the only way to talk about something is to say you are in favour of it or to pour scorn on it. The Christian Church, Canada geese, the newsreader’s tie, daisies, the Norfolk accent, automatic gearboxes, wind turbines: I was called upon to give each of these the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down, and my moral fibre and even perhaps my masculinity was judged according to my verdict. The only thing everyone could agree on wholeheartedly was capital punishment.
The argument about wind turbines rumbled on for three days. My uncle’s wife says they are a good thing. My uncle’s sister says they are a bad thing. She wants nuclear power. And just when I thought I’d finally heard the end of it, when we were gathered around the telly in a bucolic stupor, say, watching one of my uncle’s DVDs about old Norfolk farming methods, the shouting match would begin again.
My uncle and his wife are well informed on the subject of wind turbines because one of their sons has three small ones on his farm. Also, their daughter and her husband have applied to have a big one on theirs, and as a consequence they have received death threats.
Inevitably, the wind turbine argument was reduced to one person insisting she liked them, and the other insisting she hated them. What did I think, they said? Terrified of being disloyal to either aunt, I said I thought they were a good thing as long as the revolving blades weren’t dangerous to bats — a claim I’ve heard made by eminent bat people.
The next day we went over to my cousin’s farm and everyone hobbled across the field to inspect his wind turbines. The blades were going like the clappers in the light breeze. I saw no dead bats, or dead anything, lying on the ground. Apparently, each turbine generated enough electricity to have a two-bar electric fire on permanently. ‘Is that all?’ scoffed my anti-wind turbine aunt. And the fatuously subjective argument was thus reignited and the two old bulldogs were at it again, even in the car on the way home.
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