English literature has a fine tradition of rural writing, and one
of this century's greatest exponents was Margiad Evans (1909-1958).
Although born in Uxbridge, she was brought up near Ross-on-Wye, and
it is the south Herefordshire borderlands, its farmsteads, hamlets
and towns, which are the setting for The Old And The Young, her
collection of short stories first published in 1948. These fifteen
stories are a distillation and refinement of all that is best in
Evans's writing. A close observer of nature, her descriptions of
trees, water, rocks, the movement of air and the interplay of light
and darkness, are both exact and fluid. She was equally attendant
to the subtleties of the human world. Her child's-eye narrations
are remarkably empathetic, coloured and informed by memories of an
idyllic year spent with her sister on her aunt's farm near the Wye.
But the countryside, though treasured, is not romanticised. A
rose-covered cottage could mean isolation, poverty and
back-breaking physical labour, as Evans herself experienced. Her
sympathies with the old, the infirm, the lonely and the careworn
are a constant strand. In many of these stories, all but one
written during the Forties, the hardships of rural living are
exacerbated by the war. Men are absent, families are separated,
women have to shoulder added burdens. This collection is testament
to the quiet heroism of the home front, to the stoic
resourcefulness of those who have no cenotaph. Indeed, in war or in
peace, it is Evans's ability to delineate the defining nature of
small incidents, and to uncover in a precise locality moments of
profound spirituality, which raise The Old And The Young to the
level of a classic.
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