I am a moderately articulate member of my generation, state-schooled and Russell Group-educated, conversant in liberal discourse and conditioned, under the assumed threat of social exile, to hypervigilantly assess and critique my own spectatorship and relative ‘privilege’ in any given situation. And so, when I moved back to the West Country after almost a decade of life in London, I had my hackles up. On arrival to the village where I was to spend the next six months, I observed that it distilled something quintessential about the rural west, the landscape of my childhood and adolescence, that I’d sorely missed. It suggested a quieter, simpler existence: a life buttressed by beanpoles and wellington boots, life inside an almanac. But I understood that my interpretation of this pastoral mise en scène was condescending at best, and dangerous at worst. The rustic rural, I knew, is an illusion, a ‘myth functioning as memory’, as Raymond Williams put it, that has a vice-like hold over the national imaginary. All those rolling hills and deep green valleys – the gilded bales of hay and baaing lambs; the wisdom of farmworkers and simplicity of good country folk – these things are not entirely real. They exist in a country of the mind. The reality of rural living, I was to relearn, is far more complex.

My return wasn’t a return home, precisely. The house where I grew up was sold well over a decade ago, following my dad’s death. My mum and her new partner subsequently spent eight years living in neighbouring Gloucestershire, before relocating here, to a village on the Somerset–Wiltshire border, some ten miles from my home town and birthplace. This was a half-return, in a sense: I’d come back to a place that was proximate to the past without being completely saturated in it. Nor had the move occurred under happy circumstances; it was by necessity, not choice. Where some of my friends had emerged from the pandemic unscathed, where others had even thrived – securing promotions, getting married and buying houses – I found myself, at thirty-one, scarcely employed, broken-hearted, and unceremoniously shunted out of the capital. I considered this an unfair fate. I was a loser of the lockdown lottery, a rapidly ageing millennial, lousy with new-found and revivified neuroses, subject to the single tax and unable to gain any traction in my life in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis. I was in a slump, and wanted to stew in self-pity, alone.

My mum’s return to the area was less equivocal. She’d found a job in a charity shop in our old home town, which meant bumping into people from a previous life on a semi-regular basis: one-time acquaintances, the mothers and fathers of my former school friends. They’d rarely recognise her. The moment you step behind a till, she said, you become invisible to most people. But this unlikely bridge to our shared past cushioned my sudden arrival in her present: it gave us plenty to talk about. After work, she’d provide post-shift dispatches – ‘you’ll never guess who I saw in town . . .’ – and our conversation became rich with reminiscences, retelling local lore in order to restore our connection to it, and thereby each other. My stepdad wasn’t entirely left out of these discussions. He’d take great interest in the shop’s daily turnover, falling into deep thought when presented with the figure, as though the townspeople’s thrifting habits expressed something profound about the regional psyche.

My stepdad – a retired engineer who sets store by shoe polish, Rothmans Silver, and his Black & Decker Workmate – seemed surprisingly easy-going about my arrival. And although he’d make quips about charging me fifty pence per shower and whatnot, I had to foist rent and bill money on him. There was no confusion in our relationship. He was wise enough – or kind enough – not to adopt an artificial role of paterfamilias, and for the most part we let each other be. I’d spend all day shut away in the back half of the converted garage, where a bar stool and knackered vanity table, elevated by stacks of books, constituted a makeshift office; he’d spend most of his time in the front half of the garage, where he’d established a workshop of sorts; the two of us separated by a thin plasterboard wall – and forty years.

But we came together at the dinner table, where our dynamic took on a different shape. He and I would occasionally find ourselves entangled in bitter disagreements over whatever happened to be in the headlines, each of us assuming the mandatory, opposing positions that culture wars, by design, encourage us to adopt. Often, I was more annoyed by the fact I couldn’t convince him to alter his opinion on a given issue than I was passionate about the issue at hand. These disagreements would dog us for days, and conversation all but stopped. Neither of us acknowledged this tension, relying on the only woman of the house to re-establish equilibrium through maintaining a state of steady, reliable domesticity, despite the fact she was the only one of us also doing shift work.

My mum and stepdad’s house lies on the outskirts of the village. It’s an ivy-eaten, post-war ex-council property surrounded by cropland, precariously placed on the side of a B-road, one of two such roads which, like cross hairs, bisect the wider parish. Along them, boy racers chase annihilation in souped-up hatchbacks, trailing clouds of vape smoke from souped-up vaporisers; while tractors, articulated lorries and army vehicles from the nearby MOD base tear up the tarmac. Despite its modest appearance, the house is sizeable. It has ‘good bones’, according to my stepdad. The gargantuan back garden leads onto flat fields, which stretch for several miles, before an escarpment cuts across the horizon: the site of an Iron Age hill fort, stamped with a white horse. When they moved in, my stepdad was tasked with taming the interior. He repainted and re-floored the entire house, and sourced electricians to do a wholesale rewiring, slipping bundles of cash into their palms (‘the old-fashioned way’) so they could pocket the VAT.

My mum focused her energy on the garden, pick-axing away bamboo and reseeding the lawn, which was covered in dead patches from where the previous owner’s dogs had pissed and bleached the grass. There was also the matter of the hot tub, installed atop a cement slab in the far corner, which absolutely had to be removed. The very existence of the hot tub was perplexing. She – and I, by extension – are from modest, Protestant stock, former members of the aspirant lower-middle classes, and allergic to ostentation of any kind. What kind of people, we wondered, would spend money on such a luxury, let alone have the temerity to install it out in the open air?

Finally, there were vermin. Rats had taken up occupancy under the rotten timber decking, and needed to be eradicated. Every conceivable tactic short of witchcraft was deployed: traps, poisons, ultrasonic rat repellents, culminating in my stepdad standing watch with his air rifle. He would sit outside, puffing away, sight trained on the rat runs – of which my mum, with the cunning of a military tactician, had sketched detailed blueprints – ready to squeeze the trigger. It took some time, but eventually the rats were exterminated.