In her last column for Country Life, our longest serving columnist reflects on what it means to write about herself and the world each week, and why she's decided to stop.
‘Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but my great inheritance was Carla Carlisle, who was already writing for Country Life when I became Editor back in 2006. I had the star I needed. Every week, she wrote the Spectator column on the last article of the magazine, which was why, together with Annie Tempest’s Tottering-by-Gently cartoon, everyone read the magazine backwards.
Editors should not be in awe of their writers, but I was of her. Carla observed Britain with an Anglophile’s fascination: she could see what was special about Britain even when we, the natives, couldn’t. She made us feel better about ourselves, lit up dormant imaginations and challenged what seemed normal.
Occasionally, she felt that she wanted to stop, that she had said all she could, but over a reassuring glass of Champagne at The Savoy, I would persuade her to carry on for all our sakes. Carla and Kenneth became friends of Rachel and mine. We stayed at Wyken and saw that her life was as real as the words she wrote.
She brought her American dream to our country and made Britain seem a finer, better place. Eventually, she took the oath and became British herself.
Shortly before Christmas, I received a note saying her column for January 1 (below), would be her last ever. Her words have finally ended, my thanks are everlasting.’ Mark Hedges
Although my mother stayed married to my father until the day she died, she tended to fall in love every 10 years. This rocky rhythm of passion was hard on her daughters and wearing for her husband. It was also vexing to her own mother, who mourned that ‘Mary Alva has a heart like a hotel’.
That was the beginning of a column I wrote for Country Life in November 1997. In those days, I wrote the ‘Spectator’ column for the back page every week. I did it for three years, stopped for a year, returned and stayed for nine more years. After another sabbatical, I returned to a new location: a monthly essay with the flexible title Another Country. I know all this because I’ve been going through the piles of those columns, trying to summon up the courage to write this ‘Farewell’. As I waded through the fading photocopies, I was surprised to find three old ‘Farewell’ columns. Faithful readers might conclude I inherited a heart like a hotel.
Not long after my first ‘Last’ column, written after a three-year stint of writing weekly, I had a visit from Christopher Lloyd, the Prince of Longevity in the kingdom of Country Life. He made a special journey to Wyken to have ‘a word’ with me. Christopher began his garden column in these pages in 1963 and was well into his 36th year when he came to chide me for ‘giving up’. I gazed around at my bustling restaurant where we were having lunch. I mentioned the shop, the vineyard, the farm, the garden, the husband, the nine-year-old son. I confessed to the bachelor gardener and writer that there were a few obstacles that made it difficult for me to escape into that peaceful realm where ideas are shaped and deadlines loom. The words had barely tumbled out of my mouth before Christopher growled: ‘I call that very feeble.’
His words stung and they stuck. Like a prodigal daughter, I came home to the back page and stayed put for nine years before writing my second ‘Farewell’. That time, I relied on my hero E. B. White, who described his hero, Henry David Thoreau, as a man ‘torn all his days between two awful pulls, the gnawing desire to change life, and the equally troublesome desire to live it’. I wrote that the time had come for me to live life.
I don’t know if Thoreau’s dilemma gnaws at all writers with deadlines, but I believe the writing life has something in common with growing wheat and barley. However rich the soil, you need break crops. You need fallow periods. Farmers now talk about ‘regenerative’ farming, the need for renewal and restoration of the land. I’m pretty sure most columnists need it, too — unless you are Alistair Cooke (58 years of Letter from America), Lloyd (42 years at Country Life) or White (60 years for The New Yorker).
By the time the Editor Mark Hedges asked me to consider the ‘lighter load’ of a monthly column in 2016, it looked as if the world had got completely out of hand. He suggested that I ‘name’ my column — an irresistible offer from an editor — and ‘Another Country’ allowed me to observe events in the land of my birth even as Britain was becoming a different country outside the EU. My debut as monthly columnist was written on the day after the Brexit vote. In tune with my feelings, I went to a funeral where the mourners were a mixed gathering. The deceased, stylish to the end, had used her absentee ballot to vote Leave, a metaphor any columnist would kill for.
It is hard to believe that that was nearly a decade ago. Yes, I am embarrassed to admit that this is my fourth ‘Farewell’. It’s not the rocky passion of a ‘heart like a hotel’, simply the need for time to reflect. Going through past columns, I found I was most grateful for thoughts of other writers whose words replenished my own.
‘Writing a weekly column is like being married to a nymphomaniac. As soon as it’s over, you know you have to begin again’
Long before I arrived at Country Life, I was a fan of Ellen Goodman, whose home base was the Boston Globe. She wrote a syndicated column for 40 years, but it’s her farewell to her readers I’ve quoted most often. ‘Writing a weekly column is like being married to a nymphomaniac. As soon as it’s over, you know you have to begin again.’
My most faithful companion throughout my tenancy at Country Life is the writer who wrote from his saltwater farm in Maine. White’s words are taped above my desk: ‘I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart, the inconsequential but near things of this living was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sanctity or grace.’
The big things that threatened to overwhelm him included the Depression, Hitler, the Second World War and the atomic bomb. The things that have threatened to overwhelm me include Iraq, Afghanistan, Brexit, Trump, covid, Trump again, a war in Ukraine, a planet on fire and a government that doesn’t understand family farms. I admit that my grace and humour has sometimes been thin on the ground. Believe me, there are days when a writer gets sick of her own voice.
Four farewells over three decades and, yes, I’m still searching for the answer to the poet’s question: ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?’ I like to think I’ll devote myself to all I have been given and all I have now. If happiness is continuing to desire what we already have (St Augustine), then I want to focus on what is close at hand: a good husband whose only editorial guidance all these years is ‘will this make the reader happy or sad?’; a great son and his family living on the farm; huge piles of books waiting to be read.
One more thing. More goes into a column than what you read on the page. I’m the beneficiary of an Editor who never once tried to steer me away from or towards a topic. If there were times when he wanted me to lighten up, no such request was ever made.
Deputy Editor Kate Green presides over the deadlines — and so much else — with surpassing warmth and wit. My peace of mind I owe to Octavia Pollock, the infinitely patient Chief Sub-Editor who has put up with thousands of my ‘tweaks’ on the proof, a luxury unknown in today’s publishing world.
The abiding spirit of Country Life honours the past, yet keeps a sharp eye on the long view. That this happens every week is a rare miracle in this transient age and it’s been the honour of my life to spend nearly three decades in these pages chewing over things agricultural, cultural, religious, bovine, canine, royal and moral.
In the end, it’s the readers who bring out the best in a writer. To you I can only say thank you and (write it!) adieu.
Carla Carlisle: We’ve diversified, modernised and compromise — but now we’re farming at a loss again for the first time since the ‘Great Betrayal’
Carla Carlisle laments what has become of Wyken Farm — and worries how much worse it may yet get.
Carla Carlisle: If Jeremy Clarkson was on the ballot, he’d win the farming vote easily
Our columnist from across the pond reflects on the turbulent state of politics, and retains hope for a more predictable
Carla Carlisle: The Nanny State isn’t to be feared — it can fix pretty anything from the NHS to the Post Office
Put your worries aside and join Carla Carlisle on a journey in to common sense.
Carla Carlisle: ‘Sometimes, repetition brings revelation’
Did we learn the lessons about Donald Trump from eight years ago? Probably not, says Carla Carlisle.
