![]() ![]() The last chance was the Birmingham phone book. The village isn't listed any more and a village not listed in the Gazetteer is usually an ex-village. However, a check in the British Gazetteer accentuated 25 years of guilt. This winter, with the centenary of his birth due on January 3, seemed a last chance to try to carry out his wish. The opening sentence read: 'There was a village once, not very long ago for those with long memories nor very far away for those with long legs.' It was, unmistakably, his imaginative farewell to Sarehole. In 1967 he sent me a carbon of his last story, Smith of Wootton Major: 'An old man's story filled with the presage of bereavement,' as he put it. He was a shy but clubbable man of lightly-carried learning and huge relish - 'every morning I wake up and think good, another 24 hours' pipe-smoking,' he would say. ![]() He befriended me, as he did several journalists and other young people in those final years before his death in 1973. I couldn't - my then paper the Oxford Mail's coverage area didn't quite stretch to Birmingham. When it was over, he asked me to go to the area and write a story which might start a campaign to save any shred that suburbia might have left of the village. The interview, his first with a newspaper journalist, was a considerable kindness. 'There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. ![]() 'It was a kind of lost paradise,' he said. ![]()
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