Yurts, tukhuls and other amenities
PERSONAL COLUMN STRIX
For the small covey of small children, who pass her twice a day on their way to and from the school bus, the old grey mare has what bureau- crats describe as considerable amenity-value. Her sad but unalarming head hangs over The hedge; she accepts the offerings they bring her —bits of bread, half-eaten apples, lumps of sugar. For the girls she is an object of deep affec- tion, almost of love; for all the children she is part of the furniture of their lives.
They do not know, and there is no reason why they should, that she is dying of neglect. The grass in the little paddock, in which her clueless, absentee owner boarded her out several years ago, is sour. Her teeth are in ruins, so that she cannot graze properly; her hooves, splayed like overgrown oyster-shells, are an embarrass- ment to her. She is full of worms.
But for the children she is an amenity; if she were put down and vanished from their lives, it would grieve them deeply.
The unlovable word 'amenity'covers an almost limitless field, throughout which one man's meat is apt to be another man's poison. Across the valley from the village stands, and has stood for centuries, the mellow complex of buildings which make up Pipit Farm. Built piecemeal in an age which had never heard of time and motion, they cover nearly an acre of ground; they are a delight to behold, at any rate from a distance, and have been scheduled by the local authority as possessing exceptional architec- tural and historic interest.
They are wholly unsuited to modern agricul- tural practices. The old cart-shed is too low to house tractors with cabs on; the main barns, with huge tiled roofs which need constant main- tenance, provide, in a series of great inglenooks separated by old ships' timbers, storage of the most inconvenient kind. They are as obsolete as an ox-wain, but because they are an amenity, officially designated as such, they are sacrosaidet and Pipit Farm is condemned to the doldrums.
If a project were mooted for pulling down the old buildings, and replacing them with clinical, porridge-coloured cantonments, which would enable the farmer to make a go of things instead of, at best,-marking time, there would, very naturilly, be an outcry. The idea that a thing of beauty, a landmark in the lives Of generations, should be destroyed is repugnant to everyone, and doubly hateful to those who live in its neighbourhood. So what?
This is one of those cases (an imaginary one, incidentally, but typical of many) where no com- promise is possible, where a bit of architectural surgery and some tree planting cannot provide an acceptable solution. The buildings must either be razed, or continue to stand as they are. Who is to say, and on what grounds, which of these things is going to happen?
The buildings have long outlived their useful- ness. Like the old grey mare, they are doomed, but the preservationists, like the small children, cannot be expected to appreciate this; they look, after all, just like farm buildings used to look. The farmer doesn't like the idea of knocking them down but knows by now that if they don't ruin him they will ruin his successor; he is farming with one hand tied behind his back and he is, when all is said and done, the owner of the buildings. To attempt, even unsuccess- fully, to assert his own rights and further his own interests by appealing against the local authority's preservation order will involve him in expense, obloquy and unwelcome publicity; his action will be seen as selfish, his motives as sordid.
His critics and opponents, on the other hand, can hardly be blamed for standing up for their rights, even if these have no basis in law. They have aesthetics on their side, and sentiment, and old associations. Their view of Pipit Farm is part of what some of them may, in letters to the local press, describe rather loosely as their heri- tage. Perhaps, if householders paid a small rent for the view from their windows (we sometimes buy a right of way for our feet: why not for our eyes?) the rights and wrongs of local dis- putes over amenities would be that much easier to establish. But they will always present diffi- culties, because so many different sets of values, so many conflicting motives and emotions, appear in so many different guises, upon the battlefield. What one side calls progress the other execrates as vandalism; how can we reconcile the nation's need for technology with the people's hatred of eyesores?
On this, the main battlefront, the local plan- ning authorities provide a forum where such a reconciliation can at least be attempted. Where permission for development cannot reasonably be refused, conditions can be imposed on the siting and dimensions of a building, on the materials to be used in its construction and on other aspects of the project (unless, as we have lately been reminded, the building is to be erected by the Gas Council or any other nation- alised undertaking). The resulting compromises may not be very happy, but at least they are compromises. Neither the Progressives (or Vandals) nor the Preservationists (or Reaction- aries) have had it all their own way. A formula has been found.
But there are other fronts in this internecine war where hostilities are less easily brought to an end. A lake, for instance, is an amenity. So are fishing, and bird-watching, and sailing, and silence. But so also are speedboat-racing, water- skiing and (let us face it) transistor radios. How does one find a formula here?
For visitors to London a Beefeater is an amenity; he is picturesque and colourful and he doesn't in the least mind having his photo- graph taken. He may not be a symbol of pro- gress but he is not an obstacle to it; nobody —not even that boring Labour me whose name (through no fault of his own) for the moment escapes me—wants him to be abolished for reasons of ideology or class-warfare. Have we perhaps at last discovered an amenity standing above controversy, incapable of breeding envy and generating rancour?
Only up to a point, I am afraid. When we travel abroad we look for Beefeater-equivalents. Veiled women: tribesmen festooned with ban- doliers: tiny children astride huge water-buf- faloes : a toothless crone selling iguanas in the market—it is at these, not at the managing director of the ball-bearing factory or the lady in charge' of the welfare clinic, that we direct our cameras. In Mongolia we want to see yurts with camels kneeling in front of them, in Ethiopia tukhuls with a goat peering out of the door; and these predilections, especially in im- perfectly developed countries, are apt to give serious offence, for our hosts wish us to take an interest in their amenities—the veterinary research station, the college for midwives, the signs of progress—and are understandably annoyed by our obsession with the most back- ward-seeming features of their national life. They do not understand that, for us, these are our amenities.
'Amenities,' says Fowler, revised by Gowers, 'has become something of a VOGUE won), especially in housing, for what conduces to human pleasure or convenience, and can mean anything from indoor sanitation to a distant prospect.' I hope I have written enough to con- vince the reader that the key-word here is 'any- thing' and to persuade the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary that their own definition is out of date. It is hardly any help to be reminded that a word which has launched more public inquiries and brought more bad blood to the boil than almost any other once meant 'pleashnt ways.'
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