Reflections on a Pastoral Scene

Standing in my garden on this late autumn evening I hear the familiar sound of the shepherds bringing their herds back from pasture.  This is a sound that never ceases to fill me with contentment.  As a child growing up in a very industrial setting I would yearn to be part of such a pastoral scene.  A weekly insight into the life of ‘Heidi’ on my black and white TV made me long for just such a simplistic and rustic way of life.

The sound also brings to mind  one of my favourite poems – Gray’s ‘Elegy’.  This poem begins with a description of a pastoral scene at twilight. The poem is a reflection on death, lost potential and missed opportunity.  I don’t see it as ‘morbid’, however,  but rather inspirational.  It is the common man, the working class, that lie here in Gray’s churchyard.  They are the ‘mute’ ‘Miltons’; the ‘guiltless’ ‘Cromwells’, not because they didn’t strive to achieve, but because they were born into poverty.  As a social worker with a very strong sense of social justice, and having been brought up in a very working class environment,  I identify with such ‘Annals of the Poor’.

Live your dreams

The characters in Gray’s pastoral setting all  have unrealised talents, hidden dreams and lost potential.  One motif of my blog is “aspiring to live one’s dreams”.  As a child I dreamt of leaving Wigan and living in Cornwall – where we used to holiday every year.  My dream became a reality in my forty fifth year when I met my second husband, a Cornishman.  At least, he liked to think of himself as such, though he had not actually been born there.  He had lived there from the age of eight, his parents having purchased a small hotel where he had been brought up on the beach most of the time.

He grew to love the sea, and still does, and as a teenager he became a beach guard – yes ‘BayWatch’!  Even at sixty three he still has enormous stamina and can swim like a fish, to use the proverbial.  Do you remember the advertisement: ‘This is Dave, he swims like a fish’, the girlfriend says all dewy eyed; well that’s me, accept Jeff doesn’t have big ears, LOL in fact he’s rather handsome!  Well, I digress, what I am actually trying to say is that he was very fortunate to be brought up in such an amazing location.  

A growing dissatisfaction with life in England

We enjoyed a very privileged lifestyle: a nice home, good jobs, a good social life, etc., but the water bill alone was well over one hundred pounds a month.  We now pay less than a quarter of this.  A cup of coffee cost around three pounds in most places in Cornwall, often more – we now pay less than fifty pence.  And of course we always had the worry of paying a mortgage, which we don’t have here. The cost of living is just so much more affordable here.

Yes, I loved the coast line in Cornwall, but I also love our mountains.  I don’t think I fall into the purported category of loving either mountains or coastline the most . And we can see the coastline (just as beautiful as Cornwall around the Black Sea) as often as we like as we own property there also. Property here is also much more affordable than in England.

The inspiration for this  blog was hearing the sound of the shepherds bringing their herds back from their mountain pastures in the evening.  I do not romanticise this pastoral scene however.  As in Gray’s ‘Elegy’,  the shepherds here are very poor, under privileged, and live a very hard life.  They are also very isolated, often spending long periods alone with their flocks in harsh conditions.  Whenever I see them I think how arduous their lives must be.  

Simple blessings

I also think of how blessed I am to be living here and hearing their sounds instead of that of heavy traffic.  Of smelling the roses in summertime, the woodsmoke in winter, the sweet smell of fermenting grapes in autumn, and the Linden trees in springtime, instead of the polluted air of my home town.  I don’t  hate Wigan, I just never felt that I ‘fitted in’ there.  Of course, this was a lot to do with the fact that I was never happy at home, particularly with my mum, but that is a whole new ball park to explore.  I do have many happy memories of Wigan, but I do feel so blessed to hear these lowing herds and their bells , and to be part of such a pastoral scene each day.