Alison Brackenbury, born in Lincolnshire in 1953, is descended from long lines of servants and skilled farmworkers. She has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Thorpeness (Carcanet, 2022) and Gallop, her Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2019). Her work has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. The programmes she has written and narrated for BBC Radio 4 have been frequently been "Choices" in Radio Times, which praised her account of village life: "evocative, amusing and utterly compelling." After she left the village, Alison’s life ranged from a First-Class Oxford degree to industrial work. Memory, experience and the startling results of research have enriched Village, her brand-new, non-fiction prose book, honouring her Lincolnshire home. Alison’s writing about her village has recently been featured in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Financial Times, and discussed on The Verb on BBC Radio 4. Village has just been published in both digital and paperback forms. Alison's website is here.
About Village, by Alison Brackenbury
Witches and wheelbarrows ...
Francis Weatherhogg, saddler and Census taker, had one special form to deliver. To a "witch" ... Under the shifting shadows of the walnut tree, Mary Ann opened the door of her tiny stone cottage. There she lived, unmarried, with a man whose extraordinary story spanned three continents. And Mary Ann herself – in 1891! – was still feared in her village for murderous "spells" ...
Village tells extraordinary stories of six homes, from 1841, when the first Census taker trudged up steep Hollowgate Hill, to 1971, when its author, aged 18, was driven below its thorn trees to Oxford. But she never forgot her village: Vicarage Road where Amy Mary, her grandmother, gleefully spoke of her rebellious survival of "service"; tall Rose Cottage, up "Long Lane," where Mrs Rudkin, pioneering archaeologist, brought the past to life for village children; the Mount, the farmhouse where the author’s family camped in a few grand rooms, and the mysterious cold Manor on its limestone ridge, "the Cliff" ...
The author’s memories began with cheerfulness. Her research revealed what women survived: especially abandoned, pregnant girls, struggling "Singlewomen," including Amy Mary’s own tiny, gallant sister. Yet it was in the finest houses that young wives in farming’s "Golden Age" crashed and burned.
And how did old Emma Jarman survive into her 80s, despite her Saturday night sessions in the Commercial Inn? She had her lift home booked with Mr Weatherhogg. In a wheelbarrow ...
You can read more about Village here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book.
From Village
What the travelling woman saw
December, 1854. A hard winter in Lincolnshire. The lane-side trees, at the village edge, are caves of white above the dark figure, bundled in shawls. She has seen many things in her calls at cottages. But never before a woman on fire ...
Beneath the bare, grey-barked arms of a young walnut tree, the cottage is tiny. Hawking or begging to survive, it is in the smallest homes she may find villagers as kind as my grandmothers will be: superstitious Amy Mary, who buys lucky tokens, or tiny, benevolent Dot, the shepherd’s wife, who gives workless men a thick slice of bread and butter, and a brief, safe place by the fire.
No answer to her knock. But through the window’s thick glass, she glimpses a dangerous light. Glinting flames lick the long skirts of a woman, crumpled on the rug. Is the traveller afraid that the villagers will call her a thief? She rushes across the lane. She shrieks to Mary Herrick.
Does Mary stamp on the creeping hems of flame? Married to a "Cottager," who farms a few acres, she can afford stout boots, stitched by John Barratt, the village shoemaker. But her middle-aged neighbour has not survived. Her fall overturned a tub. She has suffocated in a pale flood of what the Coroner and The Lincolnshire Chronicle will mysteriously call "Paste."
Blue, huge, the sky sinks. Down the lane, a young girl dawdles, carrying a tired child, returning, reluctantly, from the excitement of a village wedding.
