Fordyce Maxwell: 'Some writers were like war correspondents, predicting the end of the countryside'

Published on Saturday 21 February 2009 18:40

WE HAD a pub lunch with friends one day last week – I know, no expense spared, keep that economy ticking – and a pleasant lunch it was too. Good food, good company in an atmospheric if slightly over-the-top setting – rows of gleaming brass pots and pans on wooden beams, a stuffed fish, and a coal fire that had those too close to it removing a layer of clothing with each course. A five-course dinner might have produced fascinating results.

Three months or so ago, if we had been sitting in that room we would have been underwater when valley, village and pub were flooded. Standing in that bar at that time I might just have kept my nose above the surface. Liz would have needed a snorkel.

A nearby valley had, at the same time, seen more than 800 sheep drowned, heroics performed as others were rescued, homes flooded and people stranded. Five miles away a town high street was feet deep in water for the first time in half a century with every shop, the library and a small museum with its valuable display of musical instruments flooded. They are all now back in business. Some refused to close while cleaning up, reminding older residents of "Business as usual" shop signs from the Second World War.

Once started on disasters, manmade and natural, there is no shortage of conversation. There was the recent anniversary of the bombing of Dresden in 1945, the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, cholera in Zimbabwe, the more immediate horrors of this month's bush fires and more than 180 dead in Australia. And, as the conversation had taken such a cheerful turn, I remembered that on February 20, 2001, the foot and mouth epidemic started.

Not that we knew that night or even by the following week that one case of foot and mouth in a pig would lead to an epidemic that devastated Dumfries and Galloway, Cumbria, Devon, parts of the Borders and Northumberland, and see more than six million animals slaughtered.

That realisation came with week after week of new horrors as the number of farms affected rose into the thousands and television crews from London and piles of burning carcasses became a blight on the landscape. They were followed closely by writers who thought they were war correspondents, pontificating on the end of British farming and the imminent end of the countryside.

Meanwhile farmers, like flooded-out shopkeepers, householders and pub-owners, burnt-out Australian townships, fishermen in the tsunami region, survivors of the Dresden bombing and those who at any time have lost loved ones unexpectedly in appalling circumstances were coping with the horrors of the present and planning for "Business as usual" in the future.

There are no direct comparisons possible, or intended, in that list. But what each one, from village pub to Dresden, illustrates is that human resilience, spirit and the will to survive must never be underestimated. That's why, deep down and sometimes well hidden, I'm an optimist.