Hovel in the Hills

TW

I really enjoyed this book about how a pair of intelligent, resourceful people, one of whom can really write, managed to live self-sufficiently in the Black Mountains. Elizabeth West doesn't romaticise the lifestyle at all - there's a lot of hard work, discomfort, mould on the walls and smoke in the house - but there's also a lot of genuine pleasure in the simple things in life and joy in the birds, plants, landscapes and wildlife around her. I'm always interested to see which sacrifices people are willing to make and which they aren't and to consider whether I'd be willing to do the same - I found it bizarre for example that she was willing to wash only once a week yet still ironed her clothes with a flat-iron heated on the stove, but everyone has their own priorities.

This book was fascinating too as a historical document - I'd always considered worries about peak oil and the possible unsustainability of our Western way of life to be a rather modern concern, but here were a couple of people worrying about it in the sixties and seventies. The time they spent working as domestic servants to make ends meet was also a fascinating glimpse of a forgotten, class-bound world and actually left me feeling rather sorry for the old aristocrats, stranded as the social order they were used to vanished. Other historical details were less welcome - in an otherwise lovely chapter on the the garden birds whose lives they observed and followed it was rather a shock to suddenly read that they named the blackbird "N****"! That's what I put the TW there for - while I know it's something you sometimes have to expect in books written in different times it always rather spoils my enjoyment of what I'm reading.