TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

“Is St Mary Mead a very nice village?”

“Well,” replied Miss Marple, “I don’t know what you would call a nice village, my dear. It’s quite a pretty village. There are some nice people living in it and some extremely unpleasant people .. human nature is much the same everywhere, is it not?”

Ashmansworth is certainly a pretty village. It’s a Conservation Area in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. That’s a very good start; but when it comes to tales, it is the human beings in the village we want to hear about, especially the extremely unpleasant ones. Unfortunately, we’ve never had any extremely unpleasant ones to tell tales about.

Instead, we’ll stick to the nice ones, like the composer Gerald Finzi and his family at Church Farm. They are always an inspiration.

In 1939 Finzi and his wife Joy, the artist, threw open their new house at Church Farm, Ashmansworth, to refugees from Germany and Czechoslovakia who were escaping the death camps, and to Londoners fleeing the bombs. The Finzis were remarkable, not only for their hospitality – they never locked their door – but also for their broad-minded tolerance. “You can do, or say, or think anything you like in that house,” said one musician.

From the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, communist and feminist, right through to those with a whiff of fascism about them, like Alfred Chenhalls, a favourite guest, who’d been an open admirer of Hitler, the Finzis welcomed the lot.

Yet Gerald himself was Jewish. It wasn’t easy. Some of the idle guests drove Gerald to despair when he came home exhausted from war work in London. And there was Joy doing all the cooking.

We could do with a little more of that Finzi tolerance today, listening to other people instead of cancelling them. Mosley, over at Crux Easton, claimed he only started his Blackshirts because communists kept breaking up his meetings.

Diana and her sisters are getting another airing on TV now, so it’s back to our local monsters. The Mosleys may be monsters, but at least they’re our monsters; and if Sue Lawley and the BBC can have Diana on Desert Island Discs in 1989, so can we. Diana’s biographer says she chose just one pop song on that programme: A Whiter Shade of Pale, “because the music was by Handel.” But wasn’t it by Bach?

Agricola, August 2025