Byline: DAVID LOVIBOND
ALAN CLARK'S diary entry for July 30, 1990, complains of a parish councillor's 'fat wife' stealing firewood from the hedgerows.
Things have not changed much in the past ten years.
Indeed, the situation is far worse than Clark, the late Tory MP, imagined.
All over rural England, the poor are taking cabbages from the fields at night, chasing sheep all day for a bag of groceries and tending gardens for a lift into town on market day.
While Tony Blair wags his Methodistical finger at the countryside and tells everyone how lucky they are to live there, the rural poor turn quietly to the oldest system of all - hunting and gathering.
England's 38 rural community councils, one for each rural county, acknowledge the limited appeal of their formal initiatives to tackle rural deprivation - for example, free access to the internet. And they quote with unofficial pride some of the ways in which country people are responding to personal exigency.
In Sussex, for example, the local development council tells the story of 'Jean', a divorced mother of three children (all under ten), who lives in a village council house near Chichester.
SHE WILL trundle an old pram into the newly reaped fields and glean the ears of corn spilt by the combine after harvest this year, as every year.
'We keep chickens at home.
It costs me nothing to feed them and I sell most of the eggs at the gate.
There's always a day or two before they plough the field, and between us we can fill the pram five or six times.' In winter, Jean, who owes money to mail- order catalogues and the utilities, takes her battered pram and scours local woodlands for fallen timber. 'I've a wood-burning stove and we can heat water to keep the house warm from what we collect.
'I take a rope and maybe a saw; sometimes a tree or branch needs a bit of help, but no one seems to mind.' In the downland villages above Andover, Hampshire, the rural poor have found a hard way to make ends meet.
'The farmers here say that the fields grow stones and they're just happy if we get rid of them now and again,' says Barry, 51, a 'stone-picker'.
He collects flint nodules from the upland fields and sells them on to the building trade.
He used to work in a local brewery, but has been living on benefits since losing his job more than two years ago.
'You used to get a price for copper from wire, or for scrap, but it's not worth the carrying now. There's more money in flints.' Barry and two friends gather their stony crop after the spring and autumn drilling.
'It's no good if it's raining, though. Your boots ball up with mud and it's hard to pull the stones up. We use a sled to cart them to the field edge and collect the flints in one go with the pickup.
'In a good dry spell, we can take maybe five loads down in a week - and that's [pounds sterling]100 each.' In Nottinghamshire, the closure of more than two dozen pits in 20 years has economically debilitated the country's colliery villages and led to some unorthodox self-help strategies.
'There's a whole lot of illegality in this type of community,' says Bob Middleton of Nottinghamshire Rural Development Council. 'Everything from car-boot sales to hare-coursing - a bit like Robin Hood country, which is what we are, of course.' FRED, 36, a part-time cleaner from outside Worsopvale, near Mansfield, is an unlikely candidate for Mr Hood's band of merry men.
'Potatoes are best, or carrots,' he says. 'We go out at night round Newark and fill the car from the fields, perhaps do three or four runs to the same place. I bag up what I need for myself and sell the rest in the pubs at 20p a pound.
'On average we make about [pounds sterling]35 each for the night.' Fred's vegetable raids are not without danger. 'We've been shot at with salt pellets - they sting but they don't cut you up.' Describing himself as dyslexic and 'not very clever', Fred brings hard work and ingenuity to his scams. Apart from poaching trout from private rivers and 'recovering' coal from old rail wagons, selling the bounty for cash, he offers his services for payment in kind.
'I worked for two days digging out footings for this bloke and he fitted me a bathroom suite. If you want anything like that, you do odd jobs. I painted someone's house and they gave me a carpet for the lounge. I got the television and video that way, helping a bloke assemble aerials.
'It's common in our village.
My neighbour works the fields in the daytime and delivers pizzas at night, cash in hand.' Fred has been caught twice by the DSS and prosecuted, but says he cannot afford to be concerned. 'It's not a question of being worried. I can choose to starve or to survive.' Even in my own corner of the world, apparently well-heeled Wiltshire, rudimentary subsistence systems are in place. In my village pub, the King's Arms, Tony and Mick are celebrated local heroes.
Tony is a trapper. A security guard by day, at nights and weekends he and his friend Mick, a redundant dairyman, are up on the downs taking roe deer with a .22 rifle, or trapping rabbits. 'I net the holes first and put the ferret in,' says Tony. 'Sometimes he'll catch them and that's that, or he'll chase them into the net. We can get 75p each for them at the butcher's, or swop them at the pub for beer.' UNEMPLOYED expub landlady Judy Burrell, in a neighbouring village, gives talks on antiques to the Women's Institute and Tory women's groups at [pounds sterling]10 a time. She also teaches piano, makes cricket teas, caters at local point-to-points and looks after housebound pensioners.
When Miss Burrell ran her pub, she paid her staff with cheese and doesn't feel the slightest qualm at supplementing her benefit income with earnings in cash and kind.
'I was in the Wrens. I've always worked but when you're over 50, you might as well give up. I get [pounds sterling]79 a week from the State, but my car is on its last legs and the nearest food shop is a [pounds sterling]5-return bus ride away.
'It gets so cold here in the winter, sometimes it takes [pounds sterling]20 a week just to warm the cottage. I couldn't manage without my bits of jobs. It's my form of begging, I suppose.' * This article first appeared in The Spectator
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