Ford Madox Ford is one of four Romney Marsh writers that Meads Books will focus on…the others are E.F.Benson, Russell Thorndike and Vita Sackville-West. For a while the group included H.G.Wells over in Hythe and Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Winchelsea. Meads Books will also specialise in Rudyard Kipling from higher up the Rother in Burwash.

Ford Madox Ford’s German-born parents were naturalised as British subjects after he was born. So he was able to claim German Citizenship for his divorce proceedings in a German court. When the First World War broke out he denounced Germany in When Blood Is Their Argument…subtitled an analysis of Prussian Culture. He also put his life on the line for what he believed…something I’m not willing to do as I might be wrong...and though over 40 and not obliged to do military service he still took a commission in the British Army.

The question of dual citizenship came up over the weekend when I suggested including a concept of Dual Internationality in the draft Charter of Real Nations. John Papworth had drafted the charter so I left the wording to him. But he came up with something completely different about Homelands instead.

So I brought us back to what we had talked about by breaking his clause down into his clause 6 ‘to promote the concept of dual nationality so people dwelling in a homeland will bear passports to homeland and nation state’ and my clause 7 ‘to promote the concept of dual internationality to enable homelands, nations or states to be a member both of the League of Real Nations and of the United Nations Organisation’…this being a key agreement of the Real Nations Forum five years ago.

I then got an e-mail telling me that the dual nationality clause was meaningless and accusing me of messing up his wording…which I thought was pretty rich. So I wrote back that I agreed the homeland clause was very poorly worded but that it was not possible to produce anything better without a lengthy preamble on the meaning of states and nations and homelands and this was better left to the lawyers. For good measure I added that Leopold Kohr’s The Breakdown of Nations and the United Nations both misused the word nation and should be using the word state.

Yesterday 24 people were arrested in Walthamstow, Birmingham and High Wycombe. For some peculiar reason…known only to the Stupidity Services and their political minders…even though all the suspects had been rounded up it was still necessary to cause as much havoc as possible by cancelling and delaying hundreds of flights from 20 different airfields around the country. It would be nice if someone gets charged with a real offence this time.

In High Wycombe close to the M4 west of London, arrests were made at three different addresses…Walton Drive, Plover Green Avenue and Micklefield Road. The Times managed to get its reporters out to interview neighbours in High Wycombe before their evening deadlines.

After the killing of Charles de Menezes on the London Underground police reports were cover-ups so the assumption has to be that the only reliable reports are anecdotal…from family and neighbours. These only appear in the immediate aftermath of an incident or a swoop. Within a day or two the official line takes over and anecdotal evidence disappears unless it bolsters the official line. So here are a few.

Neighbours described the arrests at Walton Drive to be from a ‘foreign family including two brothers’. Another neighbour told the Times’ reporter that the person arrested was ‘a male who converted to Islam a year ago’. From 41 Micklefield Road came reports of ‘an Asian family with a constant stream of visitors’ who ‘were building an extension at the back of their house’.

Then there were the goings-on at Number 48 where the Times carried a report from the Neighbourhood Watch that ‘there were people coming to the house at night time around midnight almost every night who left a few hours after they arrived’. Meanwhile the woman across the street spoke of ‘cars coming and going’ and ‘big white vans pulling up in the middle of the night’.

A mile away in Chipping Woods dog walkers were reporting ‘vehicles that weren’t normally seen in the area…some staying for hours and others leaving after twenty minutes’. For good measure the Times added a remark from one of the dog walkers that ‘the drivers and passengers were men, mostly in their 20s and 30s. None of them Asian.’ The evidence for this latest War on Terror incident seems to come from Lahore where two men have been arrested.

I left Bowden House at 0730 and walked into town to catch my 0900 National Express coach to London. It was all downhill and I had sent the heavy stuff off by post…figuring that with postage at £8 and the taxi fare at £4 I would not be much out of pocket. This busy Devon to London route warrants a double-decker which does the journey in six hours so I was delivered to Victoria Coach Station shortly after 1500 in the afternoon.

In the seat in front of me was a 40-something Swedish woman and a 30-something Hungarian woman. The Swede was looking to board a flight to Stockholm from Heathrow while the Hungarian…an English teacher in Budapest visiting her sister…was bound for Luton Airport after her first visit to England in eight years. I did not envy them their hours of pointless waiting. Interestingly Heathrow was operating perfectly normally...on the outside…with traffic lighter than usual.

My parents were born and grew up in London. The leafy south-eastern suburbs my mother knew as a young girl in the 1920s were something quite new. But in the countryside little had changed…except an awareness of towns and cities and the steady migration to them.

For hundreds of years the world of the village was a world of silence; a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty landscapes with long walking distances between them; of white narrow roads, rutted by hooves and cartwheels, innocent of oil and petrol, down which people passed rarely…and never for pleasure.

The horse was the fastest thing moving in this rural world. Man and horse were all the power people had…abetted by levers and pulleys. The horse was king and almost everything grew around him…fodder, smithies, stables, paddocks, distances, and the rhythm of people’s days. His eight miles an hour was the limit of movements as it had been since the days of the Romans. That eight miles an hour was life and death, the size of the world, the people’s prison.

There are still those alive today for whom this was the world they were born into and the only world they knew. Then, to the scream of the horse, the change began. The brass-lamped motor-car came coughing up the road, followed by the clamorous charabanc and the solid-tyred bus climbed the dusty hills.

People came and went. Chickens and dogs were the early sacrifices falling demented beneath the wheels. The old folks too had strokes and seizures faced by speeds beyond comprehension. Then scarlet motor-bikes…the size of five-barred gates…began to appear in the village, on which youths roared like rockets up the two-minute hills then spent weeks making repairs and adjustments.

These appearances did not immediately alter anybody’s life. Cars were freaks and rarely seen, the motor bikes mostly in pieces, the charabancs a once-a-year adventure and buses just experiments. Meanwhile Hugo Jeakes wearing a bowler hat would run his wagonette to the nearest town twice a week. The carriage would hold six and the fare was tuppence. But most people preferred to walk.

Mr. Weston from the neighbouring village ran a cart every day and would carry your parcels for a penny. But most people still did the journey on foot, heads down into the wet westerly winds, ignoring the carters…and their extortionate fares…and spending a long hard day shopping.

The car-shying horses with their rolling eyes gave signs of the hysteria to come. Soon the villages started to break, dissolve and scatter, to become no more than a place for pensioners. It had a few years left, the last of its thousand, and they passed almost without notice. They passed quickly painlessly in motor-bike jaunts, in the shadows of the new picture-palace, in quick trips to bigger towns beyond the Market Town…once a foreign city…to gape at the jazzy shops. Yet right to the end…like the false strength that precedes death…the old life seemed as lusty as ever.

The death of the squire was the final nail in the coffin of the village. He died and the big house was sold by auction and became a home for invalids. The lake silted up, the swans flew away, and the great pike choked in the reeds. With the Squire’s hand removed the village fell apart…though it was doing so anyway. His servants dispersed and went into factories. His nephew broke up the estate.

Fragmentation, free thought and new excitements came now to intrigue and perplex. The first young couple to get married in a registry office were roundly denounced from the pulpit. ‘They who play with fire shall be consumed by fire!’ stormed the vicar. ‘Ye mark my words!’ Later if he caught anyone reading Sons and Lovers he would snatch it away from them and destroy it as his last authoritative gesture. He would be succeeded by a young apologist.

Meanwhile the old people would just drop away…the white-whiskered, gaitered, booted and bonneted ancient-tongued last of their world, who thee’d and thou’d both man and beast, called young girls ‘damsels’, young boys ‘squires’, old men ‘masters’, the Squire himself ‘He’, and who remembered the Dover stagecoach. Kicker Harris, the old coachman, with his top-hat and leggings, blown away like a torn-out page. Lottie Southerden curled up in her relics and died. Others departed with hardly a sound.

There was always an old Mrs Crissold calling the young boys for errands: ‘Thee come up our court a minute squire; I want thee to do I a mission.’ They would run to the shop to buy her a packet of bull’s eyes and be rewarded in the customary way. Bull’s-eyes in cheek, she’d sink back in her chair and dismiss the young lad with a sleepy nod. ‘I ain’t nurn a aypence about I just now…but Mrs Crissole’ll recollect ‘ee…’ They would write it off as the day’s good deed…and she would die still recollecting them.

Bowden House is a centuries-old manor house on the outskirts of Totnes with a splendid Queen Anne façade. Totnes is ten miles upstream from Dartmouth and is accessible from the sea. Apart from the main house there are a couple of cottages, a row of half a dozen servants’ quarters and ten acres of grounds with lawns and bushes and trees, Victorian walled gardens, fox-free chicken run, poly-tunnels for food-growing…and laundry-drying, orchards…in fact very Pride & Prejudice and Tapeley Park…Hector Christie’s manor house in the north of the county where Dmitri Pinschof spent several happy months earlier this year and where my daughter has interned from time to time.

It is here I have been staying since leaving Purton on Monday morning for this is where my daughter has taken up residence for a few months between leaving Y Beudy in Llangolman and taking up a 3-month residency at Gaia House in Newton Abbot a 20-minute bus ride away. Until the end of 2002 the estate was owned by the Petersen Family who had a photographic museum and let the public in for car boot sales. Then it was bought by the Naylors after they had sold their Paington-based CSS Electronics to a Canadian company for a few million pounds.

Like many people with more money than sense the Naylors had a plenty of dreams but very little clue. An 18-bedroom hotel with pool and spa was the idea with rooms for mainstream alternative therapy. Totnes was described to me by the taxi-driver as ‘a few dozen acres surrounded by reality’ so there is a market. The scheme foundered which allowed an altogether more together group…with relevant development experience from Findhorn…to take over at the end of last year after coughing up £1.7 million pounds for the Naylors and their bankers.

So here in South Devon another of the ecosteries Kirkpatrick Sale has been calling for will start to grow and flourish. I question Kirk’s apocalyptic reasoning but strongly support his proposals for the alternative movement to get real and start seeding the countryside with these 21st century Benedictine Monastery Gardens. And if cries of ‘Ye are all doomed!’ and ‘Abandon hope!’ gets things moving then why not. Besides he might be right.

English Property Law is all over the place at present…like most New Labour legislation which meddles around with little understanding of social or legal history…there are new laws and directives coming off the statute books every five minutes with only the vested interests keeping their eye on the ball and ensuring they gain from any changes.

The latest bunch of regulations came a few months ago causing considerable confusion among the judiciary and putting projects like this on hold until the lawyers can figure out the implications. Nobody seems to have mentioned to this gaggle of Scottish Lawyers presuming to rule us that it is English and not Scottish Law that applies south of Hadrian’s Wall…and that we have a tradition of Courts of Equity and strange English ideas like the Good Old Law and Precedence and Royal Prerogatives to take into consideration.

The new owners plan to put in place a Common Ownership Company structure rather like the one that Fritz Schumacher was so keen on for the Scott-Bader Commonwealth. But unfortunately Property Law is rather more complicated then Company Law…not for nothing is it called Real Property…because of centuries of clearances and enclosures and bitter disputes between Landlords and Tenants…with laws to protect the tenants being reversed a decade later whn the other side gets in and introduces other laws…often contradictory…to give license to landlords to kick out their tenants under the guise of free markets and economic progress.