As a child in Leeds, life in the city seemed hum drum at times with rows of the same houses and high rises terraced back to backs and buses to school full of smokers’ smoke and a notice asking you not to spit. At school some children smelt. The outdoor toilets smelt, of course, sharp and repelling. And inside in the afternoon there was the aroma of the green vegetables which laid uneaten for long quarter hours on the plates of their potential eaters who refused to eat and as the time ticked by, their resolution was not challenged by the congealing mass on their plates. Shopping ‘in town’ meant a brisk walk down Boar Lane, Albion Street, the Headrow and Briggate, to go in Littlewoods and Lewis’s and walk past Schofields, and Matthias Robinsons. You’d see buses to Belle Isle, Pudsey, Hunslet and Wortley and there were queues at the bus stops, of the waiting, with small children smacked and bawled at, so they cried even harder. When summer came and we travelled to Cornwall to holiday with our cousins who lived in a rural idyll near places called Mevagissey, St Just in Roseland, Pencallenick, Tresillian and we spent days on the beaches of Perranporth and Kynance Cove and the smell when you went to the farm at the bottom of their garden, was of pigs which hilariously made me sneeze forever, and of fresh hay – I thought I would like to live in the countryside. Then much later, I did – in the heart of the Cotswolds, deeply rural, untouched by the hand of human progress. Minchinhampton, Nympsfield, Woodchester, sounded beautiful. But after one year living at a Field Centre there, I realised, No, it’s city life for me. It’s the busy-ness, its people coming together to make things happen, theatre, cinema, art galleries, lunch clubs for the elderly, food banks for the hungry, libraries, universities, tennis clubs and matches, football, rugby and cricket. It’s people who think and challenge and have new ideas. It’s embracing different ways of living and of being and … there’s a choice of friends.
Rosie Cantrell