Mimi and her husband Ralph have left social climbing, pushy parenting, and their marital problems behind them in London in favor of perfect, bucolic tranquility. Or so they thought. The village of Honeybourne has mud, masses of fresh air, and handsome hayseeds in abundance, but what should be rural heaven turns out to be just as tricky to navigate as Notting Hell, even with Mimi’s new best friend Rose—Dorset’s answer to Martha Stewart—by her side. Mimi can get by without world-class restaurants, spas, and vintage markets, but living without central heating is another challenge entirely. And while Honeybourne is thankfully free of prestigious preschools with waiting lists that begin in utero, it has its own fierce brand of competition—between landowners and eco-warriors, Old Money and No Money, Ralph Lauren-sporting racehorses and Barbour-wearing brood mares. Without a helipad for trophy guests, an organic farm shop, and a bottom that looks good in jodphurs, Mimi is at a distinct disadvantage. And that’s just the start of her problems, because Mimi also has a secret she must keep to save her marriage. With a gimlet eye for telling details and human foibles, Rachel Johnson has crafted a novel that is fresh, hilarious, and irresistibly funny—a brilliant slice of social satire with surprising depth and heart.
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I'm sitting in the kitchen, the only warm place in the house. I have a pint of coffee in my Thermos (bought from the Wild Bean Café at service station, price of latte redeemed against price of cup) to my right, and am reading the paper. Calypso is lying pressed against my feet, which are -- I'm ashamed to report -- inserted into my exciting new fake-fur electric foot warmer with dual-setting massager which I ordered off the Argos Web site during one of my more recent online shopping jags. (I easily justify the regular delivery of squishy parcels addressed to me by telling myself there are no normal shops -- i.e., ones selling Swarovski-crystal-encrusted designer jeans, organic hemp baby clothes, Elle MacPherson Intimates -- within a hundred-mile radius of Home Farm. Works for me.)
The radio is on, and I am half listening to a report on shea butter made by a women's collective in northern Ghana on Woman's Hour.
Inside the foot warmer, I am wearing my favorite cashmere socks from Brora, sadly tiger-striped from having been dried and scorched on the Aga.
I am also "working" some long johns, last year's "boyfriend" jeans (skinny jeans are so over, according to Mirabel, which is a relief), an M&S merino thermal vest, an army surplus jersey, a scarf, and a quilted padded waistcoat in army green with brass popper buttons of the type that used to be seen, in the days, on Lady Diana before she became Princess of Wales.
Yes, I am wearing a Husky.
Like tapestry-patterned hand- knitted cardigans with toggles, crewelwork, English teeth, women in rugby shirts tucked into fractionally too tight high- waisted jeans, the Conservative Party, and Grow the Longest Carrot contests, Huskys have never gone out of fashion outside built- up areas.
I am taking full advantage of this reassuring fact.
The telephone.
"Hello?" I say, powering up my laptop so I can multitask while taking the call.
"Mimi?" comes a tweeting voice I know well. "It's Fenella!" she announces with excitement, as if she has produced her own grandchild.
"Hiiiii!" I cry.
Fenella Prigeon is the beauty editor of Results* magazine. We used to work together on the Telegraph, a million years ago. Last glimpsed by me at a tea party in Burlington Arcade for Tatler types and their posh pets (I was returning a pair of Vilebrequin swimming trunks that I'd bought for Ralph as a lovely present, which he had spurned without a second glance, reminding me that his old pair, minus elastic, were absolutely fine, and would be for many years, thank you very much).
"So, how are you?" I cry, as if I really, really want to know, automatically slipping back into insincere mode. I have never mastered the trick of simply being the same with everyone. With Fenella, therefore, I go all glossy and gushy.
"Oh," comes a faint sigh, an exhalation, as if I simply can't imagine the suffering. "I don't honestly think I've ever been so exhausted. It's been completely utterly frantic. Really manic."
I log on, input my password.
"Why?" I ask, knowing what's to come. Ralph has a theory that, if you listen to Fenella talk, you'd think that in harsh contrast to testing cellulite gels and nasolabial creams for a monthly magazine, slogging it out in the trenches of the Somme was a teddy bears' picnic.
"It's the, the spa guide," says Fenella, with a break in her voice. "I've had to write up no fewer than fifty -- that's five zero -- spas over the past six months, including some in the Far East and the Caribbean. I'm totally wiped out, before I've even begun on the living nightmare that is the annual teenage skincare issue."
"You poor thing," I say automatically.
"That's why I'm calling you, actually..." Fenella goes on, a wheedling note entering her voice. "There's this new spa, I thought you could go, take Mirabel. You only have to write a hundred fifty words, and you'd get, I'd say, at least two free treatments." Fenella throws this morsel in knowing full well that there's nothing, nothing, I like more than a luxury junket.
As she speaks, I am already picturing my eldest daughter and me lounging around in fluffy white robes, having massages to tinkling New Age music -- somewhere hot, I'm thinking, Bali, or the Maldives -- while demure maidens minister silently and with total concentration to our toenails.
"Gosh, Fenella," I say, playing it cool, wanting her to think I'm still a player, "I have a black diary at the moment, things are sooo busy, I don't know if I could squeeze a minibreak abroad in right now...where is it?"
"It's in Somerset," she says, in the reverential tones of one who has dutifully swallowed all the guff about expensive English holidays in the rain being so much nicer than cheap hot hols abroad. "On an organic farm, where they make their own pizza and muesli and bread, with -- hold on, let me just grab the bumf -- spelt. Spelt. Apparently it's some ancient type of wheat -- hold on, it's a grain from the grass family with a fragile gluten content, whatever that means. Anyway, all the therapies in the spa, and treatments, well, they're spelt-based, too, and I just thought, well, you've lost your column on the mag, you're local, aren't you? -- you're in Dorset -- there's no way I can fit it in with all my other commitments to do with the eco hair products special issue we're planning for the spring, just no conceivable way! Not from London. It takes longer to get to Somerset than it does to Ibiza. I can't pay you, but you could drive over, check it out, file a hundred fifty words...I thought it'd be a treat."
I replace the receiver with a sigh, having promised Fenella that I'd get back to her on the spelt spa gig.
Nothing could make it clearer. My friends, my former colleagues, my old neighbors think I'm flying below the radar. I've gone...free-range.
It's time to face it.
I'm not in Notting Hill now. I am not obeying an unwritten law that all women approaching forty have to weigh eight stone, wrangle with celebrities, interact with the atrophy wives, take their pedigree pets to the new dog spa and deli off Westbourne Park Road, and pretend to one another they don't suffer from "bonus envy."
I'm not doing the supermodel sweep at the Whole Foods Market on Kensington High Street as they load up on acai berries and seeds from the Food Doctor while bragging about how they, like, never go to the gym, and how they're, like, so busy running after their kids they don't need to work out, they're just naturally this skinny, and they are trying and trying but they can just never put on weight even though we know and they know, it's nil by mouth for them for literally years at a time.
What a relief, in so many ways.
But.
Because there always is a but.
But, to be brutally honest, though it is a relief, I stand by that, of course -- I love the grass, the mud, the fact that I have a view of the rest of Dorset and the sea from my bedroom window (if I stand on tiptoe), and I love drinking in the fresh and clean smell of the countryside, with its wholesome tangy topnote of manure. I love the chill evening airs, the silence, the peace, and I love the fact that I can see all the stars on a clear night, and the Milky Way, and have become best friends with some barn owls, i.e., have allowed myself to be fully penetrated by the beauties of nature -- I do still kind of miss it. London. Notting Hill, and all that.
But mainly I miss it because there's no going back. After all, as everyone knows, and does so love repeating to you, once it's too late, as if I have made a brave lifestyle choice to dwell in the seventh circle of hell rather than in an utterly idyllic Dorset model village, "Once you're out of the London property market, Mimi, that's it, you know! You never get back in."
All the children are at school, but it's already 10:30 a.m. so it'll be dark in a few hours, and if I don't leave the house soon and walk Calypso I'll be tempted to go back to bed for a snooze, as that's so much more inviting a prospect than finally getting to grips with the vegetable patch. My morning dog-walk circuit takes in the Post Office and Stores, the pub, the Stag, and the village green.
Okay, the Stag: standard-issue Dorset pub, i.e., it's wall-to-wall roaring fireplaces, growling local "characters," smell of old pipe smoke from before smoking ban, nicotine-stained orange ceilings, skull-cracking low beams, Badger ale, famous for...not the beer, not the snug, certainly not the food or the friendliness of its regulars -- the chain-smoking woodcutter "young" Colin Watts, the butcher's son (young only in comparison to most drinkers); the Melplashes; the farmers; the farriers; and so on -- but its annual nettle-eating competition, and the house pet.
I didn't know anything about it until Garry, the landlord, who serves underneath a sign saying garry's bar, asked me if Calypso was "okay around wolves."
I didn't really take it in and then he said, "Because they smell different than dogs."
And then he brought this rangy, ribby thing with pale eyes and trembling flanks through on a lead, and I quivered, "What sort of wolf is it?" drawing Calypso close, and he said, "A wolf wolf," and that he had gone to Alaska to get it when it was so big, holding his hands apart like an angler describing his catch. Anyway, the animal's name is Cherokee, but the children call it Wolf Wolf.
As for the nettle-eating contest, well, that's a contest during which people eat as many yards of nettles as they can, and if you don't believe me, there're pictures of contestants, gaping mouths stained with green, pinned up next to the postcard advertising the next meeting of the Pudding Club.
Although I had discovered after doing an online search that there is a riding stable in Honeyborne with "qualified owner on site" and "excellent hacking" that takes children of all ages and abilities, I couldn't resist switching screens and...
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Shire Hell, Repackaged,
By Melissa McCobb Hubbell "artist and book lover" (Fairfield Co., CT, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: In a Good Place: A Novel (Paperback)
I enjoyed Rachel Johnson's Notting Hell and Shire Hell (tho the former was a bit better than the latter). And so I was pleased to see that Amazon recommended what appeared to be a third book from Rachel Johnson. IT IS NOT! It is merely a US repackaging of Shire Hell - maybe the publisher didn't think we Americans would know what a shire is.. Don't be fooled as I almost was.Here's hoping Johnson is working on a new book with more of the same charm and whimsy, but some fresh material.
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