POTTERY MAKING
IN A COUNTRY COTTAGE

From Yorkshire to Suffolk (Continued)

Our income since we moved here has dropped to levels we would not have thought possible. We now live on approximately £20 per week (family income supplement and child benefit).

It has seemed like climbing an endless hill which has wearied us all and ended up making me physically ill. Like Boxer in 'Animal Farm', after each new disaster in the pottery I have thought the only answer was to work harder.

This winter in particular has seemed very long and hard for us as it has for many people. Many people have tried to advise us how to solve our economic problems but of course, they cannot because all their solutions would have meant going back. We have clung tenaciously to our own sense of rightness in what we were doing and have gained untold support from watching and being with our three children. It will sound trite but as we have become poorer so we have become richer. We have become more confident about ourselves and our ability to survive on our own terms and the pull of so-called civilisation has grown progressively weaker.

Whilst it seems likely now that my efforts to live and work at home are going to pay off, we are aware that they still may not. Gradually though, the endless anxieties about bills, getting enough food, and staying warm we are learning, I think, to get things into perspective.

Our move to the country and to a new life is not and has not been just an experiment in self-sufficient economy although that has been very much part of it, mostly right from the beginning it has been about letting go. It has been a humbling and sometimes harrowing experience. This experience though has produced some quite unexpected and for us, very moving responses from other people, friends and neighbours.

A £5 note appeared in the bottom of a bag of food scraps left by a neighbour for our chickens, along with anonymous bundles of greens left for the animals. When the piglets I had reared got ill a friend paid a rate demand we had no way of meeting. Kindness I sometimes could not fathom but which have warmed and supported us.

In a sense, our attitude from the beginning was to throw our-selves to fate. I could never have 'worked out' what has happened or how things would have developed. It has just happened, it has seemed to be right and we have all grown through it.

As for my romantic ideal to be hugged and nurtured by the country - it has not gone. It has changed though. To begin with it seemed an ideal at a distance. Today as I look out onto a long awaited spring morning it seems much nearer.