Tower and Town, July 2021

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Editorial: Wiltshire And Me

When I was 18, and still living with my parents, we moved from Surrey to a village in West Sussex. We had not long been there when we were invited to take part in a poetry recital in a beautiful little church in the lee of the South Downs. I was asked to read Kipling's The Run of the Downs, a paean to the hills that run from Beachy Head in East Sussex to the Itchen valley in Hampshire. The poem ends with the lines: "The Downs are sheep, the weald is corn / You be glad you are Sussex born!"

I did my best but I found the recital troubling on two counts: I wasn't remotely Sussex born; and it felt vaguely absurd to speak Kipling's words – essentially a litany of Sussex place names – in my posh public-school accent. Who was I to extol the virtues of a county of which I knew nothing?

Nearly 40 years later (the last 20 in Wiltshire), I am still intrigued by this sense of belonging, of identifying – or not – with place. That is why I asked the eight disparate people featured in this edition of T&T to give a very personal account of their relationship with their home county. Of the eight, five have moved to Wiltshire from elsewhere (very much elsewhere in two cases), two grew up in the county, moved away and returned, and one has lived here for 91 years, man and boy.

So to Liu Hong, Steve, Selam, Chris, Gina, Simon, Rachel and Alan I say thank you so much for sharing your fascinating insights into your Wiltshire lives. I hope the readers of this magazine enjoy reading them as much as I have.

Ben Tarring