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 About
the book…
Inspired by her popular Times column 'Country Life', A Country
Wife is Lucy Pinney's memoir chronicling her love affair with the
Devon countryside.
A true Londoner at heart, Pinney became a country mouse twenty
years ago, as a rather bemused bride. A self-confessed novice of
the great outdoors, she reluctantly agreed to spend her honeymoon
harvesting, and suddenly found herself raising a family in the farmyard.
So began her fast and frantic rural education, which would eventually
lead to Lucy making a name for herself as a country columnist, while
picking up the pieces after a messy divorce.
Can Lucy build a new life for herself in the hills and valleys
she has come to love, and will her relationship with the countryside
survive two decades and more mud than she ever dreamed possible?
Read this irresistibly funny and nostalgic memoir to find out!
 'irresistibly
funny'
Woman and Home
About the author…
Lucy Pinney wrote an extremely popular column for The Times, called
Country Life, for over four years. With style and wit, Lucy chronicled
life in the Devoncountryside - from diversifying wives and errant
husbands, to lambing seasons and pet foxes - as well as life inside
her own, less than perfect, farmhouse kitchen. Now a full-time author,
Lucy has previously published two novels. She lives in Devon with
her new partner Ian and three children Nat, Sam and Kathy.
Lucy Pinney tells us about her life since writing A Country Wife…
Since writing A Country Wife I have gradually settled in to living
with my new partner, Ian, a former tenant farmer who had to give
up growing wheat for financial reasons. He's retrained as an Aga
serviceman. The chief problem with his new profession is other people's
pets, as he has to spend hours on his knees, peering into ovens
and fire-boxes. Kittens scamper up his back, puppies run off with
his tools, and yesterday an African Grey parrot kept telling him
to bugger off.
We're gradually returning to farming. We're making hay this year,
and have planted out a wood, an orchard, and a huge vegetable garden.
But it is a bit hard to think of a way of making money out of animals.
(Nearly all the farmers round here make a loss due to falling prices.)
Maybe we will rear a few beef cows, in a co-operative venture with
some neighbouring smallholders. A year ago we kept a sow co-operatively,
and it was highly enjoyable. She was called Cornflake (name chosen
by committee) and lived off leftover quiche, potato peelings, acorns,
and unbelievably expensive organic pig-nuts. In the mornings she
would lie frostily in bed with her best friend (a semi-bald runaway
chicken from the egg farm next door) and have to be woken up by
shouting. She hated brussels sprouts, just like us - and enjoyed
basking in the heat of a bonfire. When it was time for her to become
sausages and neat rolled joints of pork we gave her a last supper
of scones and clotted cream and enticed her up the ramp of a trailer
with a line of chocolate chip cookies. (Incidentally, one of the
nicest things about keeping a pig is the way that you feel so happy
when it puts on weight. Such a change from climbing on the bathroom
scales in the mornings and feeling despair. And, of course, you
can feed the pig all the biscuits and cakes you shouldn't eat.)
Apart from the pig we have kept a pet lamb which died mysteriously
and horribly aged six weeks - reminding me of all the reasons why
I gave up farming in the first place - and a vast assortment of
poultry. At the moment we are hand-rearing two Greylag goslings.
The eggs were given to me by my sister, who lives on a houseboat
on the Thames. We've kept the little dark-green goslings in the
kitchen ever since they hatched. They snuggle up to the warm stove
at night, making a harmonic whistling noise, and the rest of the
time make a noise exactly like a dog's squeaky toy. They climb on
our feet affectionately when we sit down, and follow us when we
walk, their enormous leathery brown feet slapping on the lino. Their
presence severely annoys the dog and the cats.
The village is still very much the same as when I wrote the book.
Marty the postman still delivers the mail and helps out with furniture
removals and intimate advice. Mike the sub-postmaster still sits
behind his counter telling enthralling rural tales. (My favourite
is about the squirrel that stole his fruit last summer. It would
carry a plum in each paw, and tuck more under its armpits.) But
an awful lot more of the local farms have sold up. Nowadays when
I walk my little son, Nat, to primary school we don't pass a single
working farmyard. When my other kids went to the same school there
were three thriving dairies on the way.
My ex-husband has moved away from Scotland with his girlfriend
to a farm in the South. He seems happy, and keeps mules and goats.
He rarely speaks to me when we meet, which is generally at a motorway
service-station in the holidays, to hand Nat over to each other.
My older children still won't meet him. Their feelings about him
can be deduced from their reaction when Nat opened a letter from
his father asking if he would like to think of names for his girlfriend's
four puppies. Sam suggested Chastity, Fidelity, Loyalty and Monogamy.
And Kathy (even less forgiving) Gonorrhoea, Syphilis, Crabs and
Herpes.
It would be a bit difficult to write a follow-up to A Country Wife
until a few more dramatic things have happened to me. So in the
meanwhile I'm researching and writing a modern love story set in
the countryside.
Click
Here to read an extract of A Country Wife
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