It’s been a very patriotic weekend, ablaze with Union flags. In London there was the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and in South Northamptonshire there was the ninth annual ‘Village at War’ festival at Stoke Bruerne on the Grand Union Canal. I watched the first event on television but attended the second in person, because Stoke Bruerne is where I spend my weekends. These events, of course, were rather different in scale, but both evoked times of Britain’s greater glory and both took place under the shadow of the Brexit referendum in June. My own vote was in favour of remaining in the European Union, but I was part of the minority in South Northamptonshire, where 54.3 per cent of voters chose to leave. The majority followed our Brexiteer MP, Andrea Leadsom, who achieved such celebrity during the referendum campaign that she even aspired briefly to the premiership.
I have pointed out before that Stoke Bruerne is a strange place to hold such an event. In the 1940s the village was only ‘at war’ in the sense that the whole country was at war, for its own part in it could hardly have been more insignificant. None of its citizens was killed or wounded in the conflict; and while the village mustered two motorcars, one motorbike, 12 bicycles and 13 wheelbarrows for use against the enemy if the Germans invaded, there was no invasion and none of these things was ever needed.
But the festival is not so much celebratory of Stoke Bruerne’s war effort as a nostalgic exercise in re-enactment of life in the wartime years. Several thousand people turned up in period costume or military uniform to gawp at impersonators of Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Montgomery and George Formby, watch war games and a flypast of old wartime aircraft, and enjoy cream teas in the open air.
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