Take that high street, which Upshott doesn’t have. What it has, instead, is a main road that curves once upon entering the village, to avoid the church, and then again three hundred yards later as it threads between the pub on its left and the semicircular green on its right. Then it climbs past the new-build housing; past the small primary school and the village hall, a modern prefab visitors need directions to find. But then, the hall isn’t Upshott’s heartbeat; that would be the trinity of post box, pub and village shop. The first of these sits on the side of the green furthest from the road, which is inconvenient, unless you live in one of the houses lining that stretch. Arranged in a curve, they are Upshott’s oldest dwellings—three-storey eighteenth-century townhouses peculiarly resituated here, making strange near-neighbours for those bungalows on the rise, most of which stand empty, having once been homes for service-staff on the nearby USAF base: cleaners and janitors, cooks and washers-up, mechanics and drivers. When the base pulled the plug in the mid-nineties, a lot of life drained out of Upshott. What’s left mostly lives in those townhouses, or further along the main road, and sooner or later all of it turns up at the pub.
Which is called The Downside Man, and faces the green, with a small car park to its left and a tiered patio round back, overlooking the woods’ curving treeline a mile distant. The Downside Man has whitewashed walls and a wooden pub-sign which once flapped in the breeze, but also came loose in high winds, so has now been fixed to its post by Tommy Moult, the village’s honorary odd-job man. Tommy’s rumoured to have a secret life, as he’s only ever seen at weekends, when he can reliably be found outside the village shop, red woollen cap pulled over his ears, selling packets of seeds from his bicycle, which he parks next to the racks of vegetables. He evidently regards this as the linchpin of his commercial enterprise, because every Saturday morning, winter or summer, there he is; networking more than selling, perhaps, because few locals pass without exchanging words.
The shop where he stands is back the way we came, on the corner facing St Johnno’s. To get there from the pub is to pass, on the left, a row of stone cottages, interrupted by the old manor house, now converted into flats. On the right are larger, newer houses, yet to bed down into the landscape; they’re too clean, too neatly brushed. In the gaps between them, though, views of the mile-distant treeline can still be enjoyed, and if the occasional presence of a cement mixer indicates that some of those gaps were intended to sprout houses of their own, there’s little other sign of building activity. That all came to a halt years back. It might start up again once things improve, but the financial crisis remains as ill-defined as an unbuilt house; you can sketch its possible shape on the air, but there’s no touching its walls to know its limits. And then the road bends again, between shop and church, St John of the Cross: thirteenth century and pretty as a postcard, it has a lych-gate and a well-tended graveyard, whose oldest occupants once inhabited the manor house, and who presumably rolled over when its conversion into flats took place. But services at St Johnno’s are now on a fortnightly basis; far more reliable is the village shop, open eight till ten daily, though this bears no resemblance to the upmarket boutiques of the prettier villages, its shelves stacked high with stuff people need rather than want: tinned foods, dairy foods, frozen foods; sacks of charcoal, bags of kitty litter, breezeblocks of toilet rolls; shampoos, soaps and toothpastes; fridgefulls of lager and wine; cartons of juice and bottles of milk.
For many locals, the shop is as far as they need to go on any pedestrian expedition; the road, though, pootles on, passing a few more raggle-taggle cottages before dwindling into a minor country highway, hedged either side and badly potholed. A mile further on, it reaches the MoD range—when the American base upped sticks the Ministry of Defence stepped in, and land once leased to friendly aircraft is now home to friendly fire. When red flags fly, there’s no rambling across the fields south-east of Upshott; and sometimes, after dark, great balls of light drop from the sky, illuminating the ranges for night practice. Adjoining the road, separated from it by an eight-foot wire mesh fence, lies the last remaining airstrip, at one end of which sit, like properties on a Monopoly board, a hangar and a clubhouse. These see civilian activity several evenings a week, and most weekend mornings during spring and summer are the launchpad for a single-engined plane, which putters over Upshott before disappearing into the open skies, though so far, it’s always returned.
