I’m not sure I’ve ever sung Happy Birthday to a building before. Something caught in my throat – and looking round at my fellow villagers, I could see I wasn’t the only one. Our village hall is a hundred years old – one of many around the country sharing a surprisingly radical, rural centenary around this decade.
After the first world war, the newly formed National Council of Social Service set up a village halls department, and communities rallied behind a desire to provide lasting memorials with practical, educational, joyful purpose. Their aim was to bring scattered, shattered rural communities together. They were particularly important for women, who were unwelcome in pubs and often had family to care for.
These triumphant halls of hope and community, of honouring, of social cohesion, practicality, action and play, are often not much more than grey prefabs. Ours is a rather lovely purpose-built modernist one with a wooden floor and barn-like rafters, set on a donated corner of field. Though it’s what they contain and engender that counts.
To celebrate our “old girl”, photographs and memories were put together by the caretaker, Helen. They scroll through on a screen, annotated by events and activities on offer: the WI and the choral society, the temperance band and its rival, the “Guzzeleers”; a men’s club, Home Guard meetings and defiant dances that took place behind the blackout of the second world war; plays and youth clubs, jumble sales and race nights, farmers’ markets, harvest suppers, pilates and playgroups, weddings and wakes – and, of course, its use as a polling station and a place for parish council meetings.
We serve each other cakes we’ve baked ourselves; young villagers put in shifts. We cheer those who have kept the hall going, blur-eyed at the memories spent under those same bunting-hung rafters, acknowledging the hall’s lifeblood as a diverse and vibrant community.
We’ve another birthday party coming up for a former villager. We’re to dress as Dave, a local paramedic who moved from this parish when his tenanted cottage was sold. No doubt we’ll raise the rafters again and wander home in the starlit, muddy dark, carrying our best shoes.
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