THE village of Goodnestone embodies most of the qualities people have in their mind's eye when they talk about "the depths of the English countryside".
It is more of a hamlet than a village and much of it remains exactly as it has been for centuries.
Goodnestone lies on a back road - not, as so many Kent villages are today, on a busy through road. Visitors to Canterbury a dozen miles away are unlikely to come across Goodnestone's pub, the Fitzwalter Arms, unless they search for it. At this season, the busiest time of the year is Sunday afternoon when people come to see the Goodnestone gardens which my sister cherishes.
Kentish men, west of the Medway, and Maids of Kent in the East have reluctantly come to terms with our modern county, which has been suffering a metamorphosis. In a relatively short space of time, it has been translated from the Garden of England into a funnel which links Great Britain to Europe. With the advent of the Channel Tunnel and all it brings, a lot of the flowers have gone.
But not at Goodnestone, we thought, one of the corners in our county where we counted on finding summer days much as they were between the wars.
So, some will conclude, murder has become so commonplace that no quiet quarter of this land is now immune from it. As one who has lived in Kent most of this century, I would interpret it differently. It is mobility that has so changed our circumstances in certain parts of rural England.
There were days when a murder like this in a country lane would have been far harder to commit. For one thing, it would have been more difficult to escape unobserved. Strangers on foot or even horseback were more conspicuous to countrymen than today's anonymous figures in a car.
Mobility, coupled with anonymity, explains a lot in our society we find difficult to understand. We are less sure than we have ever been of who our neighbours are, what they are like or how they occupy themselves. But those who live in a county like Kent understand it better than some, because we have had to adjust ourselves more quickly than most people to these factors.
As president of Kent's Council for the Protection of Rural England, I sometimes reflect on our impotence to protect ourselves against what we fear the most. It is not, in reality, power lines or new prisons or supermarkets that will cloud our lives, or the lives of our grandchildren. It is this pervasive cosmopolitanism - the invasion of cultures from the megalopolitan capital; it is the loss of neighbours we know well.
Television has something to do with it - modern communications tend to corrupt good manners; but less than many people think. For remote corners of rural England like Goodnestone, the car - and the swift escape that it offers to criminals - counts for more.
That is why the police have consistently and wisely refused to hand over their duties on the highways to a subsidiary body for traffic enforcement. They well understand the extent to which all crime, including murder, has become mobile. A murderer in Maida Vale one night can be on the Paris South Bank before dawn.
So, as this crime at Goodnestone reminds the countryman, some of Paradise has been lost. Those tumbling out of the towns in search of rural tranquillity must reckon with that. Appearances are deceptive. The Goodnestones of this world can no longer be counted on as refuges.
