Gardening: Stirred at home, shaken in Texas

THE OTHER day, the youth club went up to a hay meadow on the edge of the village. It had all the flowers that you would expect of these rare places. There were ox- eye daisies, meadow sweet, yellow iris, purple loose-strife and a lot else. In the tall grasses, the flowers made mists of colour.

The owner had a well-thumbed Keble Martin (his The Concise British Flora in Colour is an old-hat bible with drawings, not photographs), which we ferreted through trying to work out just a few of the zillions of grasses. The children liked the outing well enough, but their eyes glazed over when I said that this area was one of the few to have escaped the effects of fertiliser and the plough.

The owner's approach was better. She told the girls - the party was mostly girls, since the boys, especially the older ones, refused to have anything to do with an expedition involving flowers - that they should just go off and pick as many blooms as they liked or could. Oh, perhaps not the orchids, she said, and we went off to identify those few glamorous items. The kids rolled and romped and took everything for granted. Which is as it should be.

Just at the moment, I am delighting in the ordinary stolidness of this place. I don't feel like lecturing it at all. I have even stopped moaning that the all the kids seem very bourgeois and keen on trainers and junk food and don't seem to have an idea in their heads. But so far, so good: normality seems pretty current. Sure, we have a bit of thieving and some not especially happy adolescents in the county, and the odd fight breaks out. We've had a stabbing, and even a rapist was at large for a while.

But, if I understand it right, American citizens face much more serious problems. What frightens people in Texas, for instance, is that the normal life they try to live is riven by the bizarre, the disturbed and the dangerous.

One morning last month, for example, James Richard Brown, 21, and James Lee Clark, 25, were accused of having killed two high school students aged 16 and 17. Robbery and rape seem to have been the motives behind the killings in Clear Creek, north of Denton. According to the Dallas Morning News, both the victims were bright, happy youngsters. The boy, a Mexican, was a part- time chef at a drive-in and enjoyed sports. He planned to return to Mexico one day, part of the reverse brain-drain now taking place between the two countries. The girl was set to take over the presidency of the school's Amnesty International chapter and worked with deaf children. The best of America had met what looks like the most troubled.

The accused, who claimed to be at the river on a night-time fishing trip, were both on parole for other offences. One lived in a mobile home and was a fast-food chef while the other had once toured schools speaking about the perils of drugs and crime, which he appeared to have renounced. The two men, who had stolen firearms with them, blamed each other for the killings.

Compared with the drive-by gang shootings and the accidental killing of two children by a frightened young householder (also reported during that June week in north-east Texas), the Clear Creek murders were given considerable space in the Dallas Morning News.

Of course, the merit and tragedy of American life is that it maintains some of the traits and expectations of a frontier society. American life, to a degree quite unknown in Britain, has elements in it of the folksy, serious, churchy. There is some hokum in all this. As a New Yorker remarked to me one night when we had sat through an egregiously down-home homily from a famous broadcaster: 'There are some great snake-oil salesmen in this country.'

It is easy to mock the down- home, but even sophisticated Americans sense the damage that is done when it is lost. Anyway, knocking at the door of America's self-conscious virtue is a world that is almost demonically unhinged. This other, dangerous world flows naturally from America's promise of opportunity to all with the strength to grasp it. It is very exciting to see America's continuing capacity to allow people to arrive, and to succeed or fail according to luck and ability. But the failures flow fast and press hard against society.

One young middle-class woman told me she has her classical music, her church, her choir, and her ambitious, executive husband. She drives from a nice neighbourhood to other nice neighbourhoods. The rest of America, the one in the newspapers, is something she simply blocks out. She undertakes voluntary work to try to heal the damage she sees around her. Her life is a little like that of a white expatriate in a tough African country, except that she feels culpable as well as victimised: this, after all, is her country.

Britain, of course, has had time to bind the majority of its people together quite securely. Sometimes I think we are proof against all threats. We have our claustrophobia and our anarchy nicely balanced. But when I am feeling less secure, I think we will import the American schizophrenia, as we have so much else from that country. We spent the Eighties dipping our toes in American attitudes to opportunity: my breakfast reading in the US made me less confident about that parcel of ideas than I used to be.

All in all, I hope this matter-of- fact village and county will do the impossible: stay relaxed, yes; but fight like mad for the good things they have preserved in their unfussy way. I more or less trust them to pull it off, but confess to having been badly shaken in Texas.