@StoneColdBitch, that sounds very familiar. Appallingly so! I had never anticipated that in the 21st century being a working mother would be considered so outré, and yes, absolutely to the idea that 'moving away' was considered a deeply unnatural, and vanishingly rare, thing to do.
I think that was part of the issue.
These people had, by and large, never left (or if they had, it was for a brief, finite period, like university, and they'd moved back to 'settle down', often marrying someone from the area -- it seemed most often to be university-educated women who moved back and married men who hadn't gone to university, so hadn't left at all).
So it wasn't even so much that they were hostile to, or uninterested in, people who moved to the area from elsewhere -- though they were certainly both of those - it was that they had little or no experience of ever having to make new friends, or deal with people they hadn't known from pre school, so they had very minimal social skills in those areas, as they'd never had to use them.
I'm sure there are people who grow up in similar circumstances who are open-minded, intellectually-curious and interested in the world, but these people lived in a very small world. They were obsessed with the minutiae of one anothers' lives, like new cushions, or disagreements over planning permission.
Less pleasantly, I only realised years in that any reference I made in passing to living elsewhere (I mean, I visibly wasn't from the UK, so it was hardly a surprise that I'd lived in at least one other country, as well as other places in England) was viewed as 'showing off'.
And some minor reference I once made to something that suggested it was likely I would eventually live overseas again was very negatively viewed, as indicating a lack of commitment. I felt that people there actually resented any indication that there was a whole world out there, and that you didn't need any special skills to access it.
It was an incredibly depressing period.