COUNTRY LIFE
The Country Wins
Three delightfully ingenuous views about country things may be recorded from three very different parts of the island. A land girl of my acquaintance reports one from mid Wales. A little immigrant from the town sent to a parent. "There is a thing called spring. It comes here every year." It has come unusu- ally late in that district, but childish faith in its sweet recurrence has not been weakened. In my own immediate neighbourhood a group of urban children came back to their cottage with arms full of cabbages, and the delighted news of their discovery that cab- bages grew wild. They had strayed to the allotment field. An elder visitor to a cottage close to my house grew quite ecstatic on hearing the nightingale from her bedroom. The second night she listened with pleasure to the self-same song. On the third night she swore because the horrid bird kept her awake from 3 a.m. The following is an extract from a letter from Galloway : "I still have my Glasgow mother and her three little boys. How they love the country ! The mother went to Glasgow the other day, but the boys refused to go with her in case they didn't come back again." Reports reach me from east as well as west Scotland of the intense pleasure of town children in country places and occupations. One ardent Scotsman sees the beginning of a real return to the land in the evacuation movement.
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