After the Winds Came The gales have been so enduring
and so violent that one would expect to find the countryside swept clean of all movable objects, includ- ing the fragile left-overs from a vanished summer. But while driving home recently, just after dark, along the lanes between my home. and the Tudor village of Biddenden in Kent, I was astonished to encounter almost a plague of moths. They staggered into the beam of the head- lamps, weltering there long enough for me to see the tinge of colour in their incandescent wings ; cream, grey, orange. Then they were gone again, like Titania's creatures off on some wilful errand. This went on for mile after mile, until I began to wonder whether or not I had been transported to the Spice Islands, away from our English winter shires.
It was a pleasant illusion of escape, for I had seen enough of home for one week. The gales have been playing havoc with my hill-top house, and they chose Sunday morning to do it, a time when little help is at hand. A particularly venomous gust lifted one or two tiles from an oast-roof above my work-room lined with valuable books. This blow was followed by another that flung a tile through the skylight. While I was trying to clear up the splintered and powdered glass a still more savage attack lifted the whole side of the roof, and a shower of tiles came through the skylight, causing a complete chaos. Rain-water laced with broken tiling and glass is tricky stuff to handle. I almost began to wish that I lived in a valley sheltered from the south-wester.
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