COUNTRY LIFE
IT IS difficult to settle down to a morning's work in my study above the cherry orchard. The fruit-pickers have camped there, with caravans, lorries, tents, cara, and all day long the sound of their chatter never ceases. It is punctuated with bursts of song (not folk-song, but greasy moanings caught from the Light Programme and the picture houses), the firing of guns and strings of crackers, and the cries of the men when, as the mood takes them, they give their attention to the starlings, blackbirds, thrushes, • pigeons and myriad smaller kinds of finch, tit and passerine.
Sometimes the guns come near the house with a startling report, followed by the patter of small shot falling on the roof. I have already ' fished out the corpses of a green woodpecker and a thrush from my ornamental pond. This cherry-picking has its sordid side ; and nowadays, with everybody so eager to make money easily, that sordid side is perhaps too evident. The large packing tent (a rough erection of poles and canvas), fronted by high piles of crates and market boxes, the grasses trodden to dust patched with grease from the lorries ; all this is a commercial blasphemy against the spirit of the orchard.
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