The Tidy Countryside With this auxiliary labour of ex-enemy workers,
plus that of the men returned from the Services, the farmers have had the spring-clean of their lives. I have never seen the countryside so carefully trimmed and set. The fashion in orchards now is to take out every other tree, and in many places to cut down to the trunk and regraft new stocks. And with this the wind-screen hedges (in Kent often ten to twelve feet high), sometimes grown into coppice thickness, have been taken down to the bole, the consequent gaps being filled in with chestnut stakes. Very little layering is done in Kent. Field and roadside ditches have been cleared and squared off, while the grass banks are already being brushed with the hook. The result is a velvety border to lane and orchard, so dapper that one might think the West End hairdressers had been mis- directed by the Ministry of Labour to come with scissors and pomade to the countryside.
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