English Picnics. By Georgina Battiscombe. (Harvill Press. 95. 6d.) WHEN
the subject is picnics it is permissible to concoct a pie containing larks. Mrs. Battiscombe has evidentry revelled a little in her venture, but felt her obligations. The pseudo-solemn historical handling bears this out. Picnicking is traced back to a twelfth-century episotip when a monk, bearing the cheese he had stolen, was changed into a fox. "A picnic," Mrs. Battiscombe declares roundly, "is the Englishman's grand gesture' ; and, indeed, it may be that Waterloo, the Armada and other skirmishes were but minor picnics beside this age-long battle with weather conditions. For Wordsworthian Lake excursions, the alternative to the repellent sandwich appears to have been "cold pork in their pockets." There is also high life in pastoral settings, with Mrs. Beeton catering in her usual modest fashion for forty upper-class appetites and drinks to match. Plunging into a wealth of literary and fictitious picnics, Mrs. Battiscombe has picked a choice one from Don Juan, where 'the outdoor breakfast is cooked twice over for the hero who has failed to waken soon enough to eat the first. With Milton we achieve sublimity when Adam and Eve prepare a meal for Raphael. "The feast," Mrs. Battiscombe remarks, lapsing into naivety, "seems to have been entirely vegetarian." Of course it was ; ask Shelley if-Xdam killed and ate his fellow-beings before the Fall. And how does this Eden banquet qualify as an English picnic, unless the Garden, preceding Blake's Jerusalem, was re- built in Buckinghamshire? But no matter ; all goes into the picnic pie, which is a light one and will not tax the digestion.
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