24 JANUARY 1976, Page 5

Dirt

From Surgeon Commander T. W. Froggatt Sir: "A good bit of dirt, that was!" said the Sussex farmer as we looked out over the new reservoir gradually beginning to fill up with the winter rains. The "bit of dirt" was first-class agricultural land until last summer when the dam was completed. Hundreds of acres of it.

I thought idly of this lovely soil, which for fifteen hundred years and more had been growing food; of the countrymen, mainly of Anglo-Saxon stock, who had tended it lovingly all their lives and of the countless girls and boys through the ages who had helped by gathering bucketfuls of stones and flints turned up by the plough, ever one of the children's jobs until Education set in. 'A good bit of dirt! A pity it had to be flooded!' T. Wilson Froggatt