COUNTRY LIFE
Living in the Country Anyone going to live in the country is at once confronted by problems which never arise in the town: water supply, light, drainage, neighbours who are jealous of the view, the law regarding boundaries or trespass, labour rates, omissions (such as refuse collection) in the public services. Most town emigrants enjoy the dream of living on their own produce, keeping a few hens, even dabbling with a farm. It is a shock to find that it costs anything from £6o upwards to build a septic tank, that a storage capacity of 3,000 gallons is only just enough to ensure an adequate household water-supply, that poultry-food is expensive, that neighbours are often tiresome and villagers uncooperative, that the pheasants walking about the lanes like tame fowls are not for you to pick. There has long been a demand for a book of sound and unsentimental guidance in these and the countless other problems of country life, and at last it has been done. Living in the Country (Black, 7s. 6d.) is by Frederick D. Smith and Barbara Wilcox, who are a farmer and his wife. In an honest, practical way it deals with the entire mechanics of rural life, offering conclusions on housing, farming, small-holding, poultry-keeping and other rural dreams that are, I imagine, the result of hard experience. It is nowhere idyllic. and for quite half the book not even optimistic ; yet wherever it is possible to test the book by parallel experience its con- clusions and advice are incontestably right. It stands for a rural policy based equally on imagination, common sense and sound economics, and no reader of this column ought, indeed, to be without it.
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