Country Life
BY IAN MALL IN one respect the past month failed to produce the sort of weather that one somehow associates with traditional spring. We had few showers; but if the showers were not there with the frequency that makes a typical April, every- thing else went to pattern. Sowing was well ahead at the end of the month, if not actually completed; there were as many lambs on the pasture as ever; the plover was nesting and, before dusk, the pigeons were cooing with great fervour. An old man I spoke to on one of the few wet days aired the popular theory about the atomic bomb and its effect upon the weather, citing not only that day's weather, but all last summer's rain and the snow in late winter. Looking about, it seemed to me as bright a spring as any I had known—per- haps even a shade more colourful, for things that would have been early in bloom were held back by the late snow and the garden was a mass of colour, aubrietia flowering, while all sorts of things provided contrast, from narcissi and tall daffo- dils to muscari and polyanthus.
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