COUNTRY LIFE
Village Shop
All country dwellers, and I suppose most country visitors, know the village shop. Stocking everything from candles to calico, seeds to sardines, it was almost a comic institution in times of peace. Its smell was unique in the world. Now the war has hit it, as it has hit most small shops, very hard. Its stocks were first seriously depleted by evacuees, then by soldiers. By the time serious rationing was in force it found that many of its customers preferred registering with larger concerns. Its shelves, normally fascinating with everything from tea to teething powders, grew emptier and emptier. The big house was empty ; the well-to-do had let their houses. It was threatened also by London stores which delivered a higher quality and range of goods far out into the country. And one began to hear stories of its being threatened by something else. One heard of large concerns buying out small country shops which were in difficulties, keeping the shopkeeper in residence and offering to sell back the business after the war—at a price. The country shopkeeper has still another grievance. His stock is now doled out to him from a central depot, where presumably large supplies are concentrated. He is down far below a month's supply. He is wondering what will happen in case of invasion, when he will be perhaps the only local source of goods for three or four hundred people. He is probably right in urging a redistribution of goods now, rather than at a time of emer- gency, when redistribution will be a far more difficult and perhaps impossible thing.
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