Country Life
By IAN NIALL
ONE becomes very used to living in a. quiet, place. Until yesterday we could listen to the morning songsters, and at lunch, if we paused for a moment and shut our minds to the background murmur of the one o'clock news, it was possible to hear the woodpigeons in the trees across the road. All this we took for granted, with the bleating of ewes and lambs that sometimes stray into the garden and the mysterious hammering sounds that jackdaws make in a chimney at daybreak. Today all that is changed. The air vibrates and crockery dances, for a juggernaut is bringing civilisation to the out-backs we know as old So-and-So's farm. The old water-main was inadequate and we are having a new one of suitable diameter laid right past our door in the interests, one likes to feel, of a generation as yet unborn. Yard by yard a compressor and its attendant train of shovellers and pick-swingers creep along. The jackdaws won't like it, .I am sure of that, We shall not be able to hear the love- making of the pigeons for a while, and I doubt whether even the pigeons will be able to hear each other very well. We must bow to progress.
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