COUNTRY LIFE
Desired Streets
When the great exodus came, two expectant mothers from London were received in a country house that has all the charm associated with the name. The rooms are pleasant and spacious, the garden is extremely beautiful in form, and the flowers are so fine that they win prizes at the Royal Horticultural Society's shows. When you pass from the shade of a splendid beech tree out of the gate into the road you come in sight of a little village scene that has long seemed to me one of the most pleasant and most English in England. The ingredients are old timbered cottages, great trees and the relics of a gothic church, " bosomed high " in trees and bushes which make it a favourite choir for our singing birds. On the third day of their visit the two London women clean disappeared. Cars were sent out to search the countryside, but all in vain: the vanishing trick had been perfectly performed, though the humble luggage remained in their rooms. A day later a postcard was received from London. It contained sufficiently gracious thanks for the kindness that they had received, but the chief burden was a complaint against the A.R.P. authorities for having sent them to a place " where there were no streets "! I was reminded of an event in the last war. A London woman who had come down to a country-house hospital to see her husband could find no lodging and was put up in my house. We asked her in the morning how she had slept, and she said that she had been quite unable to sleep because of the noise. She could just hear from her window the faint, far- off tinkle of a small mill-stream. Her home was in the Old Kent Road. The cases are perhaps not parallel. Silence can certainly be loud in the ears of those used to noise. The inability to bear the absence of streets for as much as three days is an example of another sort of psychology.
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