The surprising thing about the squatters is that they did
not begin to squat earlier. In the country district where I live there are two hutted camps, erected at the beginning of the war to accommodate r,000 troops each. They stand on common land of which I am Lord of the Manor. One of them has been unoccupied (except for a small R.A.O.C. detachment which lodged in a corner of it for a few weeks) for nearly a year. The other was occupied last winter by Polish troops, the last of whom was repatriated to Poland in (I think) February. On behalf of the commoners, who own what used to be a beauty-spot, I have carried rut various reconnaissances into Whitehall to try and find out when the camp-sites will be derequisitioned. Sometimes I have been given a date—an approximate, a provisional and as it turned out always a wrong date. Meanwhile the eyesore remains, the huts deteriorate and accommodation for 2,000 people—complete with drainage, electric light and coal dumps—has lain vacant for months. If the sites were private property a casual and dilatory attitude towards their disposal might be deemed, in these days, no more than the beastly land-owner deserved ; but they belong to the people, who, one would have thought, were entitled to know what use, if any, was going to be made of their property, and to get it back if it was not going to be used at all. No squatters have arrived yet, and in the village whose surroundings they disfigure the camps have become a symbol of the waste, the folly, the delays which are all that these misguided countrymen expect from a Socialist Government. * * *
Previous page
