COUNTRY LIFE
MORE than once or twice I have read in comments on this island refer- ences to the extreme wetness of the climate; but foreign critics as well some natives seem to have acquired a strangely wrong idea of the normal weather In ii (which has some curious affinities with 1944) the total rainfall for the year was under 16 inches. If you add to inches to reach a normal fall, the total is still moderate. This summer the drought was serious; but among the sufferers the essential crops are not to be reckoned ; and the most essential—wheat and potatoes—have flourished far beyond the normal. Country houses on the Cotswolds, hamlets in Hereford, farms in the clay country about the Fens, rivers and wells east of the Chilterns are all enduring a serious lack of water ; but where water is shortest crops are best. Seldom, if ever, did I see such a promised yield of wheat and potatoes as in fields above a Hertfordshire valley from which the stream has clean vanished.
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