DRESSED TO KILL After the 1914-18 war a number of
farm workers wore old army tunics. They made satisfactory working jackets even if they didn't quite blend with more conventional clothing. One looked at those tunics, tattered and worn, and there was something saddening about them. Well before the Second World War most of the old tunics seemed to have disappeared. In the past ten years or so I have noticed a fashion in rather outlandish uniforms among all sorts of country folk. Wild-fowlers, anglers and pigeon shooters hide themselves in parkas; the tractor drivers have visored caps that somehow make them look like panzer men or the vanguard of an Oriental invasion. Shepherds come down from the hills in camouflaged gas capes and all sorts of people do their work in assorted uniform. Yesterday in the course of a walk along the footpath that crossed a farmyard I was startled by the appearance of a 'para- trooper' in the doorway of a shippon with something that looked, at first glance, like a tommy-gun. It was only a dung fork, but why at that moment did the tractor burst into life and another 'Commando' hustle a 'section' of bullocks out of a shed? Once upon a time the scene would have been right with a man in a smock carrying two buckets on a shoulder yoke, and what the olden-day 'gaffer' would have said to it all I just don't know!
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