SHORTLY after writing about the drought last week, the sky darkened. Over the next few days we were soaked, the rain driven horizontally by thrashing wind. Hailstones added to the fun. At the first drenching, the blackbirds were out, finding worms for their sulky youngsters, who loiter near the rhubarb, camouflaged as clods of earth. They require so much food, their parents get under my feet whenever I’m in the garden, squawking when I nearly tread on them as I round a corner or take a step back without first looking over my shoulder.

With falling temperatures, the village moved back indoors. You’d scarcely know that there has been any lifting of lockdown. One neighbour says her grandmother scoffs at the idea that the coronavirus crisis is like the last war, when she was a child in a nearby town. Although they were often hungry, they had complete freedom. Even when the air raid siren went, and they had to dive into shelters, they did not feel the all-pervasive threat of today.

Nor, unless they were extremely remote or unlucky, were people shut off from each other. We talk a lot about the power of modern technology to keep us connected, but in those times, whether you were in a village or a city, there was daily contact with other folk, even if you lived alone. People wouldn’t have felt the need for video calls when they could nip out of their (unlocked) door and visit whoever they liked nearby. The Blitz spirit is not entirely a myth, but the circumstances in which it thrived were very different from this pandemic.

My mother lived in London and, in 1939, like countless city children, was evacuated to the country. She was luckier than many, being sent not to strangers but to an aunt, who lived in Herefordshire, near the Welsh border. There was no running water, light was by paraffin lamp, her uncle was an irascible war veteran, and her aunt would often retreat to bed for days, finding the extra responsibility rather too much. But for an 11-year-old, collecting eggs from under hens, sauntering up the lane for still-warm jugs of milk from the farm, and seeing a night-time sky lit by stars was a revelation. From then on, she counted the days until she could leave London forever.

Not all evacuees felt the same way. Encountering beetles and bugs for the first time was hard enough, but herds of cows with a bull among them must have been pretty alarming. One boy, who had never previously left the Gallowgate, ran to tell the farmer that “they coos are eating a’ your grass”. Another Glaswegian, taken into a Perthshire home, escaped onto the roof when they ran him a bath. He thought they were trying to drown him.

Recalling that period, my mother spoke of country folks’ shock at the poverty of inner city children, who had come from slums. Those who organised the mass evacuation were appalled to discover that, when asked to provide each child with a change of clothing, a toothbrush and enough food for a day’s journey, a lot of families were unable to do so. It was a sobering eye-opener. Rural hardship was rife, but it did not compare to the scale of urban deprivation: barefoot youngsters with rickets, scurvy, ringworm, or so underfed they were the colour of lard.

It’s hard to imagine what it must have felt like to be dropped into a world of fields and trees and pitch black nights, when you were used to well-lit canyons of concrete and stone; or to find yourself alone in a bed, when usually there’d be siblings on all sides, keeping you warm, and your parents only a step away. Some children were so miserable, they had to be sent home. For others, like my mother, it sparked a lifelong love of the countryside.

Not that she idealised her aunt’s way of life. Some aspects of it were, for a Londoner, like stepping back in time. Nor, in the 1940s, was there any glamorising of country life. It was often equated with backward attitudes and ignorance. If anything, most villagers dreamed of escaping to the city, or at least the suburbs, and a clean, warm house with all mod-cons.

I’ve been reading Dirk Bogarde’s memoir, Great Meadow, in which he recalls his childhood in the Sussex Downs, from the age of six. Between 1927 and 1934, he spent weekends and long spells of holiday in what his affluent parents called a cottage, but photos show as a substantial house. Later he was packed off to Glasgow, which he loathed, but that’s another story. In Great Meadow, he and his little sister were looked after by a nanny, while his actress mother swanned around in a kimono, and his father raced up and down to London where he was on The Times’s picture desk. Bogarde often mentions the healthiness of the country, compared to London, where public transport was frowned on, because of the risk of germs. This was a legacy, perhaps, of the Spanish flu.

Bogarde loved everything about the cottage, but the most noteworthy feature was the outside lavatory. Every Friday he had to dig a hole in the garden and, under cover of dusk, empty the privy bucket into it. His great fear was of tripping, because sanitation was basic. They’d have a weekly bath, filled by their nanny, but his parents preferred going to the nearest pub for their ablutions.

Years ago I visited friends in rural Perthshire who had an outside toilet. I rather liked it: it was made of wood, and smelled of sawdust. Unlike the shed at the bottom of many cottage gardens, one wall was open, so the view was lovely, even in the snow. You didn’t have to crunch over snails in the dark to reach it – bedrooms came with chamberpots – and as a guest there was no fear of ever being asked to empty it. To watch him on screen, you’d never think Bogarde was the man to cope with such a noisome task. If for any reason it suddenly becomes a necessary chore in our cottage, I’ll be with the Gallowgate evacuees, heading straight back to the flushing loos of the Merchant City.

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