HAPPY VILLAGE 13 



Yet even such a comparison is too complicated. Their 

 quality lies in the directness of their simplicity. 



The villagers, who as a rule are incredibly free from 

 jealousy, are as proud of the country house or great park, 

 as if it were a personal possession. Indeed any picture 

 of an English village ought to include the Manor House, 

 so to call it, for it absorbs into itself much that is best in 

 English scenery. Indeed I have heard an agricultural 

 labourer say so, in his own idiom. Its garden has space 

 for the finest plant there is, to wit the forest tree, which 

 cannot be integral to the small garden. Trees convert 

 the grassfield of the Park into a bit of scenery that may 

 claim the virtues of field and wood and garden, all three. 

 You find a curious and rather forlorn likeness to it in 

 Australia, where the woodland and brush trees have been 

 ring-barked to the end of their destruction and that 

 cattle may be introduced as soon as the dying boughs let 

 in the light and persuade the grasses of that dry con 

 tinent to take their place. The likeness leapt to my eye 

 again and again in travelling about the back blocks 

 though the Australian scene was made melancholy by 

 the grey dead trunks and the loneliness, while the English 

 Park, even when neglected and full of stag-headed oaks 

 and ill-forested elms, is warm and homely even in winter 

 when only the likeness appears. Where there is no 

 country house, the glebe often takes the place of the 

 park. One such glebe, of which I have a long and fond 

 memory, is in fact the relic of the domain of a great 

 house that fell into ruin and began to disappear quite 

 four hundred years ago. 



When you come to know these southern villages well, 

 then and then only you begin to discover how old they 

 are. Though the social life has revived greatly since 

 the War, with better lighting, better clubs, with Women s 



