ENGLAND NOW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 520, 10 June 1949, Page 18

ENGLAND NOW

Tl THE ENGLISH COUNTIES. Illustrated. By various authors. Advisory Editor: C. E. M. ) Joad. Odhams Press Litd., through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. English price, 12/6. | THE ENGLISH HERITAGE. By Rex Welldon Finn, Macdonald. English price, 12/6. COPSFORD. By Walter J. C. Murray. Allen 6nd Unwin. English price, 12/6. England, I could think of no better | speeding gift than the first in this list. | True, it weighs about as much as a stout pair of walking shoes, but it would prove almost as useful to the tourist I | have in mind-the one who will walk or cycle or ride a horse about England with time enough to travel at no more than five to seven miles an hour. For such a traveller The English Counties would take the place of road maps (there are 36 maps ‘included, mostly -pictorial and on a scale of five miles to the inch); it would take the place of many guide books, histories, picture books or tourist folders. Each writer is an expert on. his particular countyS. P. B. Mais on Oxfordshire, Richard Church on Kent, R. H. Mottram on Suffolk, and a couple of dozen others on their chosen subjects. The chapters are, of course, most varied; some are |} more historical than others; some in- | clude more folk lore, others more field |and forest lore, and others more hard statistics than their companion pieces. There are 280 photographs, 82 line drawings; a few of the photographs are disappointing, but many are magnificent, and all have something to tell the stranger, something that will set the displaced Kentishman or lakeland dalesman dreaming and remembering. And to make the puny price of 12/6 seem even more ridiculous, there is a_ sprightly, good-humoyred, and most winning introduction by the editor-C. E. M. Joad. As a book-that is, as printed paper with pictures all bound and pagedThe English Heritage is a more pleasing achievement than The English Counties, But there it ends. The author ‘sets out in a longish preface his views on a tourist’s need of historical back-ground-and then adds a new preface to this, the second edition. He planned it "for the tourist or holiday-maker, in the hope that as a companion it would add to his enjoyment of any district which he might visit." But there would be no room for it in any ruc-sac of my acquaintance; and I couldn’t happily recommend it as an addition to the luggage in a 30 horse-power touring car with petrol to burn. Companion? No. All right to flip over the pages looking at the very good photographs, 30 of them; but a mortification of mind and eye to read sentences beginning, "Not always can we say with certainty .. ." ; ) F I had a- friend setting off to see | /

or ending, "Caxton was a typical product of his period, for it is during the Tudor age that the learning of the centuries came to England." The third book, Copsford, is so delightful it seems a pity to overtop it with bigger and heavier affairs. It is the book that "is most pleasant to handle and to read. Mr. Murray found a cottage that had been empty for 20 years; there were rats and rat-holes, spiders and cobwebs, window holes with no glass, floors with great gaps, grass growing in the doorway-but it was a Cottage, empty, remote enough from the nearest farm and village, and to it Mr. Murray could and did escape from his sordid London room. He escaped for a year to work and to study the wild plants and animals round silent Copsford. This is a book for a herb-gardener; but it is also a book for anyone who has the smallest hermit-instinct; and it is also a book for anyone who will enjoy a gentle story of solitariness with an even gentler story of love scarcely seen in the background. The photographs are excellent beyond comment.

J.