When Village Bells Were Silent

London, UK: Readers Union, 1976. Hardcover. Good/Good. h/b 158 pages, condition is good, slight tanning to the edges of the pages. An owners name label to the flyleaf. In his new book Fred Archer of Ashton-under-Hill remembers what the Second World War was like in rural England. First of all the war meant the War Ag, that terrible right hand of agricultural bureaucracy which made wheat grow in what had been bramble-covered fields, but was less successful in ploughing water-logged meadows. Then there were the evacuees from the industrial midlands, seeking refuge from the destruction wreaked nightly on Birmingham and Coventry, to which Bredon Hill afforded a macabre grandstand view. The Land Girls arrived, determined to keep up with the local sprout-pickers by day, and adding variety to the restricted night life of the village. Eventually there were the Italian prisoners of war. Joyce came from Sutton Coldfield as a Land Girl and Fred wooed and wed her. The Home Guard was formed and went about its manoeuvres with the sensible reflection: 'We beant worth a bom yer . . . they be hellishly expensive to make.' But a stray bomb did fall, on a flooded wheat field, leaving a blue clay hole 'that ud make some smartish bricks'. There were stories of the pig clubs and a black market of bacon, and of ten tons of cement spread on a field by mistake, and all the comings and goings in a small Worcestershire village which would never be the same again. Here is some human war history, from an inimitable author.