Free (2/20) Village Diary by Miss Read Page B

own pains. Is all art involuntary? Is it, perhaps, a bad, rather than a good thing? I paused to study the front of my cardigan, and found that I had decreased at both armhole and front edge, giving a remarkably bizarre effect to the garment, and involving two inches of careful unpicking.
    I decided suddenly that literary fame had gone to my head, that the obscurer motives behind artistic impulses were beyond my comprehension, that a glass of hot milk would be a really good thing, and bed the best place for a bemused teacher.

APRIL

    I N a week's time Fairacre School will have broken up for the Easter holidays. I, for one, am always glad to see the end of this most miserable of terms. In it we endure, each year, the worst weather, the darkest days, the poorest health and the lowest spirits. But now, with Easter in sight, and the sun gaining daily in strength, the outlook is much more heartening.
    The return of the flowers and young greenery is a perennial miracle and wonder. The children have brought treasures from hedge, garden and spinney; and coltsfoot and crocus, violet and viburnum, primrose and pansy deck our classroom, all breathing out a faint but heady perfume of spring-time.
    How lucky country children are in these natural delights that he ready to their hand! Every season and every plant offers changing joys. As they meander along the lane that leads to our school all kinds of natural toys present themselves for their diversion. The seedpods of stitchwort hang ready for delightful popping between thumb and finger, and later the bladder campion offers a larger, if less crisp, globe to burst. In the autumn, acorns, beechnuts and conkers bedizen their path, with all their manifold possibilities of fun. In the summer, there is an assortment of honeys to be sucked from bindweed flowers, held fragile and fragrant to hungry lips, and the tiny funnels of honeysuckle and clover blossoms to taste. Outside the Post Office grow three fine lime trees, murmurous with bees on summer afternoons, and these supply wide, soft, young leaves in May, which the children spread over their opened mouths and, inhaling sharply, burst with a pleasant and satisfying explosion. At about the same rime of year the young hawthorn leaves are found good to eat—'bread and cheese' some call them—while the crisp sweet stalks of primroses form another delicacy, with the added delight of the thread-like inner stalk which pulls out from the hairier outer sheath.
    The summer time brings flower games, the making of daisy chains, poppy dolls with little Chinese heads and red satin skirts made from the turned-back petals, 'He-loves-me-he-don't' counted solemnly as the daisy petals flutter down, and 'Bunny's mouth' made by pressing the sides of the yellow toadflax flowers which scramble over our chalky Fairacre banks. And always, whatever the season, there is a flat ribbon of grass blade to be found which, when held between thumbs and blown upon, can emit the most hideous and ear-splitting screech, calculated to fray the nerves of any grownup, and warm the heart of any child, within earshot.
    How fortunate too are country children in that, among all this richness, so much appeals not only to their senses of taste and smell, but to that most neglected one—the sense of touch. As they handle these living and beautiful things they run the gamut of texture from the sweet chestnut's bristly seedpod to the glutinous, cool smoothness of the bluebell's satin stalk. They part the fine dry grass to probe delicately with their fingers for the thread-like stalks of early white violets; and yet to pluck the strong ribbed stems of the cow parsley, they must exert all the strength of wrist and hand before its hollow tube snaps, with a rank and aromatic dying breath.
    They leap to grasp the grey rough branch of the beech tree that challenges their strength near the school gate, and legs writhing, they feel the old rough, living strength of that noble tree in the very