H.E. Bates Companion

Bates recalls Kent when he first settled there in 1931 -- untouched woods and heaths, three "great houses" and a church, and a working paper mill -- and reflects on the changes of twenty-five years: the houses and church gone, the open land increasingly developed, and a "housing estate that resembles an army barrack block." While noting the strange fact that "this prosperous countryside is littered with empty houses," he laments that "presently people escaping to the countryside must inevitably, it seems, have no countryside to escape to." In The Spectator (November 22, 1957, cic, pp. 669-670).