"And No Birds Sing."
A twelve-year-old girl, whose overworked and materialistic parents have little time for her, runs away from home and takes refuge briefly with a homeless vagabond in the woods. Exposed to the simplicity and slow pace of Mr. Thompson's life, the girl thinks of her parents and her home, replete with "the telly, the fridge, the radio, the cooker and the washing machine all crammed in together, the table with uncleared breakfast remains still on it when she got back from school, the grey eye of the television set holding her a mute captive there in the dead half-darkness while she waited for someone to come home." After several days and nights of innocently allowing her company, the vagrant hears search dogs and hurriedly sends her home, recognizing his compromising legal position. The girl, baffled by this sudden change of mood, runs "back where she belonged, to where the house was dead." While capturing well the girl's receptiveness to the smells, sounds, and spirit of nature, the tale is a simplistic depiction of the loss of family ties and traditions in modern society. Baldwin (212) notes the potential for "an exploration of values, but the drifter is idealized and the girl's family too conventionally materialistic for the clash to generate any sparks." In Today (December 30, 1961), The Fabulous Mrs V (1964), H.E. Bates (1975), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989).