Perhaps in instinctive contrast to the cold, unhappy mountains of Palestine, there rose up in my mind the picture of a village street at dusk with a smell of wood smoke lying in the still air and [...] I remembered how the church bells ring at home, and how, at that time of year, the sun leaves a dull red bar low down in the west, and against it the elms grow blacker minute by minute. Then the bats start to flicker like little bits of burnt paper and you hear the slow jingle of a team [of plough horses] coming home from the fields. ... When you think like this, sitting alone in a foreign country, you know all there is to learn about heartache.
But does it seem strange that a townsman should in his extremity see this picture? Would it not be more reasonable to expect him to see his own city? Why did I not think of St Paul’s Cathedral or Piccadilly? I have learnt since that this vision of mine is a common one [...]
This village that symbolizes England sleeps in the subconscious of many a townsman. A little London factory hand whom I met during the war confessed to me, when pressed, and after great mental difficulty, that he visualized the England he was fighting for — the England of the 'England Wants You' poster — as not London, not his own street, but as Epping Forest, the green place where he had spent Bank Holidays. And I think most of us did. The village and the English country-side are the germs of all we are and all we have become: our manufacturing cities belong to the last century and a half; our villages stand with their roots in the Heptarchy.
H. V. Morton, In Search of England (1927; reprinted 2000), pp. 1-2.
'England Wants You': slogan of a wartime recruiting poster
Epping Forest: see here
germ: seed
Heptarchy: seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the 7th century
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