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By GERALD S. HAWKINS
Rappahannock News Contributing Writer
A day in the country is sometimes quite an adventure for someone who has grown up in the city. The zoos and parks can hardly equal the pureness of the countryside. It is natural to want to escape, to drive the scenic routes, to hike or camp, or stay overnight in a country house.
Rappahannock is one of the last rural counties in Virginia, with the wild forests of the Shenandoah National Park making up its western edge. In Rappahannock there are more cattle than people, more pastures than lawns, and the only highrises are the hills and mountain peaks.
A country friend of mine runs a Bed and Breakfast establishment. He told me how one city guest had mistaken the roar of a bull for the trumpeting of an elephant. Actually the bull had been separated from the young heifers, and was only making a natural protest.
Next morning at the breakfast table the guest said, “Listen! There’s that elephant again!”
The host didn’t know what to say at first, but then he decided to add to the safari excitement.
“I think it’s getting nearer,” he said.
I grew up on a smallholding farm with cattle and crops and wildlife. I soon got to recognize the roar of the bull, and to know what it was roaring about. Because of the war (World War II), most of us children in England were evacuated from towns and cities, and placed in foster homes in the countryside. We were known as “evacuees.” My town, Great Yarmouth, was on the dangerous North Sea coast, and along with all the other children I was put on a steam-train, and was spirited away to what was described officially as “an unknown place in Central England.” The puffing locomotive was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin leading the children to a far-away land.
I remember how one East London evacuee was caught by surprise at the noises he heard in the country.
“What was that?” he asked the farmer, as they walked through the darkened woods.
“That was an owl.”
“’Course it was an ’owl,” said the boy with a perfect Cockney accent, “but ’oo made it?”
Another time I saw 22 young fellows playing soccer, kicking the football between two piles of manure which they had set up for a makeshift goal. It was a pleasant spring day, and they would have done just this, with ashcans as goalposts back
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