ABSTRACT
On VE Day, 8 May 1945, Nella Last wrote in the diary that she kept for Mass Observation about the trip she had made that day with her husband and son to Coniston Water. ‘It was a heavy, sultry day,’ she recorded, ‘but odd shafts of sunlight made long spears of sparkling silver on the ruffled water, and the scent of the leafing trees, of damp earth and moss, lay over all like a blessing ... I felt I’d kept a tryst with the quiet hills and fells’ (279). Such a response to nature was not uncommon among those trying to express in poetry and novels a sense of the Britain (or more commonly, perhaps, England) that was being fought for. Angus Calder notes unsympathetically that ‘many writers who should have known better implied that the soldiers and airmen were dying to preserve an essentially rural Britain’ (419). Popular novelists like Ernest Raymond and Neville Shute drew on such sentiments in novels like The Last to Rest (1941) and Pastoral (1944), linking the immediate privations and sacrifices of the war to a timeless sense of the country (in both senses) enduring.1 In film, this rhetoric of the countryside had a wellestablished tradition; asAndrew Higson observes, in his discussion of the 1924 film Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, it involved ‘the construction of a very specific rural vision of the national landscape and the national character’ (1997: 43) that was developed in response to the increasing industrialisation of Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, Higson argues that the establishment of this rural idyll involved a displacement in which a particular landscape and setting derived from the south of England came to stand for the nation as a whole, creating a ‘a new vision of the nation as England, which was itself reduced to a particular vision of the South Country’ (43).
