Carrying on regardless | 25 June 2015

This big, bristling, deeply-furrowed book kicks off with a picture of the British countryside just before the second world war. Apparently we then grew only 30 per cent of our food, horses did most of the work and a lot of the land, criss-crossed by empty roads featuring the occasional pony trap, had been abandoned to weeds and brambles.

Move on a year or two and millions of acres had been brought under the plough. Tennis courts, golf courses, railway embankments, school playing fields and even the lawns of large houses had been turned into vegetable plots or corn fields. Barbed wire blocked the beaches, church bells only rang to warn of imminent invasion and ornamental church gates had been carted off to be turned into tanks. Armed vehicles of every description clogged the roads and a reddish gold sky ten miles away would indicate that a nearby city was in flames.

Sounds terrible — but worse was to come. Runways, control towers, hangars and Nissen huts soon littered the land. Badger setts were turned into subterranean lairs, while stately homes were given over to evacuees — or vital government offices. Glorious Chatsworth had 21 schoolgirls sleeping in its state drawing room and less-than-glorious, ‘Lavatory Gothic’ Bletchley Park became a top-secret code-breakers’ workshop. Further afield, on a tiny Scottish island, the authorities were testing the potency of anthrax spores which could be used for a biological attack on the enemy.

Yes, war is ghastly; but Duff Hart-Davis explains how we responded to the enemy machine-gunning herds of our precious cattle — by feasting off nettle soup, baked hedgehog, sizzled frogs’ legs and the infamous Woolton pie (made of swedes, carrots and turnips).

We also kept going at our outdoor sports.