In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson Page B

despite the call-up, the Ministry was encouraging him to finish the third year of his engineering degree at the University of Leeds. They believed, I suppose, that his training would come in useful in the forces.
    Our little shop was a newsagent’s-cum-general store about halfway along the High Street, near the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s, and we lived above it. We didn’t sell perishable goods, just things like newspapers, sweets, cigarettes, stationery, jam and other odds and ends, tea and tinned goods—depending, of course, on what was available at the time. I was especially proud of the little lending library I had built up. Because paper was getting scarce and books were in short supply, I rented them out for tuppence a week. I kept a good selection of World’s Classic editions: Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in particular. I also stocked a number of the more sensational novels, Agatha Christie and the Mills and Boon romances, for those who liked such things—unfortunately, the majority of my customers!
    Though most of the able-bodied men in the village had joined up and put on one uniform or another, the place had never seemed busier. The old flax mill was operating at full strength again and most of the married women worked there. Before the war, it had practically come to a standstill, but now the military wanted flax to make webbing for parachute harnesses and other things where a tough fibre was needed, like gun tarpaulins and fire hoses.
    There was also a big RAF base about a mile or so away through Rowan Woods, and the High Street was often busy with Jeeps and lorries honking their horns and trying to pass one another in the narrow space. The airmen sometimes came to the village pubs—the Shoulder of Mutton just down the High Street, and the Duke of Wellington over the river—except when they went to Harkside, where there was much more to do. We didn’t even have one cinema in Hobb’s End, for example, but there were three in Harkside.
    These things aside, though, it remains difficult to say exactly how much the war affected us in Hobb’s End. I think that at first it impinged upon us very little. For those of us left behind, daily life went on much as normal. The first wave of evacuees came in September 1939, but when nothing happened for ages, they all started drifting home again, and we didn’t get any more until the bombing started the following August.
    Even with rationing, our diets didn’t change as much as those of the city folks, for we had always been used to eating plenty of vegetables, and in the country there were always eggs, butter and milk. Our neighbour, Mr Halliwell, the butcher, was probably the most popular man in town, and we were occasionally able to swap any tea and sugar we might put aside for an extra piece of mutton or pork.
    Apart from the feeling of waiting, the sense that normal life was suspended until all this was over, perhaps the hardest thing to get used to was the blackout. But even in that we were more fortunate than many, as Hobb’s End had no streetlights to begin with, and the countryside is dark enough at the best of times. Still, that pinprick of light on the distant hillside was often the only thing to guide you home. In the blackout, we had to tape up our windows to prevent damage from broken glass, and we also had to hang up the heavy blackout curtains. Every night, Mother used to send me outside to check that not a sliver of light showed, because our local ARP
    man was a real stickler. I remember the whole village laughing the day we heard Mrs Darnley got a visit from him for blacking out only the front of her house, but not the back windows. “Don’t be so daft,” she told him. “If the Germans come to bomb Hobb’s End, young lad, they’ll come from the east, won’t they, not by Grassington way. Stands to reason.”
    On moonlit nights, especially if there