H.E. Bates Companion

A brief account of a visit a month before to a country of "padlocked coal-trucks, children crying for bread, shops full of the richest silks, handbags, jewells, and dresses, laughterless people, armed guards at travel agencies, six shillings a day for bread, censorship, corruption, a smell in the air of the barbarism of the Middle Ages, fantastic bribes for seats on trains -- this is the regime, priest-ridden and dictator-bound, that still reveres the German Army, the spirit of Fascism and the ghost of Hitler." In the News Chronicle (November 8, 1948).