H.E. Bates Companion

Bates describes rural life of the late 19th century (citing examples from his own family history) and the radical changes brought by the automobile, especially beginning in the 1920s. Opposed to the view that the "swift breaking down of the barriers that once kept urban and rural life into severely removed compartments, [is] a dreadful and lamentable thing," Bates considers an increased interaction between town and country to be a positive development for both town and country, even to conjecturing that the atom bomb might destroy the blight of urban development: "Is it a crazy thought that as we flee to hide from the bomb we run to the place where life is most creative, where re-creation is most rapid and regular and above all certain? " In The Saturday Book (October 1944, 4, pp. 65-72).