I Prefer Living in the Country

Bates writes of the cycle of city-dwellers who move to the countryside and then, disillusioned, return to "town life." 

In his view, such people have been "hood-winked" by a "land-of-milk-and-honey dream which bears no relation to reality" — a "legend carefully preserved [by] generations of writers and playwrights and still preserved, to its discredit, by the B.B.C." In contrast, he depicts those who treasure rural life — the seasons, birds, flowers, and people — without illusions that it is an "enchanted way of escape... from the common problems of existence. There is no ready-made cloud-cuckoo-land."

In the London Evening News (March 19, 1941, attached).