This Peculiar Englishness

Commenting that 'we have passed through, or partly through, the greatest revolution of our time', Bates posits that almost all that remains of the vanished world of his childhood is the celebration of Christmas.

But even Christmas has 'suffered a change' in the loss of 'earnest and jolly brass bands blowing carols one against the other, which filled the streets of my childhood in the Midlands', of church bells, of the reciprocal holiday gifts between tradesmen and customers, and of carolers in the village streets.

He reflects that the special quality he associates with Christmas is the 'dark, wet tenderness of mid-winter, so English and so full of half-woken pulsations of Spring, when rain hangs and never seems to fall from all the thorns of the hedges.'

A year later, Bates would write another Christmas essay for the same magazine.

In The Field (London, December 25, 1948, p. 720, attached).