Pamela Gastall

Country Cousin

When our country cousin Ella came to stay for a week, everything turned into something like the last days of Pompeii. Ella was a great big girl whose main activity on the farm was showing fractious bulls who was the boss. She could eat some of them for lunch. Every window in our house was flung open night and day, and she made the beds like haystacks. She threw out everything she said wasn't healthy, like canned milk and Sunday supplements, and exchanged all our contemporary furniture for chairs and tables made out of obsolete milk churns.

But not everybody's country cousin is like that. PAMELA GASTALL is someone's lovely country cousin from Sussex, and if there's one thing we're certain of she makes her farm milk churns look anything but obsolete. She's a gorgeously sweet seventeen, she's kind to all the bulls and cows, and gallops deliriously o'er the downs on her horse.

How would you like a country cousin like Pam? Don't apply to us, write to Father Christmas-but only if you've been good.

In addition to everything we've already said, Pam's opinion is that the rat race in rural areas is mainly confined to bunnies. You may consider that ridiculous, but if you were a doe and were being chased up hill and down dale by every buck for miles around, what would you think of civilisation?

The question is rather rhetorical. It's merely posed to make you think.

Span No 186 - February 1970