So far we have viewed the CWAECs and countryside largely through the lenses of official documents and oral histories. But we can also investigate contemporary representations, both officially blessed and unofficial, especially since the Second World War saw radio and print media coming fully into their own. The messages from central authorities were actively intended to promote patriotic citizenship, ‘we are all in it together’. They worked either directly or subliminally. Those receiving the messages, however transmitted, were culturally attuned to ‘read’ them in approximately the same way, with a tacit understanding. In many cases they were symbolic of ‘Englishness’ (although this did not always resonate in other parts of the United Kingdom) and thus were emotive but also exhortatory – ‘go and do this yourself ’ – thereby initiating processes and practices contributing to the war effort in the countryside. The concept of pastoral, imbued with nostalgia and aesthetic scenery, has been examined by writers keen to demonstrate it as a political device, cloaking the actuality of the economic and social processes at work. Its use in this way prior to the twentieth century has been explored but in both world wars we find it deployed again. Pastoral, in establishing a powerful link between rich and poor as part of an organic whole, was fully deployed as state propaganda at this time of crisis: rural landscapes and their people as a virtuous essence – to be fought for and to love. ‘In an age of destruction there is a re-awakened interest in the things that endure.’ (Figure 38.)

But media-pastoral was deployed in a very particular way. All radio, artistic work, cinema, Pathé News and publications such as Picture Post were subject to Defence Regulation 39B, making it a criminal offence to publish material ‘likely to be prejudicial to the prosecution of the war or the defence of the realm’. All was subject to official censorship.

At this juncture many intellectuals, previously critical of British ways of life, often communist sympathisers or left-wing critics, also responded to the threat to western culture posed by fascism.