Mr Willet was my informant, punctuating his account with so many guffaws that I found myself roaring with laughter, long before the point of the story had been told me.It appears that Jim Waites had been missing chicken food from his store at the end of the garden at Tyler's Row, on several occasions, and he strongly suspected that Arthur Coggs helped himself, under cover of darkness, to a few handfuls of corn and bran for his own bedraggled hens, that led a miserably-confined existence in a ramshackle run next door. Jim Waites kept the chicken food in an old air-raid shelter. In the musty darkness bicycles jostled garden tools, ropes of onions swung overhead, firewood was stacked in one corner, and other awkward objects, too cumbersome to find a home in the little cottage, here found a resting place.The shelter had been erected at the beginning of the war by a don from Cambridge who had taken over the cottage for his wife and young family. Two things keep his memory fresh in Fairacre—the incredible speed with which he had completed this air-raid shelter, and the looks of his progeny.'Never seed a chap rush at a job so,' Mr Rogers, at the forge, told me once.
