Rural life in Belgium could have been depicted by Millet: the hay gathered with wooden rakes, the straw beaten with flails, fruits and vegetables handpicked and transported on horse-drawn carts. Like French provincial towns, where men in berets really did collect a baguette on their way home from the corner Café de la Paix (typically named in 1919), or Spain, sealed in aspic by Franco’s authoritarian rule, Belgium and Britain hung in a sort of delayed Edwardian limbo.
