Rural England, I learn, is rapidly changing hands--not for the first
time, by the way, but we cannot go into that just now. Excellent
treatises on feudal tenure, wapentake, the dissolution of the
monasteries and the enclosure of common lands may be picked up dirt
cheap at any second-hand bookshop in the Charing Cross Road with the
words "Presentation Copy" erased from the flyleaf by a special and
ingenious process. What is happening now is that farmers are buying up
the big estates in pieces, and Norman piles or Elizabethan manors are
beginning to be too expensive to maintain, what with coal and the rise
in the minimum wage of vassals and one thing and another.
"The stately homes of England
How beautiful they stood
Before their recent owners
Relinquished them for good,"
as the poet justly observes. And even if there is enough money to keep
up the castle without the broad acres (though as a matter of fact an
acre is not any broader than it is long) there is no fun in having a
castle at all when the deer park has been divided into allotments and
the Dutch garden is under swedes.
The question is then what is going to happen to Montmorency (pronounced
"Mumsie") Castle, and The Towers at Barley Melling?
In London the difficulty of dealing with huge houses has been solved in
a very subtle manner by turning them into a couple of maisonettes
apiece, so that under the portico of what used to be 105 Myrtle Crescent
you discover two perfectly good doors, marked 105a and 105b. Into the
letter-box of the door marked 105a the postman invariably puts the
letters intended for 105b, and _vice versá_, but, as these are always
letters addressed to the last tenant but two, it does not really very
much matter. Both are desirable maisonettes, though the tenants of 105a
have the sole enjoyment of the lincrusta dadoes in the original
dining-room. In some cases there are as many as three maisonettes, and
the notice on the area gate says, "105c. _Mrs. Orlando Smith_," where it
used to say simply "No bottles." I never really understood that notice
myself, for whenever I am walking along with an empty bottle that I want
to get rid of I do not throw it down into an area, where it would make a
most horrible crash, but softly into the thick shrubs of the Crescent
Gardens.
This brings me back to the country again.
There will not be enough of the new rich to purchase a castellated
mansion apiece, partly because of the Excess Profits Duty, which is
crippling this kind of enterprise, and partly because so many baronial
seats, romantic and picturesque in their way, are terribly
under-garaged. On the other hand you cannot expect a farmer who happens
to be buying the fields round Badgery Mortimer to have any use for a
dungeon keep or the haunted picture-gallery in the west wing. No, there
is only one thing to do and that is to break these places up into a
number of self-contained homes.
* * * * *
[Illustration: MODERN AND ANCIENT.
_Young Cricketer_. "Yes, I cocked one off the splice in the gully
and the blighter gathered it."
_Father_. "Yes, but how did you get out? Were you caught, stumped or
bowled, or what?"]
* * * * *