1
I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was a
little boy in knickerbockers.
When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back to me
the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up to heaven
and its floor covered irregularly with patched and defective oilcloth
and a dingy mat or so and a “surround” as they call it, of dark stained
wood. Here and there against the wall are trunks and boxes. There are
cupboards on either side of the fireplace and bookshelves with
books above them, and on the wall and rather tattered is a large
yellow-varnished geological map of the South of England. Over the mantel
is a huge lump of white coral rock and several big fossil bones, and
above that hangs the portrait of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and
displaying an interior of intricate detail and much vigour of coloring.
It is the floor I think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed
to be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there
are steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF
THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown
surround were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine.
I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I
owe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have not
forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous west
of England builder; including my father he had three nephews, and for
each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made by an out-of-work
carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the toyshop, you understand,
but a really adequate quantity of bricks made out of oak and shaped
and smoothed, bricks about five inches by two and a half by one, and
half-bricks and quarter-bricks to correspond. There were hundreds of
them, many hundreds. I could build six towers as high as myself with
them, and there seemed quite enough for every engineering project I
could undertake. I could build whole towns with streets and houses and
churches and citadels; I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make
causeways over crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on
a keel of whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push
over the high seas to the remotest port in the room. And a disciplined
population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and
all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors and
soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.
Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write
about toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common theme for
essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting out of
the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink and glory of the
performance and the final conflagration. I had such a theatre once, but
I never loved it nor hoped for much from it; my bricks and soldiers were
my perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. There
was the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make,
with long passages and steps and windows through which one peeped into
their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting
ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out
into the hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun
emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And there
was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of nasturtium
seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender from the garden;
such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in sacks
of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by waggons along
the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian
frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there were
battles on the way.
That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget by
what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead--I have
never seen such soldiers since--and for these my father helped me to
make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a hitherto desolate
country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of an ancient trunk. Then
I conquered them and garrisoned their land. (Alas! they died, no doubt
through contact with civilisation--one my mother trod on--and their
land became a wilderness again and was ravaged for a time by a clockwork
crocodile of vast proportions.) And out towards the coal-scuttle was a
region near the impassable thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived
certain china Zulus brandishing spears, and a mountain country of
rudely piled bricks concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and
several mines of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of
survivors from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently
invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the uncultivated
wildness of this region further by trees of privet-twigs from the garden
hedge and box from the garden borders. By these territories went
my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in the
oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic hills--one tunnel was three
volumes long--defended as occasion required by camps of paper tents
or brick blockhouses, and ending at last in a magnificently engineered
ascent to a fortress on the cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and
developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion and
now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or twelve. I
played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the retrospect far more
significantly than they did at the time. I played them in bursts, and
then forgot them for long periods; through the spring and summer I was
mostly out of doors, and school and classes caught me early. And in
the retrospect I see them all not only magnified and transfigured, but
fore-shortened and confused together. A clockwork railway, I seem to
remember, came and went; one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships
that, being keeled, would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the
floor; a detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over,
given me by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from
an aunt, that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public
buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and
therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass
cannon in the garden.
I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my
memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that
went gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they stooped
to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow growth of
whole days of civilised development. I still remember the hatred and
disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given warnings. Did I
disregard them, coarse red hands would descend, plucking garrisons
from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling them up in their wrong
boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and swords were broken, sweeping
the splendid curves of the Imperial Road into heaps of ruins, casting
the jungle growth of Zululand into the fire.
“Well, Master Dick,” the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, “you
ought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until you've
sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do it I will.”
And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and
swiping strokes of house-flannel.
That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear lady,
was something of a terror to this microcosm. She wore spring-sided
boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, with dull
bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that were very
destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial Road. She
was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me for a meal,
fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity! fetching me for a wash
and brush up, and she never seemed to understand anything whatever of
the political systems across which she came to me. Also she forbade all
toys on Sundays except the bricks for church-building and the soldiers
for church parade, or a Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark
mixed up with a wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know
whether a thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with
cannon, and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear
of God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of
ark rather elaborately done.
Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of the
pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen. You made
your beasts--which were all the ark lot really, provisionally conceived
as pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a central pen, from which
they went down a cardboard slide four at a time, and dropped most
satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-litter over some steep steps
to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah) strung a cotton loop round their
legs and sent them by pin hooks along a wire to a second slaughterman
with a chipped foot (formerly Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly,
converted them into Army sausage by means of a portion of the inside of
an old alarum clock.
My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore
bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my mother
disliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my little chair
and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable understanding and
sympathy.
It was he who gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most
of my ideas. “Here's some corrugated iron,” he would say, “suitable for
roofs and fencing,” and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled paper that
is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, “Dick, do you see the tiger
loose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your cattle ranch.” And I
would find a bright new lead tiger like a special creation at large in
the world, and demanding a hunting expedition and much elaborate effort
to get him safely housed in the city menagerie beside the captured
dragon crocodile, tamed now, and his key lost and the heart and spring
gone out of him.
And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the inestimable
blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood except those of
Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for himself and me from
the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and illustrated
histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war and one of Napier's expedition
to Abyssinia I read from end to end; Stanley and Livingstone, lives
of Wellington, Napoleon and Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from
which I derived conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has
taken years of adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we
had Wood's NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number
of unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I
think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's NEW
TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other informing
books bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also, with thousands
of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and one or two other
important works in the sitting-room. I was allowed to turn these over
and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays and other occasions of
exceptional cleanliness.
And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the
fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that fascinated
me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a pin.
2
My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and with
his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher, taking
a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under the old
Science and Art Department, and “visiting” various schools; and our
resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a hundred
pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three palatial but
structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead Station.
They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,
interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs
coal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect vindictively
devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so, he had
overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant would stay
in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional tolerance of
inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every storey in the
house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which would have been cool
and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs went steeply up, to end
at last in attics too inaccessible for occupation. The ceilings had vast
plaster cornices of classical design, fragments of which would sometimes
fall unexpectedly, and the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern
and much variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.
As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses at a
time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable tenants,
he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and devote the
rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to the incessant
necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of the repairing
himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which my mother would
not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated vegetables in a sketchy,
unpunctual and not always successful manner in the unoccupied gardens.
The three houses faced north, and the back of the one we occupied was
covered by a grape-vine that yielded, I remember, small green grapes
for pies in the spring, and imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable
autumns for the purposes of dessert. The grape-vine played an important
part in my life, for my father broke his neck while he was pruning it,
when I was thirteen.
My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not always
good ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster and one of
the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father had assisted
him in his school until increasing competition and diminishing
attendance had made it evident that the days of small private schools
kept by unqualified persons were numbered. Thereupon my father had
roused himself and had qualified as a science teacher under the Science
and Art Department, which in these days had charge of the scientific and
artistic education of the mass of the English population, and had thrown
himself into science teaching and the earning of government grants
therefor with great if transitory zeal and success.
I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic
time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married when my
father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw only the last
decadent phase of his educational career.
The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the
world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness and
generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive, more or
less completely digested into the Board of Education.
The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how many
of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and early manhood
have given place now to more scientific and efficient machinery. When
I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was ruled by a strange
body called a Local Board--it was the Age of Boards--and I still
remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast-table over
the liberation of London from the corrupt and devastating control of a
Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there were also School Boards; I
was already practically in politics before the London School Board was
absorbed by the spreading tentacles of the London County Council.
It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State to
remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within my
father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic people
were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of the sort.
When he was born, totally illiterate people who could neither read a
book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature, were to be found
everywhere in England; and great masses of the population were getting
no instruction at all. Only a few schools flourished upon the patronage
of exceptional parents; all over the country the old endowed grammar
schools were to be found sinking and dwindling; many of them had
closed altogether. In the new great centres of population multitudes of
children were sweated in the factories, darkly ignorant and wretched
and the under-equipped and under-staffed National and British schools,
supported by voluntary contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an
ineffectual fight against this festering darkness. It was a condition
of affairs clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount
of indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were
possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian
will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the
commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian
enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.
I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social
institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they should
present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust of government
in the Victorian days was far too great, and the general intelligence
far too low, to permit the State to go about the new business it was
taking up in a businesslike way, to train teachers, build and equip
schools, endow pedagogic research, and provide properly written
school-books. These things it was felt MUST be provided by individual
and local effort, and since it was manifest that it was individual
and local effort that were in default, it was reluctantly agreed to
stimulate them by money payments. The State set up a machinery of
examination both in Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and
payments, known technically as grants, were made in accordance with the
examination results attained, to such schools as Providence might see
fit to send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would
be established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,
inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of “Grant earning” was
created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.
In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but
Grant-earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far
as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the task
of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the most
part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also were teaching
similar classes to those they examined, it was feared that injustice
might be done. Year after year these eminent persons set questions
and employed subordinates to read and mark the increasing thousands of
answers that ensued, and having no doubt the national ideal of fairness
well developed in their minds, they were careful each year to re-read
the preceding papers before composing the current one, in order to see
what it was usual to ask. As a result of this, in the course of a
few years the recurrence and permutation of questions became almost
calculable, and since the practical object of the teaching was to teach
people not science, but how to write answers to these questions, the
industry of Grant-earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any
kind of genuine education whatever.
Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of the
age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science prevalent at
this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by making graduates in
arts and priests in the established church Science Teachers EX OFFICIO,
and leaving local and private enterprise to provide schools, diagrams,
books, material, according to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in
the district. Private enterprise made a particularly good thing of the
books. A number of competing firms of publishers sprang into existence
specialising in Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to
produce text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality
of knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty
subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and models
and instructions that should give precisely the method and gestures
esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book was written
in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the examiners, and test
questions extracted from papers set in former years were appended to
every chapter. By means of these last the teacher was able to train his
class to the very highest level of grant-earning efficiency, and very
naturally he cast all other methods of exposition aside. First he posed
his pupils with questions and then dictated model replies.
That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes as an
elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death, and it is
so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table, smothering a yawn
occasionally and giving out the infallible formulae to the industriously
scribbling class sitting in rows of desks before him. Occasionally he
would slide to his feet and go to a blackboard on an easel and draw on
that very slowly and deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the
class to copy in coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a
specimen or arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the
Institute in which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of
apparatus prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by
the Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with
maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.
But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in
systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to pieces.
He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it, because in the
first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen burner and good
material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second they were, in his
rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger the apparatus of
the Institute and even the lives of his students. Then thirdly, real
experiments involved washing up. And moreover they always turned out
wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant learner very seriously
and opened demoralising controversies. Quite early in life I acquired an
almost ineradicable sense of the unscientific perversity of Nature and
the impassable gulf that is fixed between systematic science and elusive
fact. I knew, for example, that in science, whether it be subject XII.,
Organic Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow
into a glass of lime-water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you
continue to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the
stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face and
painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And I knew,
too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a retort and
heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and may be collected
over water, whereas in real life if you do anything of the sort the
vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium chlorate descends
sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says “Oh! Damn!” with
astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady student in the back
seats gets up and leaves the room.
Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite understand
that ancient libertine refusing to co-operate in her own undoing. And I
can quite understand, too, my father's preference for what he called
an illustrative experiment, which was simply an arrangement of the
apparatus in front of the class with nothing whatever by way of
material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool, and then a slow luminous
description of just what you did put in it when you were so ill-advised
as to carry the affair beyond illustration, and just exactly what ought
anyhow to happen when you did. He had considerable powers of vivid
expression, so that in this way he could make us see all he described.
The class, freed from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this
still life without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw,
then my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard
to be copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any
exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as “empyreumatic”
or “botryoidal.”
Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once sticking
up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description, “Please, sir,
what is flocculent?”
“The precipitate is.”
“Yes, sir, but what does it mean?”
“Oh! flocculent!” said my father, “flocculent! Why--” he extended his
hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air. “Like
that,” he said.
I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment after
giving it. “As in a flock bed, you know,” he added and resumed his
discourse.
3
My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical
affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical
incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine
temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any human
being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest manner,
under the suggestion of books or papers or his own spontaneous
imagination, and as he had never been trained to do anything whatever
in his life properly, his futilities were extensive and thorough. At one
time he nearly gave up his classes for intensive culture, so enamoured
was he of its possibilities; the peculiar pungency of the manure he got,
in pursuit of a chemical theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory
memories for a lifetime. The intensive culture phase is very clear in my
memory; it came near the end of his career and when I was between eleven
and twelve. I was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions,
and assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that
wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up both
lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour alternating
with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And for weeks he
talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every meal.
A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a
thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to be watched; it does
not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its own.
Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to trouble mankind;
it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged and demoralised and
over-irritated garden. My father got at cross purposes with our two
patches at an early stage. Everything grew wrong from the first to last,
and if my father's manures intensified nothing else, they certainly
intensified the Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the night
before they were three inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight,
the only apparent result of a spraying of the potatoes was to develop
a PENCHANT in the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were
damaged by the catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back,
and all your cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its
occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme, because my
father always stopped work and went indoors if any one watched him.
His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome spirit of inquiry in
hardy natures.
In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding
string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the consequent
obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, and
particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and never finished by
which everything was to be watered at once by means of pieces of gutter
from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and particularly
obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the abolished hedge that he had
failed to destroy entirely either by axe or by fire, combined to give
the gardens under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly
appearance. He took steps towards the diversion of our house drain under
the influence of the Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped
in time. He hardly completed any of the operations he began; something
else became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the
Number 2 territory was never even dug up.
In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a man
less horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he had
launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out his
patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men after a
day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or social
organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He talked to me
of anything that interested him, regardless of my limitations. Then he
would begin to note the growth of the weeds. “This won't do,” he would
say and pull up a handful.
More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary. His
hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off in
his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would darken.
He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment. “CURSE these
weeds!” he would say from his heart. His discourse was at an end.
I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the
tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively enriched.
He would come in like a whirlwind. “This damned stuff all over me and
the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah! AAAAAAH!”
My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing
on such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in the
scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he sought.
“If you say such things--”
He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. “The towel!” he would
cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; “the towel! I'll
let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel! I'll give
up everything, I tell you--everything!”...
At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I was
in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it happened.
I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain,
shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and
slashing away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had
tied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half were
rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe in
both hands and slogged. Great wipes he made, and at each stroke he said,
“Take that!”
The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a
fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold tyranny,
the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After he
had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kicked
holes in two of our noblest marrows, flicked off the heads of half a row
of artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber
frame. Something of the awe of that moment returns to me as I write of
it.
“Well, my boy,” he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent
happiness, “I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like
reasonable beings. I've had enough of this”--his face was convulsed for
an instant with bitter resentment--“Pandering to cabbages.”
4
That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is
that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston and
nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, and the
other is that my father as he went along talked about himself, not so
much to me as to himself, and about life and what he had done with
it. He monologued so that at times he produced an effect of weird
world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at that time not
understanding many things that afterwards became plain to me. It is only
in recent years that I have discovered the pathos of that monologue; how
friendless my father was and uncompanioned in his thoughts and feelings,
and what a hunger he may have felt for the sympathy of the undeveloped
youngster who trotted by his side.
“I'm no gardener,” he said, “I'm no anything. Why the devil did I start
gardening?
“I suppose man was created to mind a garden... But the Fall let us out
of that! What was I created for? God! what was I created for?...
“Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me, you
know. I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about with life.
Mucked about with life.” He suddenly addressed himself to me, and for
an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered. “Whatever you do,
boy, whatever you do, make a Plan. Make a good Plan and stick to it.
Find out what life is about--I never have--and set yourself to do
whatever you ought to do. I admit it's a puzzle....
“Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco white
elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green--black and green.
Conferva and soot.... Property, they are!... Beware of Things, Dick,
beware of Things! Before you know where you are you are waiting on them
and minding them. They'll eat your life up. Eat up your hours and your
blood and energy! When those houses came to me, I ought to have
sold them--or fled the country. I ought to have cleared out.
Sarcophagi--eaters of men! Oh! the hours and days of work, the nights
of anxiety those vile houses have cost me! The painting! It worked up
my arms; it got all over me. I stank of it. It made me ill. It isn't
living--it's minding....
“Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this country all
cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all those villas we
passed just now and those potato patches and that tarred shanty and the
hedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it like a dog tied to a cart's
tail. Patching it and bothering about it. Bothering! Yapping at every
passer-by. Look at that notice-board! One rotten worried little beast
wants to keep us other rotten little beasts off HIS patch,--God knows
why! Look at the weeds in it. Look at the mended fence!... There's no
property worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend.
All these things. Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering
rubbish....
“I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go. I
ought to have made a better thing of life.
“I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my leg.
They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only began to
find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.
“If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, if
I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest....
“Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's a
cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU be
warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any one to
show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you make one. Get
education, get a good education. Fight your way to the top. It's your
only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no good at digging and property
minding. There isn't a neighbour in Bromstead won't be able to skin you
at suchlike games. You and I are the brainy unstable kind, topside or
nothing. And if ever those blithering houses come to you--don't have
'em. Give them away! Dynamite 'em--and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of
them for you if I can, Dick, but remember what I say.”...
So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, yet
exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road, with
resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and flinging out
clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of Bromstead as we passed
along them. That afternoon he hated Bromstead, from its foot-tiring
pebbles up. He had no illusions about Bromstead or himself. I have
the clearest impression of him in his garden-stained tweeds with a
deer-stalker hat on the back of his head and presently a pipe sometimes
between his teeth and sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became
diverted by his talk from his original exasperation....
This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with
many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at
different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at the
time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has become
the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't understand
the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me two very broad
ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them
to me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one a
sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the
human life that went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of
order and economy which he called variously Science and Civilisation,
and which, though I do not remember that he ever used that word, I
suppose many people nowadays would identify with Socialism,--as the
Fabians expound it.
He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, but
he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,--just as his
contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his age
and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of his time,
he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this Science was
coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning
and travailing in muddle for the want of it....
5
When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up
with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings and
paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece with that.
Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and something
of its history. It is the quality and history of a thousand places
round and about London, and round and about the other great centres of
population in the world. Indeed it is in a measure the quality of
the whole of this modern world from which we who have the statesman's
passion struggle to evolve, and dream still of evolving order.
First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years ago,
as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung out on
the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a social order
that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its own. At that
time its population numbered a little under two thousand people, mostly
engaged in agricultural work or in trades serving agriculture. There was
a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper
(who brewed his own beer); a veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop,
and two capacious inns. Round and about it were a number of pleasant
gentlemen's seats, whose owners went frequently to London town in their
coaches along the very tolerable high-road. The church was big enough
to hold the whole population, were people minded to go to church, and
indeed a large proportion did go, and all who married were married in
it, and everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried
at last in its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in the
place. It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community in
those days. There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle of the
town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much cheerful
merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a pack of
hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and the local
gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant cricket matches
for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement of the entire
population. It was very much the same sort of place that it had been for
three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van Winkle from 1550 returning
in 1750 would have found most of the old houses still as he had known
them, the same trades a little improved and differentiated one from the
other, the same roads rather more carefully tended, the Inns not very
much altered, the ancient familiar market-house. The occasional wheeled
traffic would have struck him as the most remarkable difference, next
perhaps to the swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses
and the protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish
church,--both from the material point of view very little things. A
Rip van Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater
changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of
the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses, the
stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed him, and
suchlike details. The place would have had the same boundaries, the same
broad essential features, would have been still itself in the way that
a man is still himself after he has “filled out” a little and grown a
longer beard and changed his clothes.
But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was
destined to alter the scale of every human affair.
That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to
improve material things. In another part of England ingenious people
were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metal
in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had hitherto been
unattainable. Without warning or preparation, increment involving
countless possibilities of further increment was coming to the strength
of horses and men. “Power,” all unsuspected, was flowing like a drug
into the veins of the social body.
Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had
calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost inadvertently,
people found themselves doing things that would have amazed their
ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles much more easily and
cheaply than they had ever done before, to make up roads and move things
about that had formerly been esteemed too heavy for locomotion, to join
woodwork with iron nails instead of wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts
of mechanical possibilities, to trade more freely and manufacture on a
larger scale, to send goods abroad in a wholesale and systematic way,
to bring back commodities from overseas, not simply spices and fine
commodities, but goods in bulk. The new influence spread to agriculture,
iron appliances replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic,
paper-making and printing increased and cheapened. Roofs of slate and
tile appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead
thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively enclosed,
and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover, only passable
by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the Dover Road, and was
presently the route first of one and then of several daily coaches.
The High Street was discovered to be too tortuous for these awakening
energies, and a new road cut off its worst contortions. Residential
villas appeared occupied by retired tradesmen and widows, who esteemed
the place healthy, and by others of a strange new unoccupied class of
people who had money invested in joint-stock enterprises. First one
and then several boys' boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from
London,--my grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to the
north-west, was making itself felt more and more.
But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first trickle
of the coming flood of mechanical power. Away in the north they were
casting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way to the
production of steel on a large scale, applying power in factories.
Bromstead had almost doubted in size again long before the railway came;
there was hardly any thatch left in the High Street, but instead were
houses with handsome brass-knockered front doors and several windows,
and shops with shop-fronts all of square glass panes, and the place was
lighted publicly now by oil lamps--previously only one flickering lamp
outside each of the coaching inns had broken the nocturnal darkness.
And there was talk, it long remained talk,--of gas. The gasworks came in
1834, and about that date my father's three houses must have been built
convenient for the London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of the
real suburban quality; they were let at first to City people still
engaged in business.
And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal; there
was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the east, and
the Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural placidities that
had formerly come to the very borders of the High Street were broken up
north, west and south, by new roads. This enterprising person and then
that began to “run up” houses, irrespective of every other enterprising
person who was doing the same thing. A Local Board came into existence,
and with much hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage
works. Rates became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance.
Several chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church
in commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the
residential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.
The population doubled again and doubled again, and became particularly
teeming in the prolific “working-class” district about the deep-rutted,
muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks, Blodgett's laundries,
and the railway goods-yard. Weekly properties, that is to say small
houses built by small property owners and let by the week, sprang up
also in the Cage Fields, and presently extended right up the London
Road. A single national school in an inconvenient situation set itself
inadequately to collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing,
grimy offspring of this dingy new population to read. The villages of
Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely four
miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar distensions
and proliferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect of locality or
community had gone from these places long before I was born; hardly any
one knew any one; there was no general meeting place any more, the old
fairs were just common nuisances haunted by gypsies, van showmen, Cheap
Jacks and London roughs, the churches were incapable of a quarter of the
population. One or two local papers of shameless veniality reported the
proceedings of the local Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen
who were interested in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet
“Bromstedian” as one expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in
the general mind a weak tradition of some local quality that embraced
us all. Then the parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and
an ambitious area with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead
Cemetery Company, and planted with suitably high-minded and sorrowful
varieties of conifer. A stonemason took one of the earlier villas with
a front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a supply
of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone, marble, and
granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in elaborate detail the
entire population of Bromstead as one found it in 1750.
The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was in
the full tide of building and growth from the first; the second railway
with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage followed when I was
ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are of digging and wheeling,
of woods invaded by building, roads gashed open and littered with iron
pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of men peeped at and seen toiling
away deep down in excavations, of hedges broken down and replaced by
planks, of wheelbarrows and builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and
swallowed up by drain-pipes. Big trees, and especially elms, cleared
of undergrowth and left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar
tattered dinginess rather in the quality of needy widow women who have
seen happier days.
The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream. It came
into my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden, splashing
brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a mill. (Above the
weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing in splendid clumps,
and beyond that, pampas grass, yellow and crimson spikes of hollyhock,
and blue suggestions of wonderland.) From the pool at the foot of
this initial cascade it flowed in a leisurely fashion beside a
footpath,--there were two pretty thatched cottages on the left, and here
were ducks, and there were willows on the right,--and so came to where
great trees grew on high banks on either hand and bowed closer, and at
last met overhead. This part was difficult to reach because of an old
fence, but a little boy might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by
wading. Either I have actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has
described them so accurately to me that he inserted them into my
memory. I remember them there anyhow. Most of that overhung part I never
penetrated at all, but followed the field path with my mother and met
the stream again, where beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows.
The Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now between
steep banks, and now with wide shallows at the bends where the cattle
waded and drank. Yellow and purple loose-strife and ordinary rushes grew
in clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow. On rare occasions
of rapture one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers at the water's
edge. The deep places were rich with tangled weeds, and in them fishes
lurked--to me they were big fishes--water-boatmen and water-beetles
traversed the calm surface of these still deeps; in one pool were yellow
lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly places hovering fleets of
small fry basked in the sunshine--to vanish in a flash at one's shadow.
In one place, too, were Rapids, where the stream woke with a start from
a dreamless brooding into foaming panic and babbled and hastened. Well
do I remember that half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades
have their reference to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before we
left Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.
The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new drainage
works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first acquainted
with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do with
that--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at first
did not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy might walk
dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon that came the
pegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's meadows, being no
longer in fear of floods, were now to be slashed out into parallelograms
of untidy road, and built upon with rows of working-class cottages. The
roads came,--horribly; the houses followed. They seemed to rise in
the night. People moved into them as soon as the roofs were on, mostly
workmen and their young wives, and already in a year some of these raw
houses stood empty again from defaulting tenants, with windows broken
and wood-work warping and rotting. The Ravensbrook became a dump for
old iron, rusty cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river
only when unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of
surface water....
That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of Bromstead.
The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative life; that way
had always been my first choice in all my walks with my mother, and its
rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it indicative of all the
other things that had happened just before my time, or were still, at a
less dramatic pace, happening. I realised that building was the enemy.
I began to understand why in every direction out of Bromstead one walked
past scaffold-poles into litter, why fragments of broken brick and
cinder mingled in every path, and the significance of the universal
notice-boards, either white and new or a year old and torn and battered,
promising sites, proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and
intimidating passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of
way.
It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time and
what I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that even
in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and growing
disorder. The serene rhythms of the old established agriculture, I see
now, were everywhere being replaced by cultivation under notice and
snatch crops; hedges ceased to be repaired, and were replaced by cheap
iron railings or chunks of corrugated iron; more and more hoardings
sprang up, and contributed more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy
paper scraps that flew before the wind and overspread the country.
The outskirts of Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that
led nowhere, that ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't
remember barbed wire in those days; I think the Zeitgeist did not
produce that until later), and in trespass boards that used vehement
language. Broken glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded. Cheap
glass, cheap tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushed
upon a world quite unprepared to dispose of these blessings when the
fulness of enjoyment was past.
I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the
replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient balance,
by a new order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's intimations,
it was manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude of incoordinated
fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive than the last, and none
of them ever really worked out to a ripe and satisfactory completion.
Each left a legacy of products, houses, humanity, or what not, in its
wake. It was a sort of progress that had bolted; it was change out of
hand, and going at an unprecedented pace nowhere in particular.
No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a hasty,
trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and
wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things are
necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline themselves to learn
and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms the folly
and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods.
The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some of them very
impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come to mankind, but
of permanent achievement, what will our descendants cherish? It is hard
to estimate what grains of precious metal may not be found in a mud
torrent of human production on so large a scale, but will any one, a
hundred years from now, consent to live in the houses the Victorians
built, travel by their roads or railways, value the furnishings they
made to live among or esteem, except for curious or historical reasons,
their prevalent art and the clipped and limited literature that
satisfied their souls?
That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and
undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great
new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;
stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one
possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my
father's exploitation of his villa gardens on the wholesale level. The
whole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last--it is a year
ago now--is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an immense
clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the builders'
roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old fashion; the
various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless contradiction, if
anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle slums, and public-house
and tin tabernacle glower at one another across the cat-haunted lot that
intervenes. Roper's meadows are now quite frankly a slum; back doors and
sculleries gape towards the railway, their yards are hung with tattered
washing unashamed; and there seem to be more boards by the railway every
time I pass, advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and
suchlike solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite
left in them....
Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted if
it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.
6
Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these give
the quality of all my Bromstead memories. The crowning one of them all
rises to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring sunshine of
that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes and aggressive
cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother returned from church to
find my father dead. He had been pruning the grape vine. He had
never had a ladder long enough to reach the sill of the third-floor
windows--at house-painting times he had borrowed one from the plumber
who mixed his paint--and he had in his own happy-go-lucky way contrived
a combination of the garden fruit ladder with a battered kitchen table
that served all sorts of odd purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up
this arrangement by means of the garden roller, and the roller had at
the critical moment--rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with
his head queerly bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe,
an expression of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod
with a tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had
been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him hear,
and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into the garden
and so discovered him.
“Arthur!” I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in her
voice, “What are you doing there? Arthur! And--SUNDAY!”
I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her voice
roused me. She stood as if she could not go near him. He had always
puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another enigma.
Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of him, ran a
dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and clasped her
ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly, too astonished for
feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.
The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. “Mother!” I cried, pale to
the depths of my spirit, “IS HE DEAD?”
I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that
glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into the
tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an immense
fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my childish world.
My father was lying dead before my eyes.... I perceived that my mother
was helpless and that things must be done.
“Mother!” I said, “we must get Doctor Beaseley,--and carry him indoors.”