IF OUR THURSWELL IS A TYPICAL English village, assuredly Mallingham is
a typical country town, only inclining to the picturesque side rather
than the sordid. Like most picturesque towns, it is more highly
appreciated by strangers than by its own inhabitants. Its one long
street crawls along a ridge of the Downs, and from the lower level
of the road that skirts this ridge and meanders among fat farms and
luscious meadows, with an old Norman church here and there embowered in
immemorial elms and granges mentioned in _Domesday Book_, steep lanes
of old houses climb to the business street. It is really impossible to
reach the town without a climb of some sort; and this fact, which made
the site an ideal one, from the standpoint of the mediaeval founders of
its walls and gates, remnants of which may yet be discovered by any one
searching for them in a true archaeological spirit, causes a good deal
of grumbling among the residents on both levels, who have to face many
climbs in the course of an ordinary day's work. But motoring strangers,
who pass through the town by the hundred every day, travelling between
the two fashionable coast resorts, glance down the narrow lanes and say,
“How simply lovely!” or “Doesn't it remind you of Nuremberg?” Perhaps
it does remind them of Nuremberg--I have known people who affected to
be reminded of Sorrento at Brighton--but for my part Mallingham only
reminds me of an English country town, the convenient centre for a
ten-mile area of villages. Enough business is done in its properly
called High Street to allow of two banks keeping their doors open, and
of half a dozen shopkeepers making modest fortunes in the course of a
hundred years or so, and retiring from their half-timbered places of
business to the avenue of red brick villas with well fires and radiators
which an enterprising “developer” of one of the manors perceived to be
a long-felt want. But the shops go on from generation to generation with
the old names over the front, and in many cases with the family of the
new generation living on the premises in the good old way. Only in this
sense, however, may the tradesmen be said to be “above their business”;
there is not the least disposition on the part of any of them to appear
anything beyond what they are, for the simple reason that they do not
think that the world holds anything better than a Mallingham tradesman.
And, indeed, I am not sure that the world holds anything less ambitious.
The aspirations of most of them do not go beyond the acquiring of a
plate-glass frontage. Occasionally this dream literally crystallises,
and when the crates are known to be actually awaiting delivery at
the Goods Station, the “consignee” of the waybill is pointed out to
strangers by the simple casement shopkeepers with bated breath and an
occasional break in the voice. It is understood that the plate-glass
front can only be achieved by a limited number of traders, and for years
it was accounted a gross piece of presumption for any one whose lineage
as a shopkeeper could not be traced through at least three generations
of bill-heads to make a move in the direction of a “front”; but just
before last Christmas a bolt from the blue fell upon the astonished
town, for the two demure old ladies who kept a small millinery shop
(with gloves and table linen at the farther end) put up bills on
their small latticed window announcing a cheap sale in consequence of
“impending alterations.” Now that particular shop front had remained
unchanged for certainly a hundred and fifty years--perhaps two hundred
and fifty years--and the two old maiden ladies who had looked after it
for close upon half a century seemed the most conservative of persons,
so it was taken for granted that the alterations which were “impending”
had reference only to the affixing of a new sun-blind in good time for
the summer, or perhaps an outside lamp to make the winter nights more
cheerful.
After a considerable amount of discussion on the subject an informal
deputation waited upon the ladies to obtain information on a matter
which, it was understood, affected the well-being of the whole
community, and which was approaching a stage when a specific
pronouncement one way or another was absolutely necessary.
Then it was that the truth was revealed. The maiden ladies had,
they confessed, been surreptitiously discussing the putting in of a
plate-glass front, and they had come to the conclusion that as they
were both old and life at best was uncertain, they should not any longer
procrastinate the carrying out of a scheme which the growth of the town
and its increasing importance fully warranted, they thought.
It took just four days to fix the new front in its place; but it was the
topic of the town for months, and even now you will see an occasional
group of town people discussing the innovation and wondering what things
are coming to.
The dimensions of the topic were, as I ascertained for my own
satisfaction, nine feet broad by seven feet high. This was the _premier
pas_. It led to the extravagance of a sunk letter sign, picked out
in gold, an outside lamp, and a spring sun-blind, all of the most
conventional pattern, and all to my mind in the condition of the “party
in a parlour” in the Wordsworth parody. In short, a charming old house
with many features of interest was transformed into a foolish hybrid
thing--a single sheet of plate-glass on the ground floor, beneath
two pairs of small cottage casements with delightful stone eaves. So
prosperity turns out the picturesque or, at least, relegates it to the
basement, and so a street with all the charm of past centuries clinging
to it is fast becoming commonplace, and strangers driving through it
laugh at the feeble attempts to give the commercial air of Harrods to
a row of cottages--about as sensible a proceeding as it would be to
attempt to assimilate the façade of Hampton Court with that of Hampton's
in Pall Mall.
Happily there are still some sixteenth-century eaves left and also some
eighteenth-century bow windows--the gentle curved bow of the
eighteenth century, not the detestable obtuse-angle things of the
mid-nineteenth--and happily the spirit of commercial enterprise does
not pervade the entire community. Several of the houses that have been
turned into shops contain admirable chimneypieces and panelled rooms,
with an occasional fire-back and basket grate. It seems, too, that there
must have lived in the place a century or so ago a master workman with a
great fancy for decorating chimneypieces after the style of Adam; for
in many of the rooms of sixteenth-century houses may be found quite good
examples of the early style of Robert Adam. In one house there is a fine
parlour decorated throughout in this way.