LYNN

Every man that lands in Lynn feels all through him the antiquity and the

call of the town; but especially if he comes, as I came in with another

man in springtime, from the miles and miles of emptiness and miles of

bending grass and the shouting of the wind. After that morning, in which

one had been a little point on an immense plane, with the gale not only

above one, as it commonly is, but all around one as it is at sea; and

after having steeped one's mind in the peculiar loneliness which haunts

a stretch of ill-defined and wasted shore, the narrow, varied, and

unordered streets of the port enhance the creations of man and emphasise

his presence.

Words so few are necessarily obscure. Let me expand them. I mean that

the unexpected turning of the ways in such a port is perpetually

revealing something new; that the little spaces frame, as it were, each

unexpected sight: thus at the end of a street one will catch a patch of

the Fens beyond the river, a great moving sail, a cloud, or the

sculptured corner of an excellent house.

The same history also that permitted continual encroachment upon the

public thoroughfares and that built up a gradual High Street upon the

line of some cow-track leading from the fields to the ferry, the spirit

that everywhere permitted the powerful or the cunning to withstand

authority--that history (which is the history of all our little English

towns) has endowed Lynn with an endless diversity.

It is not only that the separate things in such towns are delightful,

nor only that one comes upon them suddenly, but also that these separate

things are so many. They have characters as men have. There is nothing

of that repetition which must accompany the love of order and the

presence of strong laws. The similar insistent forms which go with a

strong civilisation, as they give it majesty, so they give it also

gloom, and a heavy feeling of finality: these are quite lacking here in

England, where the poor have for so long submitted to the domination of

the rich, and the rich have dreaded and refused a central government.

Everything that goes with the power of individuals has added peculiarity

and meaning to all the stones of Lynn. Moreover, a quality whose absence

all men now deplore was once higher in England than anywhere else, save,

perhaps, in the northern Italian hills. I mean ownership, and what comes

from ownership--the love of home.

You can see the past effect of ownership and individuality in Lynn as

clearly as you can catch affection or menace in a human voice. The

outward expression is most manifest, and to pass in and out along the

lanes in front of the old houses inspires in one precisely those

emotions which are aroused by a human crowd.

All the roofs of Lynn and all its pavements are worthy (as though they

were living beings) of individual names.

Along the river shore, from the race of the ebb that had so nearly

drowned me many years before, I watched the walls that mark the edge of

the town against the Ouse, and especially that group towards which the

ferry-boat was struggling against the eddy and tumble of the tide.

They were walls of every age, not high, brick of a dozen harmonious

tones, with the accidents, corners, and breaches of perhaps seven

hundred years. Beyond, to the left, down the river, stood the masts in

the new docks that were built to preserve the trade of this difficult

port. Up-river, great new works of I know not what kind stood like a

bastion against the plain; and in between ran these oldest bits of Lynn,

somnolescent and refreshing--permanent.

The lanes up from the Ouse when I landed I found to be of a slow and

natural growth, with that slight bend to them that comes, I believe,

from the drying of fishing-nets. For it is said that courts of this

kind grew up in our sea-towns all round our eastern and the southern

coast in such a manner. It happened thus.

The town would begin upon the highest of the bank, for it was flatter

for building, drier and easier to defend than that part next to the

water. Down from the town to the shore the fishermen would lay out their

nets to dry. How nets look when they are so laid, their narrowness and

the curve they take, everybody knows. Then on the spaces between the

nets shanties would be built, or old boats turned upside down for

shelter, so that the curing of fish and the boiling of tar and the

serving and parcelling of ropes could be done under cover. Then as the

number of people grew, the squatters' land got value, and houses were

raised (you will find many small freeholds in such rows to this day),

but the lines of the net remained in the alley-ways between the houses.

All this I was once told by an old man who helped me to take my boat

down Breydon. He wore trousers of a brick red, and the stuff of them as

thick as boards, and had on also a very thick jersey and a cap of fur.

He was shaved upon his lips and chin, but all round the rest of his face

was a beard. He smoked a tiny pipe, quite black, and upon matters within

his own experience he was a great liar; but upon matters of tradition I

was willing to believe him.

Within the town, when I had gained it from that lane which has been the

ferry-lane, I suppose, since the ferry began, age and distinction were

everywhere.

Where else, thought I, in England could you say that nine years would

make no change? Whether, indeed, the Globe had that same wine of the

nineties I could not tell, for the hour was not congenial to wine; but

if it has some store of its Burgundy left from those days it must be

better still by now, for Burgundy wine takes nine years to mature, for

nine years remains in the plenitude of its powers, and for nine years

more declines into an honourable age; and this is also true of claret,

but in claret it goes by sevens.

* * * * *

The open square of the town, which one looks at from the Globe, gives

one a mingled pleasure of reminiscence and discovery. It breaks on one

abruptly. It is as wide as the pasture field, and all the houses are

ample and largely founded. Indeed, throughout this country,

elbow-room--the sense that there is space enough and to spare in such

flats and under an open sky--has filled the minds of builders. You may

see it in all the inland towns of the Fens; and one found it again here

upon the further bank, upon the edge of the Fens; for though Lynn is

just off the Fens, yet it looks upon their horizon and their sky, and

belongs to them in spirit.

In this large and comfortable square a very steadfast and most

considerable English bank is to be discovered. It is of honest brown

brick! its architecture is of the plainest; its appearance is such that

its credit could never fail, and that the house alone by its presence

could conduct a dignified business for ever. The rooms in it are so many

and so great that the owners of such a bank (having become princes by

its success) could inhabit them with a majesty worthy of their new

title. But who lives above his shop since Richardson died? And did old

Richardson? Lord knows!... Anyhow, the bank is glorious, and it is but

one of the fifty houses that I saw in Lynn.

Thus, in the same street as the Globe, was a façade of stone. If it was

Georgian, it was very early Georgian, for it was relieved with ornaments

of a delicate and accurate sort, and the proportions were exactly

satisfying to the eye that looked on it. The stone also was of that kind

(Portland stone, I think) which goes black and white with age, and which

is better suited than any other to the English climate.

In another house near the church I saw a roof that might have been a

roof for a town. It covered the living part and the stables, and the

outhouse and the brewhouse, and the barns, and for all I know the

pig-pens and the pigeons' as well. It was a benediction of a roof--a

roof traditional, a roof patriarchal, a roof customary, a roof of

permanence and unity, a roof that physically sheltered and spiritually

sustained, a roof majestic, a roof eternal. In a word, it was a roof

catholic.

And what, thought I, is paid yearly in this town for such a roof as

that? I do not know; but I know of another roof at Goudhurst, in Kent,

which would have cost me less than £100 a year, only I could not get it

for love or money.

Then is also in Lynn a Custom House not very English, but very

beautiful. The faces carved upon it were so vivid that I could not but

believe them to have been carved in the Netherlands, and from this

Custom House looks down the pinched, unhappy face of that narrow

gentleman whom the great families destroyed--James II.

There is also in Lynn what I did not know was to be seen out of

Sussex--a Tudor building of chipped flints, and on it the mouldering

arms of Elizabeth.

The last Gothic of this Bishop's borough which the King seized from the

Church clings to chance houses in little carven masks and occasional

ogives: there is everywhere a feast for whatever in the mind is curious,

searching, and reverent, and over the town, as over all the failing

ports of our silting eastern seaboard, hangs the air of a great past

time, the influence of the Baltic and the Lowlands.

* * * * *

For these ancient places do not change, they permit themselves to stand

apart and to repose and--by paying that price--almost alone of all

things in England they preserve some historic continuity, and satisfy

the memories in one's blood.

* * * * *

So having come round to the Ouse again, and to the edge of the Fens at

Lynn, I went off at random whither next it pleased me to go.