Edwin came steeply out of the cinder-strewn back streets by Woodisun
Bank [hill] into Duck Square, nearly at the junction of Trafalgar Road
and Wedgwood Street. A few yards down Woodisun Bank, cocks and hens
were scurrying, with necks horizontal, from all quarters, and were even
flying, to the call of a little old woman who threw grain from the top
step of her porch. On the level of the narrow pavement stood an immense
constable, clad in white trousers, with a gun under his arm for the
killing of mad dogs; he was talking to the woman, and their two heads
were exactly at the same height. On a pair of small double gates near
the old woman's cottage were painted the words, "Steam Printing Works.
No admittance except on business." And from as far as Duck Square could
be heard the puff-puff which proved the use of steam in this works to
which idlers and mere pleasure-seekers were forbidden access.
Duck Square was one of the oldest, if the least imposing, of all the
public places in Bursley. It had no traffic across it, being only a
sloping rectangle, like a vacant lot, with Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood
Street for its exterior sides, and no outlet on its inner sides. The
buildings on those inner sides were low and humble and, as it were,
withdrawn from the world, the chief of them being the ancient Duck Inn,
where the hand-bell ringers used to meet. But Duck Square looked out
upon the very birth of Trafalgar Road, that wide, straight thoroughfare,
whose name dates it, which had been invented, in the lifetime of a few
then living, to unite Bursley with Hanbridge. It also looked out upon
the birth of several old pack-horse roads which Trafalgar Road had
supplanted. One of these was Woodisun Bank, that wound slowly up hill
and down dale, apparently always choosing the longest and hardest route,
to Hanbridge; and another was Aboukir Street, formerly known as Warm
Lane, that reached Hanbridge in a manner equally difficult and
unhurried. At the junction of Trafalgar Road and Aboukir Street stood
the Dragon Hotel, once the great posting-house of the town, from which
all roads started. Duck Square had watched coaches and waggons stop at
and start from the Dragon Hotel for hundreds of years. It had seen the
Dragon rebuilt in brick and stone, with fine bay windows on each storey,
in early Georgian times, and it had seen even the new structure become
old and assume the dignity of age. Duck Square could remember strings
of pack-mules driven by women, `trapesing' in zigzags down Woodisun Bank
and Warm Lane, and occasionally falling, with awful smashes of the
crockery they carried, in the deep, slippery, scarce passable mire of
the first slants into the valley. Duck Square had witnessed the slow
declension of these roads into mere streets, and slum streets at that,
and the death of all mules, and the disappearance of all coaches and all
neighing and prancing and whipcracking romance; while Trafalgar Road,
simply because it was straight and broad and easily graded, flourished
with toll-bars and a couple of pair-horsed trams that ran on lines. And
many people were proud of those cushioned trams; but perhaps they had
never known that coach-drivers used to tell each other about the state
of the turn at the bottom of Warm Lane (since absurdly renamed in honour
of an Egyptian battle), and that Woodisun Bank (now unnoticed save by
doubtful characters, policemen, and schoolboys) was once regularly
`taken' by four horses at a canter. The history of human manners is
crunched and embedded in the very macadam of that part of the borough,
and the burgesses unheedingly tread it down every day and talk gloomily
about the ugly smoky prose of industrial manufacture. And yet the
Dragon Hotel, safely surviving all revolutions by the mighty virtue and
attraction of ale, stands before them to remind them of the
interestingness of existence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------