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