THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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 fearfulsmell 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 thatchcd

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 exploitahon 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.