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.