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,