by H. G. Wells
wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, "Take that!"
The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a
fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold
tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable
aristocrats. After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned
for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows,
flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe
with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame. Something of the awe
of that moment returns to me as I write of it.
Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent
happiness, "I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like
reasonable beings. I've had enough of this"-his face was convulsed
for an instant with bitter resentment-" Pandering to cabbages."
4
That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is
that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston
and nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green,
and the other is that my father as he went along talked about
himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life and what he
had done with it. He monologued so that at times he produced an
effect of weird world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at
that time not upderstanding many things that afterwards became plain
to me. It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos
of that monologue; how friendless my father was and uncompanioned in
his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have felt for
the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who trotted by his side.
"I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything. Why the devil did I
start gardening?
"I suppose man was created to mind a garden… But the Fall let
us out of that! What was I created for? God! what was I created
for?…
"Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me,
you know. I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about
with life. Mucked about with life." He suddenly addressed himself
to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered.
"Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan. Make a good
Plan and stick to it. Find out what life is about-I never have-
and set yourself to do whatever you ought to do. I admit it's a
puzzle…
"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco white
elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green-black and
green. Conferva and soot… Property, they are!… Beware
of Things, Dick, beware of Things! Before you know where you are
you are waiting on them and minding them. They'll eat your life up.
Eat up your hours and your blood and energy! When those houses came
to me, I ought to have sold them-or fled the country. I ought to
have cleared out. Sarcophagi-eaters of men! Oh! the hours and
days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile houses have cost me!
The painting! It worked up my arms; it got all over me. I stank of
it. It made me ill. It isn't living-it's minding…
"Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this
country all cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all
those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that
tarred shanty and the hedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it
like a dog tied to a cart's tail. Patching it and bothering about
it. Bothering! Yapping at every passer-by. Look at that notice-
board! One rotten worried little beast wants to keep us other
rotten little beasts off HIS patch,-God knows why! Look at the
weeds in it. Look at the mended fence!… There's no property
worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend. All
these things. Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering
rubbish…
"I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go.
I ought to have made a better thing of life.
"I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my
leg. They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only
began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.
"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training,
if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest…
"Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's
a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU
be warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any
one to show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you
make one. Get education, get a good education. Fight your way to
the top. It's your only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no
good at digging and property minding. There isn't a neighbour in
Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games. You and I
are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing. And if ever those
blithering houses come to you-don't have 'em. Give them away!
Dynamite 'em-and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of them for you if
I can, Dick, but remember what I say."…
So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words,
yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road,
with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and
flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of
Bromstead as we passed along them. That afternoon he hated
Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up. He had no illusions
about Bromstead or himself. I have the clearest impression of him
in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of
his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and
sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his
talk from his original exasperation…
This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with
many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at
different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at
the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has
become the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't
understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me
two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with
it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained
fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion
and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about
us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he
called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do
not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people
nowadays would identify with Socialism,-as the Fabians expound it.
He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand,
but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,-just as his
contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing-he belonged to his
age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of
his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this
Sci
ence was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a
world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it…
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 peopl
e 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