H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

bulk. The new influencespread 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 awakeningenergies, 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 feltmore and more.

But this was only the beginning of the growthperiod, 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 doubtedin 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 Growthhad 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 experiencingsimilar

distensions and proliferations, and grewout to meet us. All effect

of locality or community had gone from these places long before I

was born; hardly any one knewany 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 minda

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 growthfrom 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 memoriesare

of digging and wheeling, of woods invaded by building, roads gashed

open and littered with iron pipes amidst a fearful smellof gas, of

men peeped at and seentoiling 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

happierdays.

The Ravensbrook of my earlier memorieswas 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 grewon 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 seenkingfishers 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 grewin clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow. On

rare occasions of rapture one might seea rat cleaning his whiskers

at the water's edge. The deep places were rich with tangled weeds,