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.
