east, and the GreatGrowth 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 intoexistence, 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, wereexperiencing similar

distensions and proliferations, andgrew out to meet us. Alleffect

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

was born; hardly any oneknew any one; there was no general meeting

<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>