from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with

a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged

into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was

otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt

houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's

life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge within

sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace.

Then he retired in a mood ofgood-natured contempt to his native

habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and

interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimateknowledge

of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town

and outskirts of Bromstead.

It was a district of very much the samecharacter, but it was more

completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were

the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges

and trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's

notice-board, the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal

Palace grounds cut off a large part of my walking radius to the west

with impassable fences and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it

added to the ordinary spectacle of meteorology a great variety of

gratuitous fireworks which banged and flared away of a night after

supper and drew me abroad tosee them better. Such walks as I took,

to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham and Greenwich, impressed upon me

the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs; mile after

mile one went, between houses, villas, rows of cottages, streets of

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