Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (640 page)

You have to attend to yourself even more particularly than when you are in a motor-car; you have only half a horizon — the half that is in front of you. You are nearer the dust when there is dust, or nearer the mud. Transition from country to town becomes rather wearisome; you think a good deal in miles. London manifests itself slowly with high-banked and gravelled footpaths, with those same blackened tree trunks, in a certain coarseness of the grass, in houses of call that you feel uninclined to call at. Dogcarts and governess cars begin to look a little out of place, indefinably, you don’t know why. And suddenly you meet a ‘bus.

I don’t know whether it is to me alone that a ‘bus running between hedgerows seems forlorn and incongruous. They
“
link up” all sorts of outlying villages — Mitcham with Tooting, all sorts of hamlets with Kingston-on-Thames, Islington with I don’t quite know where. There is a network of what are called ‘bus-routes all over England, but these are mostly carrier’s carts. Some have tarpaulin hoods and go at a walk, others look like the station omnibuses of country hotels. Their existence is largely unsuspected, yet it is possible to go from Lewes to York by changing from link to link in market towns, or from Canterbury to Sydenham.

But the just-outside-London ‘bus carries no parcels. It is, as a rule, bright green, and has a brilliant orange knifeboard atop. It goes at a good pace, and it is the sign that you have reached the sphere of influence of the very outer suburbs. I at least have never entered London by road without meeting or passing one of them.

They are due to the enterprise of large job masters near the great tram and London omnibus termini; they are the signs of London’s reaching out its arms still further; they are really the pioneers. In older days they started from Whitehall, from the Bank, from the Borough, and were called Short Stages. As real London spreads they cease to pay; they travel farther afield, and their place is taken by our municipal services or by those of the larger trusts.

It is a long time since I have come into London on foot, so long that I have forgotten what it feels like. Indeed, I fancy that the proceeding is no longer modern, and is in consequence illegitimate to my purpose. Some tramps do it still, I suppose, and the gipsies who walk beside basket caravans. These, we may say, are as much the country stretching into the suburbs as the ‘buses are the town stretching out. It is not very usual to meet them in inner London, though I have seen two or three at a time, with their chimneys smoking, entangled in the centre of the Piccadilly ‘buses themselves. They were crossing London thus directly in order to get as soon as possible from some horse fair in Berkshire to another in North Kent — Rochester pleasure fair, I think, because it was towards the end of May. But except when there is some such reason for haste, these caravans rarely cross London. They circle it by the roads just inside the suburbs. Only yesterday, about six miles from Whitehall, I passed twice the mouth of a dingy and sinister passage of small eighteenth century houses. It was called Angel Court.

Fifty years ago it was in the fields, now its entry was between a large modern public house and a large modern pawnshop. I glanced down it, walking outwards; it was empty, silent and sordid. On my return there were in it four or five dark men with heavy, brass-bound whips, eight or nine dark women, and several children with black or red heads. In four or five of the small new streets that ran at right angles to my road there were caravans covered with basket chairs, osier flower-stands, wicker baskets; women were holding these things up in front of the lace curtains of sitting-room windows.

These people are not mere picturesque survivals; their number increases day by day as poorer men find the hurry of modern life too great; but I cannot claim to have entered London in a pikey’s cart. I fancy, however, that looking at things through the small square of a back window, being at home in the middle of strange things, the sense too of being very aloof from the rest of the world must make one’s point of view rather a special one. One would become more or less of a foreign observer.

That attitude, backed up by that sense of being at home, is the worst that one could assume; it kills even tolerance for the habits of others. It is the reason why the days of most rapid travelling are the days of most frequent misunderstandings between the races of mankind. Your foreigner, reaching his London in a Pullman car, has been during his whole journey in an hotel, very much like one of his own hotels, not very much unlike his own home. He stepped into it in St. Petersburg an arrogant Tartar or a wily Slav; he steps down from it in the dim light of Charing Cross. He has gone through none of the processes of travel, none of his edges have been rubbed off, he is not necessarily the best type of Russian. He is quite ready to kick a porter and be cursed for it. He dislikes the place he has come to, and records his hasty impressions in letters home that may become so many international causes of misunderstanding.

In the slower days it was different. He was sent abroad because he was the best type of his race, or he came because he was a fine and adventurous spirit. He came from Moscow on sledges, in travelling carriages, on foot, by ship to Hull, overland to London. He had plenty of preparation, plenty of hardship to rub the angles down, and he was very glad to reach his journey’s end. He expected to find savages, he found amiable and civilised white men; he reported well of the place he had reached. If an ambassador, he was polished, cosmopolitan, and pleasing; if an adventurer, he was a fine spirit. He had all sorts of tales to tell of escapes, of strange things seen by the way. He became a delightful person; he was full of deference for local customs, because his life or his livelihood depended on his ability to please. (I am thinking of the evidence given at the trial of Count Konigsmarck in London by a crowd of Swedish, Russian, and Bohemian soldiers, stable-boys and hangers on. Or one may evidence Casanova, who was pleased and pleased himself in London; or you may read in Mr. Round’s “Commune of London” how great a part in the twelfth century foreign merchants, cut off from their own lands, played in exacting from the Angevin kings the liberty of London herself.)

It was the same with those whom London sent out. The few — the gentlemen and the merchant-adventurers — went, say, to the Spice Islands. The hardships of a long voyage, the great mysteries of seas and skies, chastened what of their souls was insular. They went among strange peoples with minds ready to be delighted. They sought, perhaps, nothing more romantic than pepper, but for their lives’ sakes they respected local traditions, and were ready to kneel with their faces to the ground when a Soldan went past. They had left their homes so far behind them.

And this, indeed, is the “defect of the quality” of rapid travel. The Londoner abroad is no longer sought after, fêted, a messenger of the goodness of his race, as were Congreve, Chesterfield, Gibbon, and, in another way, Richardson. Nowadays in the flood of him he has become the tweed-suited, long-toothed being of caricatures. The defect of the quality, because the traveller now, like the gipsy, takes his home and his home-spirit so much with him. And the one and the other are apt to find that every man’s hand is against him.

Yet if that be the defect, the product of the quality of rapid transit is London itself. France has its Ministry of Roads and Bridges, and that is probably why Paris is not France: we have none, and London is England. It began by London’s settling on the best placed highway in Europe, and England is still very much tied to the Thames. But France is little dependent on the Seine. Her excellent roads have in times past acted as the great decentralisers; Paris has been merely the administrative city. In England administration has remained with fair constancy at Westminster, near enough to the centre of the country. Wealth has always come into England by the Thames at London. At any rate in later centuries, the tendency has been for the Administration to settle near the centres of wealth1, and the combined attractions have made the tract of marsh and flat ground in the lower basin of the river the centre of the Arts, of the Industries, of the Recreations and of the moral “tone,” not for England alone but for wider regions of the earth.

(1 This tendency was always observable in English history. It became, however, most observable with the eighteenth century. Before then, as in the days of John or during the wars of the Roses, to lose London was not to lose the country. Henry VII indeed held London, but to the end of his reign had practically no administrative power over England at large, and until quite late Henry VIII was powerless, save in the Home Counties. Parliaments, too, were held wherever the Kings might happen to be in force. But already with the Stewarts to lose London was to lose England. It was so with Charles I., and so with James II. And the last chance of the Pretender’s vanished with the establishment of the National Debt. The Chevalier could get no adherents in England, largely because the wealthy classes feared that he would repudiate. That in fact was the personal influence of London wealth on the country at large. And from that day forth it has seemed more and more impossible that a parliament should be held anywhere but in London.)

The roads into London have always been the crucial matter. They remain both the “question” and the cause of that question. The first parliament of the twentieth century that might have devoted all its deliberation to the internal affairs of the country opened in 1903. The first question it discussed was that of Housing in London.

The question is not merely topical to the first years of the twentieth century; it has been the sempiternal question, it will remain unsolved until London and the country begin to fall into decay. It is, in fact, the “old” question, and just as to-day the alternative to rapid transit is the erecting of tall buildings, so it was in the old days for ever. The story has been the same down to the minute details.

The Thames was for sixteen centuries the great highway of intercommunication within London walls. London streets were mere footways or bridlepaths between house-walls; when Queen Elizabeth went abroad on land she was carried in a litter by her gentlemen; there were on Thames-side 40,000 watermen, till the middle of the seventeenth century. Then suddenly:

Fulsome madams and new scurvy squires

Did jolt the streets in pomp at their desires...

Drawn by the pampered jades of Belgia...

That almost all the streets are choked outright

Whilst watermen want work.

Horse-drawn carriages had been introduced.

The cry is that of Taylor the water poet and a waterman himself. It was that of the stage coachmen when railways came in, it will be that of the cabmen tomorrow, of railway engineers on the day after. That is the detail.

But until the days of Taylor London had been growing year by year more congested. Originally there had been the Tower, a fortress-village with a walled town of mud huts round it, its roads mere footpaths, its space circumscribed enough. As the town grew more important feudal nobles built palaces on the banks of the stream, crowds vast for their day came on foot or horse from the surrounding country or in ships from outer Europe. The houses of London climbed skywards along the narrow lanes—” Elizabethan” houses, half-timbered, climbing up to six, eight and ten storeys, the upper ones bulging out and almost touching overhead to gain in the air the space that had to be ceded to foot traffic on the ground. Near the river were these houses of the “comfortable” classes. These palaces of the kings and the great houses of the nobles crowded the face of the river that their owners might keep their private barges and have their own water gates. The others at the public stairs called “Oars!” as to-day we call “Cab.” Then came “the pampered jades of Belgia.”

Roads were laid down or made up to suit them, then London spread out and the watermen disappeared or starved. (Taylor died a “victualler” at Oxford.) The poorer classes began to swarm into such of the tall, “comfortable” houses as the Fire left, the nobles moved their houses on to the larger roads, the comfortable classes built themselves small houses. The riverside palaces became wharfingers’ buildings, their gardens and water gates became quays. Exactly the same thing has happened with every subsequent improvement in communications.