of it that the ineligible
qualities of my father were the cause of the estrangement. The only
other society in the house during the day was an old and rather decayed
Skye terrier in constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary
fleas. I took myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a
considerable knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.

It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-side
and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses
and flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valley
industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I turned
by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar of men's
activities. And in such a country as that valley social and economic
relations were simple and manifest. Instead of the limitless confusion
of London's population, in which no man can trace any but the most
slender correlation between rich and poor, in which everyone seems
disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can see here the works,
the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and here close at hand the
congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a little distance a small
middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the big house of the employer.
It was like a very simplified diagram--after the untraceable confusion
of London.

I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets of
mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of mysteriously
heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened walls
or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed vegetable gardens, I saw the women
pouring out from the potbanks, heard the hooters summoning the toilers
to work, lost my way upon slag heaps as big as the hills of the south
country, dodged trains at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and
surveyed across dark intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the
gnome-like activities of iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and
rumours of strikes, and learnt from the columns of some obscure labour
paper I bought one day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in
those days one of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers.
Then back I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam train of that
period, to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or
less furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade.
It was, I say, diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the
ex