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.

I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the
replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient balance,
by a new order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's intimations,
it was manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude of incoordinated
fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive than the last, and none
of them ever really worked out to a ripe and satisfactory completion.
Each left a legacy of products, houses, humanity, or what not, in its
wake. It was a sort of progress that had bolted; it was change out of
hand, and going at an unprecedented pace nowhere in particular.

No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it wa