Portrait of Elmbury Read Free

which we grew up, scarcely noticing it: the extraordinary higgledy-pigglediness, the rich seething hotch-potch of a thousand ingredients, which was Elmbury itself. Elmbury was a small town, and such are generally supposed to be dull, and to be associated with aspidistras, and to infect the souls of their inhabitants with something mean and crabbed and petty, with ignorant “provincialism,” and with something specially reprehensible and circumscribed called a “small-town mentality.” But Elmbury wasn’t like that at all. It had infinite variety. It was splendid and it was sordid; but it certainly wasn’t dull.
    Over it and dominating it rose the huge square tower of the Abbey: the finest Norman tower, some say, in the world. The Abbey itself, bigger than many cathedrals, loomed vastly out of its churchyard chestnuts and yews. But there was none of that“odour of sanctity,” which usually belongs to cathedral closes, about the immediate neighbourhood of Elmbury’s great church: no cloistered quietude, nothing sanctimonious or grave. Outside the churchyard gates the main road ran north to Birmingham and south to Bristol, and up and down it the heedless traffic flowed. Just across the road, exactly opposite the church, was a good, solid, half-timbered pub; it had a garden hedged with thick impenetrable yews, a secret place hidden from prying eyes, where old men played bowls till the light faded and younger folk played more mischievous games in the twilight. But adjoining this delightful garden (at the bottom of which a willowy stream flowed) was a large horrible red-brick building like a public lavatory; this was the grammar school. And beyond it was an untidy-looking rubbish dump, a noisome wilderness into which the town’s sewage was discharged, loved only by rats and terriers and crows and little boys.
    At the other side of the Abbey things were equally chaotic. There were more pubs—small squalid ones with spit-and-sawdust bars. There were Elizabethan almhouses, enchanting but scarcely habitable, which American tourists always wanted to buy, lock, stock, and barrel, so that they could carry them home, as explorers’ trophies, to the States. There were tumbledown cottages, dirty and overcrowded, with whole families sleeping in one small bedroom; roses in their pretty little front gardens, bugs in their beds. There was a dreadful “Italian Tea Garden” with umbrellas like striped mushrooms shading the tables on the lawn. There were shops which sold trivial souvenirs to visitors. There were allotments, smelling of dead cabbages and live pigs. And there was a pleasant cricket-field, margined by willows and cressy streams, its green turf hallowed by the feet of W. G. Grace who once played there, its pavilion roof still bearing honourable scars from the big hits of Gilbert Jessop.
    The town itself, which straggled along the main road for half a mile or so, consisted of a haphazard assortment of ancient half-timbered houses and shops—some of these leaned across the street towards each other, like old wives gossiping—with later Georgian buildings among them, and the inevitable alleys, dozensof alleys, leading off the main road into the ruinous rabbit-warren of Elmbury’s slums. There were hundreds of acres of these slums. They were scandalous; they were far worse, probably, than many of the slums in London’s East End; but the extraordinary, the almost unbelievable thing about them was that as well as being terrifying they were curiously beautiful. The narrow crooked alleys, fantastical enough by day, at twilight seemed to belong to a Grimm’s fairy tale. By the time the moon had risen their metamorphosis was complete; they had dissolved into a monstrous and yet enchanting dreamland, they had become part of a City of Beautiful Nonsense. The tottering hunchback cottages leaned shoulder-to-shoulder like drunken men; if one of them fell down they’d all