The War in the Air | Page 4

by trade and a gardener by disposition; his little
wife Jessica saw to the shop, and Heaven had planned him for a peaceful world.
Unfortunately Heaven had not planned a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of
obstinate and incessant change, tand in parts where its operations were unsparingly
conspicuous. Vicissitude was in the very soil he tilled; even his garden was upon a yearly
tenancy, and overshadowed by a huge board that proclaimed it not so much a garden as
an eligible building site. He was horticulture under notice to quit, the last patch of
country in a district flooded by new and prbaa things. He did his best to console himself,
to imagine matters near the turn of the tide.
"You'd hardly think it could keep on," he said.
Mr. Smallways' aged father, could remember Bun Hill as an idyllic Kentish village. He
had driven Sir Peter Bone until he was fifty and then he took to drink a little, and driving
the station bus, which lasted him until he was seventy-eight. Then he retired. He sat by
the fireside, a shrivelled, very, very old coachman, full charged with reminiscences, and
ready for any careless stranger. He could tell you of the vanished estate of Sir Peter Bone,
long since cut up for building, and how that magnate ruled the country-side when it was
country-side, of shooting and hunting, and of caches along the high road, of how "where
the gas-works is" was a cricket-field, and of the coming of the Crystal Palace. The
Crystal Palace was six miles away from Bun Hill, a great facade that glittered in the
morning, and was a clear blue outline against the sky in the afternoon, and of a night, a
source of gratuitous fireworks for all the population of Bun Hill. And then had come the
railway, and then villas and villas, and then the gas-works and the water-works, and a
great, ugly sea of workmen's houses, and then drainage, and the water vanished out of the
Otterbourne and left it a dreadful ditch, and then a second railway station, Bun Hill South,
and more houses and more, more shops, more competition, plate-glass shops, a
school-board, rates, omnibuses, tramcars--going right away into London itself--bicycles,
motor-cars and then more motor-cars, a Carnegie library.
"You'd hardly think it could keep on," said Mr. Tom Smallways, growing up among these
marvels.
But it kept on. Even from the first the green-grocer's shop which he had set up in one of
the smallest of the old surviving village houses in the tail of the High Street had a
submerged air, an air of hiding from something that was looking for it.When they had
made up the pavement of the High Street, they levelled that up so that one had to go
down three steps into the shop. Tom did his best to sell only his own excellent but limited

range of produce; but Progress came shoving things into his window, French artichokes
and aubergines, foreign apples-- apples from the State of New York, apples from
California, apples from Canada, apples from New Zealand, "pretty lookin' fruit, but not
what I should call English apples," said Tom-- bananas, unfamiliar nuts, grape fruits,
mangoes.
The motor-cars that went by northward and southward grew more and more powerful and
efficient, whizzed faster and smelt worse, there appeared great clangorous petrol trolleys
delivering coal and parcels in the place of vanishing horse-vans, motor-omnibuses ousted
the horse-omnibuses, even the Kentish strawberries going Londonward in the night took
to machinery and clattered instead of creaking, and became affected in flavour by
progress and petrol.
And then young Bert Smallways got a motor bicycle....
2
Bert, it is necessary to explain, was a progressive Smallways.
Nothing speaks more eloquently of the pitiless insistence of progress and expansion in
our time than that it should get into the Smallways blood. But there was something
advanced and enterprising about young Smallways before he was out of short frocks. He
was lost for a whole day before he was five, and nearly drowned in the reservoir of the
new water-works before he was seven. He had a real pistol taken away from him by a real
policeman when he was ten. And he learnt to smoke, not with pipes and brown paper and
cane as Tom had done, but with a penny packet of Boys of England American cigarettes.
His language shocked his father before he was twelve, and by that age, what with touting
for parcels at the station and selling the Bun Hill Weekly Express, he was making three
shillings a week, or more, and spending it on Chips, Comic Cuts, Ally Sloper's
Half-holiday, cigarettes, and all the concomitants of a life of pleasure and enlightenment.
All of this without