after these came the newer, pinker rows of rather larger houses, plastering
the valley: the homes of more modern workmen. And beyond that again, in the
wide rolling regions of the castles, smoke waved against steam, and patch
after patch of raw reddish brick showed the newer mining settlements,
sometimes in the hollows, sometimes gruesomely ugly along the sky-line of
the slopes. And between, in between, were the tattered remnants of the old
coaching and cottage England, even the England of Robin Hood, where the
miners prowled with the dismalness of suppressed sporting instincts, when
they were not at work.
England, my England! But which is my England? The stately homes of
England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connexion with
the Elizabethans. The handsome old halls are there, from the days of Good
Queen Anne and Tom Jones. But smuts fall and blacken on the drab stucco,
that has long ceased to be golden. And one by one, like the stately homes,
they were abandoned. Now they are being pulled down. As for the cottages of
England---there they are---great plasterings of brick dwellings on the
hopeless countryside.
`Now they are pulling down the stately homes, the Georgian halls are
going. Fritchley, a perfect old Georgian mansion, was even now, as Connie
passed in the car, being demolished. It was in perfect repair: till the war
the Weatherleys had lived in style there. But now it was too big, too
expensive, and the country had become too uncongenial. The gentry were
departing to pleasanter places, where they could spend their money without
having to see how it was made.'
This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the
halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted
out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England.
One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England.
And the continuity is not Organic, but mechanical.
Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of
the old England. It had taken her years to realize that it was really
blotted out by this terrifying new and gruesome England, and that the
blotting out would go on till it was complete. Fritchley was gone, Eastwood
was gone, Shipley was going: Squire Winter's beloved Shipley.
Connie called for a moment at Shipley. The park gates, at the back,
opened just near the level crossing of the colliery railway; the Shipley
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