624 



The Review of Reviews. 



Decemier 1. 1X6. 



II. 



Shaphambury seemed an odd place to me even 

 then. But something was quickenhig in me at that 

 time to feel the oddness of many accepted things. 

 Now in the retrospect, I see it as intensely queer. 

 The whole place was strange to my untravelled 

 eyes; the sea was strange. Only twice in my life 

 had I been at the seaside before, and then I had gone 

 by excursion to places on the Welsh coast whose 

 great cliffs of rock and mountain backgrounds made 

 the effect of the horizon very different from what 

 it is upon the East Anglian seaboard. Here, what 

 they called a cliff, was crumbling bank of whitey- 

 bro'wn earth not fifty feet high. 



As soon as I arri^•ed I made a systematic explora- 

 tion of Shaphambury. To this day I retain the 

 clearest memories of the plan I shaped out then, 

 and how my inquiries were incommoded by the 

 overpowering desire of everyone to talk of the 

 chances of a German raid, before the Channel fleet 

 got round to us. I slept at a small public-house in 

 a .Shaphambury back street on Sunday night. I 

 did not get on to Shaphambury from Wyvern until 

 two in the afternoon, because of the infrequency of 

 Sunday trains, and I got no clue whatever until late 

 in the afternoon of Monday. 



As the little local train bumped into sight of the 

 place round the curve of a swelling hill, one saw a 

 series of undulating grassy spaces, amidst which a 

 number of conspicuous notice boards appealed to 

 the eye and cut up the distant sea horizon. Most 

 of these referred to comestibles or to remedies to 

 follow the comestibles: and they were coloured 

 with a view to be memorable rather than beautiful, 

 to " stand out '' amidst the gentle, grayish tones of 

 the east coast scenery. The greater number, I may 

 remark, of the advertisements that were so con- 

 spicuous a factor in the life of those days, and 

 which rendered our vast tree-pulp newspapers pos- 

 sible, referred to foods, drinks, tobacco, and the 

 dnigs that promised a restoration of the equanimity 

 those other articles had destroyed. 



But, in addition to such boards, there were also 

 the big black and white boards of various grandilo- 

 quentlv named " estates." "She individualistic en- 

 terprise of that time had led to the plotting out of 

 nearlv all the country round the seaside towns into 

 roads and building-plots. All but a small portion 

 of the south and east coast was in this condition ; 

 and. had the promises of those schemes been rea- 

 lised, the entire population of the island might 

 have been accommodated upon the sea frontiers. 

 Nothing of the sort happened, of course. The whole 

 of this uglification of the coast line was done to 

 stimulate a little foolish gambling in plots. One 

 saw everywhere agents' boards in e^ery state of 

 freshness and decay, ill-made exploitation roads 

 overgrown with grass, and here and there, at a cor- 

 ner, a label. "Trafalgar .Avenue, " or "Sea View 



Road." Here and there, too, some small investor, 

 some shopman with " savings,'' had delivered his 

 soul to the local builders and built himself a house, 

 and there it stood, ill designed, mean-looking, iso- 

 lated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced plot, athwart 

 which his domestic washing fluttered in the breeze , 

 amidst a bleak desolation of enterprise. Then, pre- i 

 sentlv, oui railway crossed a high-road, and a row ' 

 of niean vellow brick houses — workmen's cottages, 

 and the filthy, black sheds that made the " allot- 

 ments " of that time a universal eyesore — marked 

 our approach to the more central areas of — I quote 

 the local guide-book — " one of the most delightful 

 resorts in the East Anglian poppyland." Then more 

 mean houses; the gaunt ungainliness of the electric 

 power-station — it had a huge chimney, because no 

 one understood how to make the combustion of coal 

 complete — and then we were in the railway station, 

 and barelv three-quarters of a mile from the centre 

 of this haunt of health and pleasure. 



I inspected the town thoroughly before I made 

 mv inquiries. The road began badly, with a row 

 of cheap, pretentious, insolvent-looking shops, a 

 public-house, and a cab stand, but, after an inter- 

 val of little red villas that were partly hidden amidst 

 shrubbv gardens, broke into a confusedly bright, but 

 not unpleasing. High-street, shuttered that after- 

 noon and sabbatically still. Somewhere in the back- 

 ground a church bell jangled, and children in bright, 

 new-lcoking clothes Avere going to Sunday school. 

 Thence, through a square of stuccoed lodging-houses 

 that seemed a finer and cleaner version of my native 

 s "juare. I came to a garden of asphalt and euonymus 

 — the sea front. I sat down on a cast-iron seat, and 

 surveved, first of all, the broad stretches of muddv. 

 sandy, beach, with its queer wheeled b.ithing- 

 machines, painted with the advertisements of some- 

 bodv's pills — and then at the house fronts that stared 

 out upon these visceral counsels. Boarding-houses, 

 private hotels, and lodging-houses in terraces clus- 

 tered rloselv right and left of me. and then r.inie 

 to an end. In one direction, scaffolding marked a 

 building enterprise in progress, in the other, after a 

 waste interval, rose a monstrous, bulging red shape, 

 a huge hotel, that dwarfed ail other things. North- 

 ward, were low, pale cliffs with white denticulations 

 of tents, where the local volunteers, all under arms, 

 lav encamped, and southward, a spreading waste 

 of sandv dunes, with occasional bushes and clumps 

 of stunted pine and an advertisement board or so. 

 A hard, blue skv hung over all this prospect, the 

 sunshine cast inkv shadows, and eastward was a 

 whitish sea. It was Sunday, and the midday meal 

 still held people indoors. 



A queer world ! thought I even then — to you now 

 it must seem impossiblv queer — and after an inter- 

 val I forced mvself back to my own affair. 

 How was I to a.sk ? What was I to ask for? 

 My solution was fairly ingenious. T invented the 

 following storv : — I happened to be taking a holi- 



