June 5, 1915 
LAND AND WATER 
AN INLAND MARKET TOWN 
By J. D. SYMON 
IT lies within easy reach of London, but it is in no sense 
suburban, for it retains its ancient traditions, its busy 
corporate hfe, most keenly individual, and although 
the builder of these latter days has not been kept 
whoUy at bay, the town stUl holds many quaint and 
charming relics of the domestic architecture of an older 
England. 
From the long High Street you can turn aside in 
fifty places, and passing under a low-browed archway find 
yourself in yards and open spaces where buildings of the 
mellowest warm brick huddle in a delightful confusion of 
half-timbered gables and casements that were made before 
the days of devotion to fresh air. The hand of modernity 
has been too intrusive at certain places in the High Street, 
but enough remains to uphold the character of an English 
market town, and at favoured spots the architect, as distinct 
from the builder, has done his later work well. He has 
contrived things which, a hundred years hence, will give our 
descendants no cause to blame their forefathers. 
One or two inns retain the right Georgian character, 
and over the door of one of them hangs what may 
be taken as a survival, the last survival I know, of 
an ancient vintner's custom, and one that has been 
enshrined in a familiar proverb, whereof the meaning 
is Uttle reflected upon by the majority. " Good wine 
needs no bush " comes glibly to the tongue, but if you 
asked the philosopher what he meant by "the bush, "he would 
very likely answer, " Well, just the bush, you know." Here 
in my market town he would find the visible symbol ready 
to his eye in explanation, but alas, for purity of the antique 
thing. 
Here again, the hand of the twentieth or perhaps the 
late nineteenth century has forced its inevitable modifica- 
tions. The bush is a bush no longer, but a colossal hanging 
flower-basket, about which, however, ivy has been made to 
twine so cunningly that when it is in full leaf, you do not 
suspect the wire sub-structure to the clustering foliage. It 
may not be the bush pure and simple, but it is a noble and 
pleasing variation of the old symbol, and it has this advantage 
over the original sign that whereas that was sometimes severed 
from its root, and doomed to wither soon, this bunch of 
ivy is upgrowing evergreen, perennial, and suffers not, like 
its prototype, a constant interchange of growth and blight. 
Manufacture has laid a light hand upon the township, 
not always to the beautifying of the outskirts, but at least 
one factory has shewn unwonted signs of grace, and has painted 
its long low sheds a delicious green on the walls and the 
pleasantest of old tile-red upon the roofs. The chimney has 
to be endured, but the buildings fall snugly into the landscape, 
and cannot be called a blot. Not every industry is so praise- 
worthy. There are other places of commercial output, the 
effect of which, to say the least of it, does not make for harmony 
but to these it is possible to turn a bhnd eye. They offend 
you for a moment only as you seek the open fields in certain 
directions. 
Thank heaven, there are some unsullied approaches 
to the country. At heart this Borough is still a country 
market town, and on market-days the square is filled with 
the bleating of sheep and the lowing of oxen, when the white- 
washed pens are up and full, and round about stand the 
bargaining farmers — sturdy yeomen, who have, most of them, 
in these later months, sent their sons to other business than 
that of peace, for our County Yeomanry has made a name 
in Flanders. War has laid its hand upon the town, but there 
are moments " about full market time," as Xenophon says 
by way of introduction to a memorable battle-piece, when 
there is little to suggest that anything has broken the peace 
of rural England. The market is ablaze with flower stalls, 
which on sunny days are almost Continental in their vividness, 
and this fairy merchandise is neighboured by stalls of drab 
commodities, pieces of sole leather for the cobbler, odds and 
ends of scrap iron, and, most fascinating to the youthful eye, 
a complete emporium of cheap accessories for the bicycle. 
One sign of war there is, visible only to those who know the 
life of the town intimately and can feel the pulse of the market, 
for here in these altered times the townsfolk are buying most 
of their vegetables, to the loss, perhaps, of the estabhshcd 
greengrocer. He, honest man, is rather handicapped; Ecme 
of his young men who formerly took orders at the trades- 
men's entrance, are taking orders of a different sort elsewhere, 
and there is a hint, too, of a lack of horse transport. But 
otherwise, to the outward eye, at certain hours this inland 
market town rriight not even have heard of the present 
struggle. 
But this aloofness is only apparent. Loiter a little 
longer in the market place, and you will catch a glimpse of 
inevitable khaki, and by and by a string of Army Service 
wagons wUl lumber into view, turn the corner, and disappear ; 
and again, at stated hours, the chaffering business of farmers 
and townsfolk will pause for a moment while a regiment swings 
into view, stepping smartly from the drill ground to its mid- 
day meal, for, during these months since August, wave after 
wave of khaki has beaten against our unwalled citadel, and 
sometimes has subsided and come to rest there for a time. 
The soldiers have been encamped for the most part beyond 
the town, and there is a little bridge some way out that lias 
cut them off almost entirely from the townsfolk, except during 
their hours of leave ; but if their presence has not been 
obtruded to the eye, it has not been without its effect upon the 
community. There has been an inevitable come and go 
between the warriors and an unwarhke population. The 
town, for all its apparent calm, is really throbbing with the 
pulse of war ; it has had, in truth, a great shaking up. Hitherto 
its acquaintance with the military caste has been of the 
slightest, and some of its good folk, mingling for the first time 
with officers, have not yet quite realised that " Mr. " is the 
only title for a subaltern. They roll the really fine word 
" Lieutenant," unctuously about the tongue, and take such joy 
of the invocation that one almost regrets that so nobly soundmg 
a title should be taboo. 
Then in the auxiliary organisations for the care of 
the wounded and the soldiers' dependents, and in the provi- 
sion of recreation for the soldiers' hours off duty, the women 
have found a new interest in life. They speak in terms of 
war, they have become learned, many of them, in the 
elements of the nurse's craft, and the horizon of a quiet 
life has widened. The thoughts of many who last year found 
the next tennis party or the next game of golf sufficient 
centre for their days, are now on distant fields with those who 
have gone out from our immediate circle, and there has been 
an extension of nulitary acquaintance among the members of 
those stranger battalions that have sojourned for a while 
beside our more or less rural ways. 
For the reflective elder people there is some harking 
back to times of which our fathers and grandsires have told 
us— to those Napoleonic days when English market-towns 
were aUve with the tramp of marching regiments, and when 
the biUet-master might any day knock at the door. These 
were the hours of life and colour, of scarlet coats and glittering 
accoutrements, lending to military presence a fascination 
which is not Ukely to return. But the spirit is the same, and 
there is still martial music to supply in sound what is lacking 
in colour. 
The town, never perhaps exactly sleepy but intent 
on the affairs of the mart, industrial and agricultural, has 
experienced at its hours of awakening a new and bracing 
sensation from the minghng of the pealing bugles of reveille 
with the strident siren of the factory. Every morning while 
a regiment is at hand, the townsfolk are reminded by a 
drifting echo of martial music that these times are not as other 
times, and that when tyrants rage, life becomes more than a 
mere matter of profit and loss. 
But there is romance, too, in the sound of the bugles — 
romance that thrills the girls of to-day, just as their 
great-grandmothers thrilled when they peeped shyly from 
behind their early window curtains to wave a farewell 
to, last night's partner at the ball as he marched 
perhaps to Waterloo or some Peninsular field. Thus, still 
earlier, in northern dawns, the girls looked out to catch a 
glmpse of Bonnie Prince Charhe. With these associations 
is bound up the sentiment of a whole body of our national 
lyric utterance, which finds, perhaps, its most poignant 
expression in Robin Adair. It breathes through many an earlier 
novel, and fiction it seems to me is never more gracious than 
when it floats in the atmosphere of an ancient well-ordered 
township, with fair old houses of the better sort, where the 
furniture came from the hand of great artists and the girls 
were the girls Jane Austen knew. 
It was into surroundings hke these, a world of lavender 
and roses and old formal gardens standing back from the ' 
street behind warm-red brick walls that the advent of the 
marching regiments brought so piquant a note of contrast 
and of romance, and in an age when the redcoats have 
given place to a duller hue, it is this that still survives 
in the thoughts and feelings of our English market town, 
touched to a new excitement, and it may be to a new 
purpose, by the transforming hand of war. 
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