IV
The electric tramcars that nowadays take you all the way to Lewisham from Westminster Bridge for threepence, and occupy incidentally forty minutes in performing the journey of six miles, travel on the average at the same speed as those old coaches; but, of course, this not very brilliant rate of progression is determined by the crowded traffic of Walworth and Camberwell. When New Cross is reached, and the comparative solitudes of St. John’s, they bring you at a good twelve miles an hour along those switchback roads to the journey’s end. They are not looked upon with favour by that suburban neighbourhood, for, worse than the burglars’ “villainous centre-bits” in Maud they not only
Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless night,
but noisily disturb every night.
It is a hilly district, revealed in these times by ascending and descending vistas of roads and roof-tops, instead of the grass and fields of yore; and Loampit Hill—the “Loam Pit Hole” of Rocque’s map of 1745—is just a little interlude in the commonplace, where an old retaining-wall in the hill-top sliced through in a bygone era serves to keep the banks and the houses now built hazardously on them from settling in the roadway. A number of old hollies give the spot something of an old-world look.
Here, then, having come through all the hazards and chances of New Cross and the Lewisham High Road, we are arrived at the Ravensbourne and Lewisham. The Ravensbourne, although not a stream of great size, and with a course of but twelve miles, from its fountain-head on Keston Common to its mouth amid the mud of Deptford Creek, is yet a river of considerable historic, or legendary, importance, and—more important still—it is due to the Ravensbourne that the last surviving beauties of Lewisham are so beautiful. Legends tell how the river obtained its distinguished name, and in the telling take us back to those very distant days of Cæsar’s second invasion, B.C. 54. The story seems to support the theory of one school of antiquaries, that the lost Roman station of Noviomagus was at Keston; for it declares that Cæsar’s legions were encamped on what we now call Keston Common, and suffered greatly from lack of water until the constant visits of a raven to one particular spot attracted attention and aroused the hope that it was water which attracted him. The expectation proved correct, for there they discovered the spring forming the source of the stream. A well, called “Cæsar’s,” on that common still serves to keep the tradition alive.
We may, therefore, well look upon the Ravensbourne with interest, although it is true that a glance into it, over the bridge which here carries the busy London street across, sadly disappoints romantic anticipations. Deposits of mud, vestiges of pails past their prime, and outworn boots which the veriest tramp would scorn to own, line a discoloured stream, and grimy backyards abut upon it. To such a pass has civilisation brought the lower reaches of this once silvery watercourse, which is not so small but that it has tributaries of its own. Such an one is the river Quaggy, which embouches hereabouts into it. “Hereabouts,” I say, because only the local sewer authority could readily point out the exact spot; the Quaggy being, in fact, at the actual confluence, embedded in an underground pipe. But if you may not see the actual meeting of the streams, you may at least see the Quaggy on the other side of the road, a little distance before it joins forces with the Ravensbourne. There you shall perceive how only a little lesser indignity than a pipe has befallen it. Its little trickle still flows on in the eye of day, but it is made to flow in a formal concrete bed, here and there spanned by long stretches of pavement. A little higher up “Lee Bridge” crosses it, and there be those lesser Stanleys and Livingstones who have traced it to its source, even as those great explorers sought the beginnings of the Nile. A certain disappointment seems, however, to await those who seek the origin of the Quaggy, for those who have essayed, and accomplished, the feat describe how it rises on Shooter’s Hill “at the back of the Police-station”! Shooter’s Hill is well enough, but that last little piece of particularity destroys any lingering shred of romance.
I should not be greatly surprised to find the Quaggy the object of police suspicion, for that name is merely an alias, its real ancient title being the Ket Brook, whence the district of Kidbrook derives its name. The “Quaggy” is a later title, conferred descriptively by those who observed the quags, or marshy places, through which it descended from Shooter’s Hill to these levels.
Here, as already remarked, we are come to Lewisham. Many thousands of people remember Lewisham as still something of a village; and yet so quick-presto are the suburban changes around London that they now behold it not merely a thronged town, but much less distinguished even than that—just a limb of great, sprawling London, and thus stripped of most of its old-time individuality.
The place changes while you look. You turn your back awhile upon the few surviving fields, the hedgerows, the ditches, and when you glance upon the scene again they are gone, and carts are delivering loads of slack-baked place-bricks for the foundations of little £25 houses that will begin to settle down unsteadily and crack all down their fronts almost before the roofs are on. Change is rampant here, and Lewisham, that was once “Lewisham Village,” is a village no longer. The proverbial saying, “Long, lazy, lousy Lewisham,” that once attached to the place—a saying which, I doubt not, owed its existence more to easy alliteration than to actual fact—is, in one respect at any rate, out of date, for it is now become a very strenuous place indeed, where tradesfolk hustle for business and crowds throng the pavements. Modernity marches all over the place in its hobnailed fashion, and scarifies the soul out of existence. It cannot survive in a modern populous suburb of wage-earners who go forth at unconscionable hours of the morning to earn the means of existence and come home to their brick boxes, exhausted, merely to sleep; and so come to their prime, joylessly, and decline greyly to an obscure end. The spectacle frightens and saddens the observer who goes beneath the surface of things. He wonders what lies in the lap of futurity for the race thus dissociated from nature, nurtured on the pavements, and condemned to lifelong comings and goings in the restricted outlook of streets; and, looking upon old representations of what Lewisham was like in what he is apt to think the halcyon days of the “20’s” of the nineteenth century, he grieves for the spacious rusticities of days gone by.