XXIX
The main road is more quickly regained at Pembury Green, where the last suburbs of Tunbridge Wells end.
Pembury Green is an old hamlet reared in modern times up to the status of a separate parish, with a tall-spired church built where it has no business to be—on the green that gives the place its distinguishing name. There are plenteous evidences, in the number of inns and Cyclists’ Rests, that Pembury Green is a favourite resort in the long days of summer.
The number of refreshment places along the Hastings Road catering for cyclists is more marked than even on that very much exploited highway, the road to Brighton. Perhaps on a road so hilly as this those pushers of the reluctant pedal require more frequent halts and more sustenance.
Most wayside inns nowadays express their readiness to entertain wheelmen by exhibiting the modest announcement, “Accommodation for Cyclists,” hinged on to their old signs; but, apart from these, the keeping of “Cyclists’ Rests” along the main roads has become an industry as congested as the close professions.
The natural history of Cyclists’ Rests affords interest to the peripatetic philosopher. They range from the cheap boudoir-like kind, a couple or so miles out from a town, where the articles most in demand are weak tea and hairpins, down to the sometimes bare, sometimes grubby little dens in remoter places, labelled in illiterate fashion,
“CYCLIƧT REƧT”
designed to suit the shallow pockets of the long-distance-riding club cyclist; where, in discomfort, you eat off delf plates laid on tables covered with slimy “American cloth,” and get a good “blow-out” and a shakedown in an attic with precipitous floor and sloping roof for an incredibly small sum.
The first variety are fully furnished for feminine cyclists with materials for tea, with the hairpins already mentioned, with chocolates, a carafe of weary-looking home-made lemonade with a lemon stuck in the neck of it, the usual fizzy “minerals,” and sixpennyworth of buns. Wonders may be wrought on a basis so slight.
The other kind is of sterner stuff. Who rides far must feed well. Tea for the hard rider, no less than for the ambling lady cyclist, is essential, but it must be tea with a tang to it, and plenty of it; and it gets mixed, in course of feeding, with such meats as the “Rest” affords, with the result—a medical expert would say—that the interior of that cyclist is converted into a tannery, and his food turned to leather by the tannic acid of his drink. And yet I never heard of a healthy, active cyclist being inconvenienced, much less laid low, by such immoral feeding.
THE “BLUE BOYS” INN.
It is a solitary road beyond Pembury Green, varied only by a few scattered houses, all the way to Lamberhurst. Kipping’s Cross is the first of these intervals, and there stands the “Blue Boys” inn, with an oast-house for only neighbour. The “Blue Boys” is practically dated by its odd picture sign, showing two blue-jacketed postboys shaking hands and lifting each a convivial glass, whether to their noble selves or to George the Fourth, whose medallion portrait is below, cannot be said.
Beyond the inn is the cross-road leading to Goudhurst, scene of many incidents in the history of smuggling. Between this point and Lamberhurst, four miles distant, there were, in the once-upon-a-time of coaching days, two turnpike-gates. The pikeman’s house remains at both places.
The level tract of land at this point was known to old road-books as “Lindridge Causeway,” and owed its name, according to John Harris, who wrote a “History of Kent” in 1719, to one Lindridge, who was born in 1560, lived in a house adjacent to Lamberhurst, and “built a handsome causeway here, called after him.” At that time there was still a stone to his memory in the porch of Lamberhurst church.
The name of “Lamberhurst Quarter,” given to the district on this hill-top above Lamberhurst village, is one of those many mysteries of place-names that now can never be authoritatively explained; but it is supposed to derive from some ancient partition of the manor into four parts—quarters of a knight’s fee.
Down below, on the right hand, are spread out the many-serried ranks of the hop-gardens. You look down upon them as a commanding officer might upon his phalanxed battalions.