“Oh yes,” he said, “I’ve been happy enough, but it’s not the sort of life for which I was intended. It’s not easy to explain, but I feel that it could have so easily been so much more happy—if the rough edges had only been ever so slightly trimmed.”
And for a long while he sat in silence. He was thinking no doubt of the quiet tragedy of a life lived happily but not intensely. But I thought of the kindly Providence that takes the handling of our destinies out of our control, and had saved this curious old soldier from a career of speculation that could have ended only in pathetic failure.
IV
BUT it is not only nor indeed even chiefly through meeting new types of people that we can arrive at that angle of detachment. We need an entire change of setting. It would be hard to overrate the subconscious influence on us of our surroundings. A sudden sensation of taste and smell will recall to us a cycle of associated memoirs. The glimpse through a railway-carriage window of a gabled roof, a square church tower, a particular shade of sunlight on red brick will open the pages of a chapter whose existence we had almost forgotten; will reveal in relief, in perspective—with an objective reality that at the time it did not hold for us—a facet of the past. The obvious, the superficial reflection on such occurrences would be an expression of surprise that so trivial an affair as the taste of cocoa, the smell of wet stone, the glimpse of a square-towered church, should become a window opening on childhood. But probably nearer to the truth would be the assumption that these moments of sight and taste of which, at the time, we hardly more than recognised the existence, and to which we attached no value, were an essential part of the framework of our thoughts, and our hopes, and our actions, and that it was from them that what we have come to regard in our lives as personal and important drew its nourishment, its colour, and its direction.
As the novels of Alphonse Daudet are steeped in the sunshine of the south and the simple, lazy kindliness that it engenders, so are Maupassant’s stories children of the mud, the lights, the rain, the gallantries of Paris. And so over the poetry and novels of Thomas Hardy lies the deep shadow of the Wessex countryside. And among these many influences that tend, unknown to us, to make our lives gay or sombre, deep or shallow, or it would be more true perhaps to say that tend to accentuate in us those characteristics that are gay or sombre, deep or shallow, there are few that touch us more surely or more closely than that of the nature of the buildings, the streets, the shops, the churches among which we live.
It would be worth while, indeed, discussing whether the classical scholar of some old foundation derives the sense of antiquity, that knowledge that we are parts of a pattern, the threads of which pass out on either side of us, which forms so human, so tolerant a basis for his ideas and his actions, more from the study of Homer and Catullus than from the tranquillising presence on every side of him of old buildings, gothic arches and cloisters, and curious quadrangles. British administration, whatever may have been said against it, has been credited always with a genial tolerance, an admirable refusal to be perturbed by trifles, a policy of “let it pass.” A capital social lubricant, this characteristic. And I wonder whether it would be too fanciful to attribute a part, at any rate, of this placidity in the class from which the majority of officers and civil servants are drawn, to the mellowing influence of the school buildings among which are spent their most impressionable years. Some such effect there must be, I am very sure. A mind continually encountering the survivals of early generations acquires a detachment from the immediate present. A boy who, on his way from one classroom to another, from the dayroom to the cricket field, and the library to the chapel, has always before him the silent grey-brown witnesses of continuity and tradition, cannot help thinking often consciously, and unconsciously times without number: “all this was going on two hundred years ago and, without any very considerable alteration, it will be going on two hundred hence.”
That sensation we rarely if ever get in London. I doubt if there is in the road I live in a single brick that is fifty-five years old. Twenty years ago Golders Green did not exist. I can barely picture this North End road as it was in the spring of 1907 when my father decided to build a house here, and to call it Underhill. A muddy, unpaved affair it was, with fields on either side of it as far as I remember: and it would remain so, we were told, for the Hampstead tube was in process of construction, and it would be impossible to build houses on the narrow gap between it and the road. Land’s End for a while it seemed to us after our nine years in a dingy West Hampstead thoroughfare. There were no shops then at the Cross Roads. We had to walk across the heath to Hampstead. Indeed, only one train in every four or six came through to Golders Green. Hampstead, Highgate, Golders Green; that was the electric sign then on the Euston platform. There were no non-stops. And one had to decide whether it would be quicker and pleasanter to walk across the heath or to wait for a Golders Green train.
And then the Garden Suburb came, and the builders discovered that there was ample room for a row of houses between the railway and the road, and Smith and Boots and Sainsbury added each of them another branch to their activities. And ’buses ceased to stop at Child’s Hill and tubes at Hampstead. And within four years the cross roads became as good a spot as Piccadilly for the unwary to be run over.
When I came home at the end of the first term at my prep. I could hardly recognise the North End Road. I believe that had I been transported there by a motor in the night I should not have known where I was, any more than I should have known where I was had I found myself in the spring of 1920 suddenly beside Potije Chateau on the road from Ypres to Zonnebeke. Golders Green sprang into life as speedily and as haphazardly as have the devastated areas. That immense hippodrome that confronts you as you turn to the left out of the station; they had not begun work on it when I went back to Sherborne in the autumn of 1913; but the curtain rang up on Boxing-Day. In less than three months they built it; working from start to finish against the clock. They had no time to instal a heating apparatus. On that first evening we shivered in greatcoats; but within a week the fires were banked up. The heat dripped on to us from the ceiling. An achievement, undoubtedly. Golders Green is a comfortable and commodious spot. There is the heath for exercise; the hippodrome for amusement; there are barbers and baths and cinemas, and trams and tubes and ’buses, and a taxi rank; an illuminated clock at the cross roads; two restaurants. A place, I am told, where one may dance, that even.
An impressive outpost, doubtless of Newer London: a fine tribute to progress, and mechanical invention. But there is one thing that, search how you may, you will never find at Golders Green. You will not find anywhere any indication that the world was inhabited a hundred years ago.