One need not be long at Evesham to note the extraordinary number of fruit-growers and market-gardeners hereabouts, as shown by the many wagons, or floats, on their way to or from the railway station with baskets and hampers of apples, pears, plums, gooseberries, currants, tomatoes, or asparagus; while to travel south of the town, through the favoured Vale, by any road you please, is to see that these are highly specialised cultivations that give as distinct a character to this landscape as do the hop-gardens or the cherry-orchards of Kent.
Leaving Evesham, it will be noticed how very much after the style at Stratford the Avon has been artificially widened and made to wear an almost lakelike effect, with a kind of everyday gala appearance. Here are trim grassy edges and public gardens; and boats and punts to be had for the hiring: a tamed and curbed Avon, like the Round Pond or the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens.
CHAPTER XXI
Broadway—Winchcombe—Shakespearean Associations—Bishop’s Cleeve.
“An Eden of fertility,” says an old writer, dwelling with satisfaction upon the Vale of Evesham. The neat orchards of to-day, with their long perspectives, and with bush-fruit planted in between the lines of plum and apple-trees, to economise every inch of this wonderful soil, would seem to him even more of an Eden, neater and more extended than in his day. It is not, you will say, the most picturesque form of cultivation, but it has that best of picturesque beauty to some minds, the picturesqueness of profit. I never yet knew a farmer who could see a cornfield with an artist’s eye, and was the better pleased the more the poppies, corn-cockles, and herb-daisies grew in it. For generations past, you will be told, the fruit-growing of the Vale of Evesham has been steadily giving less profit, and scarce a man among the growers but will declare the times are ruining the trade. But the pastures continue to be planted as extensions of the orchards, and the railway traffic in fruit is an increasing branch of business. The only possible inferences, therefore, are that these jolly-looking market-gardeners, who live so well and look so prosperous, thrive on ruination and really cultivate the plum for the æsthetic but fleeting pleasure of seeing every spring that wondrous vale of snow-white blossom that spreads out below Cotswold.
Five miles or so south-eastwards across the vale brings you into Broadway, a village exploited some thirty years ago, and now, converted from the rustic place it was, into a residential district. The old houses and cottages remain, but the simple rustic folk who lived in them are dispersed, and in their old homes live that new class of appreciative and cultivated people with anything at command, from great wealth down to a sufficient independence. A generation ago people of this class would have thought life out of London or such great centres unendurable. They would have missed their town life and the shopping and all the thousand-and-one distractions, and if you had suggested Broadway or any such place, they would indignantly have asked if you wanted them to “bury themselves alive.”
And now ideals have changed, or perhaps more exactly, a new class of persons has been born. The wealthy who cannot live away from the centres of life still numerously exist, but there are great numbers of the leisured who have culture and resources within themselves and are not dependent for their amusement upon extraneous things. Also we have in these days of swift travel by road and rail to reckon not only with the “week-ender” (who does not trouble Broadway much), but upon that class who will have it both ways, will take the best of town, and when the country is most desirable will leave town to others and retire to such places as this.
These things have made Broadway a very different place from what it was a generation ago. The old people, sons of the soil, have been disinherited, and strangers—not only the “foreigners,” of whom the rustics speak, meaning merely people not of the same shire, but foreigners from overseas—are living in their homes, and they still resent it, even though they may earn more in wages and in “tips” from the tipping classes. The sense of place and of justice too, is strong in the blood of the countryman, and he feels it to be a shame that strangers should come from remote countries and covet the house where he and his fathers lived, and turn him out. It is an outcome of the recent appreciation of country life which is creating bitterness and resentment, not at Broadway alone, but all over the country. [213]
The broad street, with its grey stone houses, is to outward seeming very much the same, but there is a neatness, an unmistakable sense of money about the place. Every little plot of grass in front of the houses at the upper end, that never used to know the attentions of the mower, has become a lawn; small cottages have been enlarged and thrown into one another, and farmhouses, whose ancient features have been ingeniously adapted by resourceful architects, have become residences of the most delightful type. A little golfing, some motoring, half a dozen other interests and the modern craze for collecting, fill the lives of the people who live here. A retired actress collects pewter, and others scan the neighbourhood with the amiable object of snapping up rare and valuable pieces of china or furniture at much less than their worth from country-folk who are ignorant of their value. There is a curiosity shop in the village, too, where the stranger may find bargains, or may not; and I am told—although I have never seen him—that an innocent-looking old person carrying a rare specimen of a grandfather’s clock under his arm may generally be seen crossing the road by the “Lygon Arms,” at times when obviously wealthy, and possibly American and appreciative, occupants of motorcars drive up. The suggestion is that very often this ingenious person sells his rare, and possibly “unique,” clock at a stunning price and will be seen in another day or two with the fellow of it. This has been indignantly denied by the outraged people of Broadway, but reaffirmed in print, and I will leave it at that.