“‘At Chatham,’ says he.
“‘What do you do there?’ says I.
“‘I go to school,’ says he.
“I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently the very queer small boy says: ‘This is Gad’s Hill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran away.’
“‘You know something about Falstaff, eh?’ said I.
“‘All about him,’ said the very queer small boy. ‘I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please.’
“‘You admire that house?’ said I.
“‘Bless you, sir!’ said the very queer small boy, ‘when I was not more than half as old as nine it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And ever since I can recollect my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me: “If you were to be very persevering, and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it,” though that’s impossible,’ said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of the window with all his might.
“I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy, for that house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true.”[101]
In another “Uncommercial” paper Dickens recorded his impressions of a later visit to this neighbourhood: “I will call my boyhood’s home ... Dullborough,” he says, and further observes that he found himself rambling about the scenes among which his earliest days were passed—“scenes from which I departed when a child, and which I did not revisit until I was a man,” when he found the place strangely altered, for the railway had since disfigured the land. The railway-station “had swallowed up the playing-field, the two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies had given place to the stoniest of roads; while, beyond the station, an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction.” He confesses that he was not made happy by the disappearance of the old familiar landmarks of his boyhood, but adds reflectively: “Who was I that I should quarrel with the town for being so changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it? All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse.”