I could remember nothing. I couldn’t even remember whether it was hereabouts that the town used to begin. All I knew was that in the old days this street hadn’t existed. For hundreds of yards I was running along it–rather mean, shabby kind of street, with the houses giving straight on the pavement and here and there a corner grocery or a dingy little pub–and wondering where the hell it led to. Finally I pulled up beside a woman in a dirty apron and no hat who was walking down the pavement. I stuck my head out of the window.
‘Beg pardon–can you tell me the way to the market-place?’
She ‘couldn’t tell’. Answered in an accent you could cut with a spade. Lancashire. There’s lots of them in the south of England now. Overflow from the distressed areas. Then I saw a bloke in overalls with a bag of tools coming along and tried again. This time I got the answer in Cockney, but he had to think for a moment.
‘Market-place? Market-place? Lessee, now. Oh–you mean the Ole Market?’
I supposed I did mean the Old Market.
‘Oh, well–you take the right ’and turning–’
It was a long way. Miles, it seemed to me, though really it wasn’t a mile. Houses, shops, cinemas, chapels, football grounds–new, all new. Again I had that feeling of a kind of enemy invasion having happened behind my back. All these people flooding in from Lancashire and the London suburbs, planting themselves down in this beastly chaos, not even bothering to know the chief landmarks of the town by name. But I grasped presently why what we used to call the market-place was now known as the Old Market. There was a big square, though you couldn’t properly call it a square, because it was no particular shape, in the middle of the new town, with traffic-lights and a huge bronze statue of a lion worrying an eagle–the war-memorial, I suppose. And the newness of everything! The raw, mean look! Do you know the look of these new towns that have suddenly swelled up like balloons in the last few years, Hayes, Slough, Dagenham, and so forth? The kind of chilliness, the bright red brick everywhere, the temporary-looking shop-windows full of cut-price chocolates and radio parts. It was just like that. But suddenly I swung into a street with older houses. Gosh! The High Street!
After all my memory hadn’t played tricks on me. I knew every inch of it now. Another couple of hundred yards and I’d be in the market-place. The old shop was down the other end of the High Street. I’d go there after lunch–I was going to put up at the George. And every inch a memory! I knew all the shops, though all the names had changed, and the stuff they dealt in had mostly changed as well. There’s Lovegrove’s! And there’s Todd’s! And a big dark shop with beams and dormer windows. Used to be Lilywhite’s the draper’s, where Elsie used to work. And Grimmett’s! Still a grocer’s apparently. Now for the horse-trough in the market-place. There was another car ahead of me and I couldn’t see.
It turned aside as we got into the market-place. The horse-trough was gone.
There was an A.A. man on traffic-duty where it used to stand. He gave a glance at the car, saw that it hadn’t the A.A. sign, and decided not to salute.
I turned the corner and ran down to the George. The horse-trough being gone had thrown me out to such an extent that I hadn’t even looked to see whether the brewery chimney was still standing. The George had altered too, all except the name. The front had been dolled up till it looked like one of those riverside hotels, and the sign was different. It was curious that although till that moment I hadn’t thought of it once in twenty years, I suddenly found that I could remember every detail of the old sign, which had swung there ever since I could remember. It was a crude kind of picture, with St George on a very thin horse trampling on a very fat dragon, and in the corner, though it was cracked and faded, you could read the little signature, ‘Wm. Sandford, Painter & Carpenter’. The new sign was kind of artistic-looking. You could see it had been painted by a real artist. St George looked a regular pansy. The cobbled yard, where the farmers’ traps used to stand and the drunks used to puke on Saturday nights, had been enlarged to about three times its size and concreted over, with garages all round it. I backed the car into one of the garages and got out.
One thing I’ve noticed about the human mind is that it goes in jerks. There’s no emotion that stays by you for any length of time. During the last quarter of an hour I’d had what you could fairly describe as a shock. I’d felt it almost like a sock in the guts when I stopped at the top of Chamford Hill and suddenly realized that Lower Binfield had vanished, and there’d been another little stab when I saw the horse-trough was gone. I’d driven through the streets with a gloomy, Ichabod kind of feeling. But as I stepped out of the car and hitched my trilby hat on to my head I suddenly felt that it didn’t matter a damn. It was such a lovely sunny day, and the hotel yard had a kind of summery look, with its flowers in green tubs and what-not. Besides, I was hungry and looking forward to a spot of lunch.
I strolled into the hotel with a consequential kind of air, with the boots, who’d already nipped out to meet me, following with the suitcase. I felt pretty prosperous, and probably I looked it. A solid business man, you’d have said, at any rate if you hadn’t seen the car. I was glad I’d come in my new suit–blue flannel with a thin white stripe, which suits my style. It has what the tailor calls a ‘reducing effect’. I believe that day I could have passed for a stockbroker.
And say what you like it’s a very pleasant thing, on a June day when the sun’s shining on the pink geraniums in the window-boxes, to walk into a nice country hotel with roast lamb and mint sauce ahead of you. Not that it’s any treat to me to stay in hotels, Lord knows I see all too much of them–but ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s those godless ‘family and commercial’ hotels, like Rowbottom’s, where I was supposed to be staying at present, the kind of places where you pay five bob for bed and breakfast, and the sheets are always damp and the bath taps never work. The George had got so smart I wouldn’t have known it. In the old days it had hardly been a hotel, only a pub, though it had a room or two to let and used to do a farmers’ lunch (roast beef and Yorkshire, suet dumpling and Stilton cheese) on market days.
It all seemed different except for the public bar, which I got a glimpse of as I went past, and which looked the same as ever. I went up a passage with a soft carpet, and hunting prints and copper warming-pans and such-like junk hanging on the walls. And dimly I could remember the passage as it used to be, the hollowed-out flags underfoot, and the smell of plaster mixed up with the smell of beer. A smart-looking young woman, with frizzed hair and a black dress, who I suppose was the clerk or something, took my name at the office.
‘You wish for a room, sir? Certainly, sir. What name shall I put down, sir?’
I paused. After all, this was my big moment. She’d be pretty sure to know the name. It isn’t common, and there are a lot of us in the churchyard. We were one of the old Lower Binfield families, the Bowlings of Lower Binfield. And though in a way it’s painful to be recognized, I’d been rather looking forward to it.
‘Bowling,’ I said very distinctly. ‘Mr George Bowling.’
‘Bowling, sir. B-O-A–oh! B-O-W? Yes, sir. And you are coming from London, sir?’
No response. Nothing registered. She’d never heard of me. Never heard of George Bowling, son of Samuel Bowling–Samuel Bowling who, damn it! had had his half-pint in this same pub every Saturday for over thirty years.
2
The dining-room had changed, too.
I could remember the old room, though I’d never had a meal there, with its brown mantelpiece and its bronzy-yellow wallpaper–I never knew whether it was meant to be that colour, or had just got like that from age and smoke–and the oil-painting, also by Wm. Sandford, Painter & Carpenter, of the
