As the trees thinned out again you could see the other road and the wall of Binfield House. The old rotting wooden fence was gone, of course, and they’d put up a high brick wall with spikes on top, such as you’d expect to see round a loony-bin. I’d puzzled for some time about how to get into Binfield House until finally it had struck me that I’d only to tell them my wife was mad and I was looking for somewhere to put her. After that they’d be quite ready to show me round the grounds. In my new suit I probably looked prosperous enough to have a wife in a private asylum. It wasn’t till I was actually at the gate that it occurred to me to wonder whether the pool was still inside the grounds.
The old grounds of Binfield House had covered fifty acres, I suppose, and the grounds of the loony-bin weren’t likely to be more than five or ten. They wouldn’t want a great pool of water for the loonies to drown themselves in. The lodge, where old Hodges used to live, was the same as ever, but the yellow brick wall and the huge iron gates were new. From the glimpse I got through the gates I wouldn’t have known the place. Gravel walks, flower-beds, lawns, and a few aimless-looking types wandering about–loonies, I suppose. I strolled up the road to the right. The pool–the big pool, the one where I used to fish–was a couple of hundred yards behind the house. It might have been a hundred yards before I got to the corner of the wall. So the pool was outside the grounds. The trees seemed to have got much thinner. I could hear children’s voices. And Gosh! there was the pool.
I stood for a moment, wondering what had happened to it. Then I saw what it was–all the trees were gone from round its edge. It looked all bare and different, in fact it looked extraordinarily like the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Kids were playing all round the edge, sailing boats and paddling, and a few rather older kids were rushing about in those little canoes which you work by turning a handle. Over to the left, where the old rotting boat-house used to stand among the reeds, there was a sort of pavilion and a sweet kiosk, and a huge white notice saying UPPER BINFIELD MODEL YACHT CLUB.
I looked over to the right. It was all houses, houses, houses. One might as well have been in the outer suburbs. All the woods that used to grow beyond the pool, and grew so thick that they were like a kind of tropical jungle, had been shaved flat. Only a few clumps of trees still standing round the houses. There were arty-looking houses, another of those sham–Tudor colonies like the one I’d seen the first day at the top of Chamford Hill, only more so. What a fool I’d been to imagine that these woods were still the same! I saw how it was. There was just the one tiny bit of copse, half a dozen acres perhaps, that hadn’t been cut down, and it was pure chance that I’d walked through it on my way here. Upper Binfield, which had been merely a name in the old days, had grown into a decent-sized town. In fact it was merely an outlying chunk of Lower Binfield.
I wandered up to the edge of the pool. The kids were splashing about and making the devil of a noise. There seemed to be swarms of them. The water looked kind of dead. No fish in it now. There was a chap standing watching the kids. He was an oldish chap with a bald head and a few tufts of white hair, and pince-nez and very sunburnt face. There was something vaguely queer about his appearance. He was wearing shorts and sandals and one of those celanese shirts open at the neck, I noticed, but what really struck me was the look in his eye. He had very blue eyes that kind of twinkled at you from behind his spectacles. I could see that he was one of those old men who’ve never grown up. They’re always either health-food cranks or else they have something to do with the Boy Scouts–in either case they’re great ones for Nature and the open air. He was looking at me as if he’d like to speak.
‘Upper Binfield’s grown a great deal,’ I said.
He twinkled at me.
‘Grown! My dear sir, we never allow Upper Binfield to grow. We pride ourselves on being rather exceptional people up here, you know. Just a little colony of us all by ourselves. No interlopers–te-hee!’
‘I mean compared with before the war,’ I said. ‘I used to live here as a boy.’
‘Oh-ah. No doubt. That was before my time, of course. But the Upper Binfield Estate is something rather special in the way of building estates, you know. Quite a little world of its own.
All designed by young Edward Watkin, the architect. You’ve heard of him, of course. We live in the midst of Nature up here. No connexion with the town down there’–he waved a hand in the direction of Lower Binfield–‘the dark satanic mills–te-hee!’
He had a benevolent old chuckle, and a way of wrinkling his face up, like a rabbit. Immediately, as though I’d asked him, he began telling me all about the Upper Binfield Estate and young Edward Watkin, the architect, who had such a feeling for the Tudor, and was such a wonderful fellow at finding genuine Elizabethan beams in old farmhouses and buying them at ridiculous prices. And such an interesting young fellow, quite the life and soul of the nudist parties. He repeated a number of times that they were very exceptional people in Upper Binfield, quite different from Lower Binfield, they were determined to enrich the countryside instead of defiling it (I’m using his own phrase), and there weren’t any public houses on the estate.
‘They talk of their Garden Cities. But we call Upper Binfield the Woodland City–te-hee! Nature!’ He waved a hand at what was left of the trees. ‘The primeval forest brooding round us. Our young people grow up amid surroundings of natural beauty. We are nearly all of us enlightened people, of course. Would you credit that three-quarters of us up here are vegetarians? The local butchers don’t like us at all–te-hee! And some quite eminent people live here. Miss Helena Thurloe, the novelist–you’ve heard of her, of course. And Professor Woad, the psychic research worker. Such a poetic character! He goes wandering out into the woods and the family can’t find him at mealtimes. He says he’s walking among the fairies. Do you believe in fairies? I admit–te-hee!–I am just a wee bit sceptical. But his photographs are most convincing.’
I began to wonder whether he was someone who’d escaped from Binfield House. But no, he was sane enough, after a fashion. I knew the type. Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry, nature-worship, roll in the dew before breakfast. I’d met a few of them years ago in Ealing. He began to show me round the estate. There was nothing left of the woods. It was all houses, houses–and what houses! Do you know these faked-up Tudor houses with the curly roofs and the buttresses that don’t buttress anything, and the rock-gardens with concrete bird-baths and those red plaster elves you can buy at the florists’? You could see in your mind’s eye the awful gang of food-cranks and spook-hunters and simple-lifers with £1,000 a year that lived there. Even the pavements were crazy. I didn’t let him take me far. Some of the houses made me wish I’d got a hand-grenade in my pocket. I tried to damp him down by asking whether people didn’t object to living so near the lunatic asylum, but it didn’t have much effect. Finally I stopped and said:
‘There used to be another pool, besides the big one. It can’t be far from here.’
‘Another pool? Oh, surely not. I don’t think there was ever another pool.’
‘They may have drained it off,’ I said. ‘It was a pretty deep pool. It would leave a big pit behind.’
For the first time he looked a bit uneasy. He rubbed his nose.
‘Oh-ah. Of course, you must understand our life up here is in some ways primitive. The simple life, you know. We prefer it so. But being so far from the town has its inconveniences, of course. Some of our sanitary arrangements are not altogether satisfactory. The dust-cart only calls once a month, I believe.’
‘You mean they’ve turned the pool into a rubbish-dump?’
‘Well, there is something in the nature of a–’ he shied at the word rubbish-dump. ‘We have to dispose of tins and so forth, of course. Over there, behind that clump of trees.’
We went across there. They’d left a few trees to hide it. But yes, there it was. It was my pool, all right. They’d drained the water off. It made a great round hole, like an enormous well, twenty
