And beyond it was an untidy-looking rubbish dump, a noisome wilderness into which the town’s sewage was discharged, loved only by rats and terriers and crows and little boys.

At the other side of the Abbey things were equally chaotic. There were more pubs—small squalid ones with spit-and-sawdust bars. There were Elizabethan almhouses, enchanting but scarcely habitable, which American tourists always wanted to buy, lock, stock, and barrel, so that they could carry them home, as explorers’ trophies, to the States. There were tumbledown cottages, dirty and overcrowded, with whole families sleeping in one small bedroom; roses in their pretty little front gardens, bugs in their beds. There was a dreadful “Italian Tea Garden” with umbrellas like striped mushrooms shading the tables on the lawn. There were shops which sold trivial souvenirs to visitors. There were allotments, smelling of dead cabbages and live pigs. And there was a pleasant cricket-field, margined by willows and cressy streams, its green turf hallowed by the feet of W. G. Grace who once played there, its pavilion roof still bearing honourable scars from the big hits of Gilbert Jessop.

The town itself, which straggled along the main road for half a mile or so, consisted of a haphazard assortment of ancient half-timbered houses and shops—some of these leaned across the street towards each other, like old wives gossiping—with later Georgian buildings among them, and the inevitable alleys, dozens of alleys, leading off the main road into the ruinous rabbit-warren of Elmbury’s slums. There were hundreds of acres of these slums. They were scandalous; they were far worse, probably, than many of the slums in London’s East End; but the extraordinary, the almost unbelievable thing about them was that as well as being terrifying they were curiously beautiful. The narrow crooked alleys, fantastical enough by day, at twilight seemed to belong to a Grimm’s fairy tale. By the time the moon had risen their metamorphosis was complete; they had dissolved into a monstrous and yet enchanting dreamland, they had become part of a City of Beautiful Nonsense. The tottering hunchback cottages leaned shoulder-to-shoulder like drunken men; if one of them fell down they’d all collapse in a heap. Their ragged eaves nearly met across the alley, fretting the tattered strip of sky into which crooked chimney-stacks intruded dangerously. Nothing was orderly, nothing rational. The chimneys defied the laws of gravity and even the stout oak beams which were the bones of the cottages were not straight, but bent like elbows—as if a forked tree had once stood there and the cottages had been built around it. One expected that when the doors of the dwellings opened there would emerge not people, but hobgoblins and dwarfs; and often enough there did.

The alleys nearest the river—and these were the dirtiest and most insanitary of all—often reminded visitors of parts of Venice; and here it was a common sight during the summer season to see a devoted artist squatting at his easel surrounded by cheeky urchins, ferociously painting a row of filthy and exquisite hovels, and chewing antiseptic lozenges like mad.

“Fields—Flocks—Flowers”

But the way to see Elmbury as a whole, to see it in all its squalor and all its glory, was to climb to the top of a nearby hill, a little hump like an overgrown haycock, curiously called the Toot. From here you could watch the light changing on the Abbey tower, so that sometimes it seemed as insubstantial as a dream, a grey ghost-tower brooding over the town, and at others, especially at set of sun, it smouldered and shone like a growing affirmation of faith. There are few towers like it in all the world, and one of them is at Caen in Normandy. On a day in June, 1944, I lay upon the forward slope of just such a little eminence as the Toot, and watched Caen burning around its Norman tower; and I thought that but for the geographical accident of our English Channel I might have watched Elmbury burn so.

From the Toot you could see, too, how clumsily and how untidily the town sprawled about the church: and how the rivers were a recurrent theme running through its history and the lives of its people. Two broad streams joined at Elmbury among a confusion of small brooks. These snaking waterways almost isolated the town even in summer; and when the floods rose in the winter they sometimes cut it off altogether, so that milk was delivered by rowing-boat and people punted through the back streets. At such times the meadows round Elmbury disappeared beneath a huge inland sea; and no doubt it was this annual flooding that made them so fertile and rich. There never was a greener countryside than those few square miles in which Elmbury was set, and what gave it a particularly fat and sumptuous appearance was the size of those river-meadows, which were large and liberal, pasturing fifty beasts apiece and yielding at haytime not one meagre rick but a whole rickyard. The biggest of all was Elmbury’s own field, called the Ham, which lay in the triangle between the confluent rivers and the town. It was something of a legal curiosity, and mixed up in its title-deeds were some of the principles of feudalism, capitalism, distributism, and communism. The hay crop belonged to a number of private owners, including the squire and the Abbey; their boundaries were marked mysteriously by means of little posts. They did not, however, mow their own hay; the Vicar didn’t come down from his vestry with a pitching fork; so the hay crop was sold each year, in little parcels none of which by themselves would have been worth the trouble of mowing.