...
For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work must have
struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon him by his social
ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire that flamed out at last
in all these things. The evidence of a pathetic, perpetually thwarted
urgency to make something, is one of the most touching aspects of the
relics and records of our immediate ancestors. There exists still in the
death area about the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that
furnish the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs.
These homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously
proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite filthy,
only people in complete despair of anything better could have lived
in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little rectangle of land
called 'the garden,' containing usually a prop for drying clothes and
a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin, full of egg-shells, cinders, and
such-like refuse. Now that one may go about this region in comparitive
security--for the London radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable
proportions--it is possible to trace in nearly every one of
these gardens some effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank
summer-house, here it is a 'fountain' of bricks and oyster-shells, here
a 'rockery,' here a 'workshop.
Pages:
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237