"Finally I found work as a dresser in one of those temporary
hospitals which sprang up everywhere in such hurry as the
streams of wounded began to pour back from France. Ours was
pitched in a derelict pleasure-ground on the right bank of
Thames some way below Greenwich. . . . I don't suppose you ever
visited Casterville Gardens: as neither had I until I entered
them to do stretcher-drill, tend moaning men, and carry bloody
slops in the overgrown alleys that wound among its tawdry,
abandoned glories. It had a half-rotted pier of its own, upon
which, in Victorian days, the penny steam-boats had discharged
many thousands of crowds of pleasure-seekers. The gardens
occupied the semicircle of an old quarry, on which the
decorative landscape gardener had fallen to work with gusto,
planting it with conifers and stucco statues in winding walks
that landed you straight from the sightless wisdom of Socrates
and Milton, or the equally sightless allurement of Venus,
shielding her breasts, upon a skittle-alley, a bandstand, a
dancing-saloon, or a bar at which stood, for contrast, another
Venus, not eyeless, dispensing beer.
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