and already in a year some of these raw houses stood empty again
from defaulting tenants, with windows broken and wood-work warping
and rotting. The Ravensbrook became a dump for old iron, rusty
cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river only when
unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of
surface water. . . .

That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of
Bromstead. The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative
life; that way had always been my first choice in all my walks with
my mother, and its rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it
indicative of all the other things that had happened just before my
time, or were still, at a less dramatic pace, happening. I realised
that building was the enemy. I began to understand why in every
direction out of Bromstead one walked past scaffold-poles into
litter, why fragments of broken brick and cinder mingled in every
path, and the significance of the universal notice-boards, either
white and new or a year old and torn and battered, promising sites,
proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and intimidating
passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of way.

It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time
and what I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that
even in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and
growing disorder. The serene rhythms of the old established
agriculture, I see now, were everywhere being replaced by
cultivation under notice and snatch crops; hedges ceased to be
repaired, and were replaced by cheap iron railings or chunks of
corrugated iron; more and more hoardings sprang up, and contributed
more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy paper scraps that flew