Bromstead. I went there as a day boy. The charge for my
instruction was mainly set off by the periodic visits of my father
with a large bag of battered fossils to lecture to us upon geology.
I was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school
work, I had a good memory, versatile interests and a considerable
appetite for commendation, and when I was barely twelve I got a
scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted with a
scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria. After my father's
death a large and very animated and solidly built uncle in tweeds
from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with
a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged
into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was
otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt
houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's
life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge within
sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace.
Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native
habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and
interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge
of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town
and outskirts of Bromstead.

It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more
completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were
the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges
and trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's
notice-board, the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal
Palace grounds cut off a large part of my walking radius to the west