Charles G. Harper

“ For the why of it, I know not; unless indeed it be that we English are ever a thought too practical, and honour, not so much endeavour, as success. Alfred was successful; Harold in the end was crushed, and his England broken. Yet it was not himself was lacking; it was his rash irregulars, who, by their headlong zeal, lost him the day. He strove his utmost, and that utmost was, beyond rivalry, noble.
To say, “He did his best,” is the noblest epitaph we can give any man, and none should grudge Harold posthumous honour. ”

“ Indeed, the climate of Hastings is a matter of as great concern to the town as her looks to a woman: it is her chief asset. You may read strange things of the Hastings climate, and indeed of that of any seaside town whose business is to attract visitors; and you will find, as a matter of curiosity, that Hastings claims not one climate, but several, according to height and position. Like the artful sinner who tried to get the best of both this world and the next, Hastings wants it both ways, and would have you believe it has actually got it, too. ”

“ The way out of Tonbridge lies over the railway bridge, past the station, where the banging of trucks and the screaming of whistles are continuous, and South-Eastern trains are, like practical jokers, for ever pretending to go off, just to flurry and excite nervous passengers, and then coming back and casually shunting up and down the sidings when they ought to be miles distant on their journeys ”

“ To the motorist, who changes from high-gear to lower, and then,viii as the gradient stiffens, to lowest, and so with labouring engine crawls uphill, like a bluebottle up a window-pane, the revulsion from charging along the levels at an illegal pace, raising veritable siroccos of dust, is heart-breaking.
Sevenoaks town crests the ramparted downs, and the hilly road goes up to it in steep lengths, with other lengths as near as may be flat, leading you to believe you are there, when in sheer cold fact you are not there, and still have other incredible gradients to climb. ”

“ The long, long ascent to Sevenoaks, which crowns a ridge seven hundred feet above the sea-level, does not lack beauty, lined as it is for a considerable distance with hedgerow elms. But it puts on another kind of beauty at night, for as you come past the railway-station, and look down in the darkness upon the galaxy of red and green signal lights, it seems like a lavish Arabian Nights display of rubies and emeralds spread out there, in the black cutting. ”

“ No one could ever entertain the remotest doubt of Hastings being, in the most intimate sense, the seaside. The roadway of the front, especially the front of the Old Town, is so narrow, and the groyne-protected beach in general of such meagre proportions that, to be housed on the front, is to enjoy every sea-salty benefit of an ocean voyage, without its accompanying miseries of sickness. ”

“ In the unconventional streets of the Old Town you lounge in the sunshine at open windows, or squat in unconcerned deshabille on doorsteps, gossiping across the width of the road; in modern Hastings the streets are of a greater width, but the manners are more strait, and you do not gaze forth from windows or exchange scandal with the house opposite. ”

“ The Norman invasion of England, the catastrophe of Senlac, and the woes that then befell the English may all be traced to the weak character and foolish policy of Edward the Confessor, a king whose reputation for piety has, during all these intervening centuries, glozed over his lack of the first qualities of kingship. Firm rule, wise and far-seeing policy at home and abroad—those are the qualities, above all others, we look for in a king, and mere saintliness of character in a ruler has never yet, nor ever will, serve the turn of any nation. ”

“ On the way from Old Town to New, passing a flagrant music-hall and the hideous stucco semicircle of Pelham Crescent, you perceive, up aloft, on the craggy cliff’s edge, the ragged ruins of the old Norman Castle of Hastings, whose grey and mouldering walls are craggy as those chalk cliffs themselves. ”

“ There the way recedes ever into the infinite, and there, if anywhere, the hurtling motorist is to be excused of his illegality. Here, however, on the way to Hastings, you linger by hillside and valley, for the road goes through the most beautiful parts of Sussex and of Kent, and marches through much diverting social and national history, to the scene of the crowning tragedy of Battle. ”

“ The College stands within six acres of beautifully wooded grounds, with lovely lawns and gardens, and is very thoroughly fenced off from the clatter of the outside world by an ancient brick wall, tall and thick. Through the wrought-iron gateway, dated 1666, flanked by piers surmounted with sculptured mitres, glimpses of the front are caught behind the blossoming horse-chestnuts.
The little houses surround the quadrangle, which has its lawn, its covered walk, like an up-to-date and domesticated cloister, and its climbing-plants twisting round the pillars of the Jacobean colonnade. ”

“ Here, then, having come through all the hazards and chances of New Cross and the Lewisham High Road, we are arrived at the Ravensbourne and Lewisham. The Ravensbourne, although not a stream of great size, and with a course of but twelve miles, from its fountain-head on Keston Common to its mouth amid the mud of Deptford Creek, is yet a river of considerable historic, or legendary, importance, and—more important still—it is due to the Ravensbourne that the last surviving beauties of Lewisham are so beautiful. ”

“ Socially, too, Tunbridge Wells of to-day is the antipodes of what it was. The traveller of old who “took the waters,” presently arriving “by the grace of God,” in his chariot, or by public coach, did no sooner come up from Tonbridge within sight of the Spa, than he was assailed by a swarm of touts who thrust their heads into the windows, eager to bespeak his custom:
Soon as they set eyes on you, off flies the hat:
Does your honour want this? does your honour want that?
To-day you enter from the railway-station, and the only people who take any interest in you are the cabmen. ”

“ To the active and enterprising it is no difficult matter to climb the tall locked gate of the enclosure that keeps out the swarming mischievous children that come destructively up out of Hastings, and easy to avoid the plentiful nails and savage barbed wire that would induce others to seek the keys at Ore Place.
It is a melancholy ruin of a fine church in the Perpendicular style, built over five hundred years ago, and left to moulder away because the neighbourhood lusted for the brand new building beside the road, yonder. ”

“ Midway between the date of those humble old dwellings and the modern shops is one old-fashioned shop where they sell hay, corn, straw, beans, and sweet-smelling seeds of all kinds. The name over the fascia is “Shove,” singularly inapplicable to this quiet, unassuming frontage.1 To gaze upon its small-paned windows, to see and scent the hay and the fragrant contents of its bins of beans, peas, and varied seeds, must surely, with the coming of every spring, set the prisoned wage-earners of Lewisham longing keenly for the banished country whose breath comes fragrant from within. ”

“ Beyond this, one comes in a mile to the casual, disjointed, and scattered collection of houses called Farnborough, once a spruce and busy “thoroughfare” hamlet in the days of coaching: now a rather seedy place of resident market-gardeners and tramping hop-pickers. The old “George and Dragon” inn, that in the Queen Annean sort faces you on approach and, as it were, plants its considerable bulk half-way into the road, as though to dare your passing, has been furbished up in the public-house kind, and without difficulty stops the passage of most. ”

“ Ever since the historic period, and doubtless long before the era of recorded things began, there existed a castle, or a fortified post, on this lofty cliff-top, where the shattered ruins of Hastings Castle still stand, few and almost formless—the long superannuated warden of the town that has grown so great and has now absolutely no defences against the foreign foe. ”

“ It is a most worshipful Gateway: strong and tall and massive, so that one cannot, in naming it, do else than give it a capital G. There is scarce a more impressive Gateway in England. It was built somewhere about 1290, in the reign of Edward the First, as the architecture of its great drum-towers shows, and was the last word in massive fortification of that time: the walls ten feet thick and fifty-three feet high, the gloomy entrance arch ribbed with immense ribs of stone, the outer face of the towers relieved only by narrow slits for arrows. ”

“ And yet, returning, you shall find the descent by no means so precipitous. River Hill by that time will have taken pride of place.
For the other hills, let them be taken on trust; they are surely there, as also are those long rises, insensible to the sight of the toiling cyclist, but patent to his feeling as he wearily pushes round his unwilling pedals. For the motor-cyclist, with disabled engine, the Hastings Road is more tragical than anything Shakespeare ever staged. ”

“ It is as the road to Sevenoaks, to Tonbridge, and to the “Wells” that we first hear of this route in the coaching way; and, as ever, we hear first of the carriers and their waggons. Goods were conveyed on wheels long before travellers, and the heavy, cumbrous wains, drawn by eight or ten horses, and rarely going three miles an hour, carried heavy merchandise and the poorest kind of wayfarers quite a century before the horsemen, riding singly or with their ladies on a pillion behind them, took to what was at first considered the “effeminate” practice of riding in coaches. ”

“ Down by Dunton Green, looking backwards, the hills, those noble North Downs, are seen to go terracing away beautifully east and west, their great, green, rounded shoulders dimpled with folds and gullies, shaggy here and there with belts of trees, or scarred outrageously with great gashes of chalk-pits, where the lime-burners every day demolish yet another fragment of picturesque scenery and roast it in limekilns, to the end that it may go towards the making of mortar and mean streets. ”

“ It is not worth the while exploring the New London Road. It is dispiriting, and those electric tramways that are the tyrants of the roads for miles around Hastings and St. Leonards render the way of the cyclist down Silverhill hazardous in the extreme. It is true the map shows the attractive name of “Bohemia” here, but it is only a mean—the meanest and miserablest—suburb. ”

“ In short, Hastings, by her own showing, is one of those favoured (not to say miraculous) places each of which has the better climate than any other, where the sun shines just so long and so brilliantly as you please, where the winds are never rude and the air never stagnant, and there are four hundred fine days (at the very least of it) to the three hundred and sixty-five of every year.
When Hastings really did begin to rise it grew quickly, and speedily overspread, not merely the old-time site, but brought into existence the twin town of St. Leonards as well. ”

“ The stage is the last ditch of convention; but the time is at hand when some dramatist will give us a stout and haughty workhouse inmate, a humble and cringing duke, and an alderman virtuoso; and he will be quite as loudly hailed for an emancipator as ever was Robertson.
The Dukes of Dorset lived up to the fine alliteration of their title, and when that became impossible, they died out, like the oxyrhincus and the mastodon, who could not survive their environment. There is scarce a modern duke who, in the spectacular way, is worthy his title. Some are bored men and commonplace ”

“ Not, perhaps, altogether so hilly as the Dover Road, and certainly never so dusty, nor so Cockneyfied; but the cyclist who explores it finds, or thinks he finds, an amazing amount of rising gradient in proportion to downhill, no matter which way he goes.
Sevenoaks town, the matter of twenty miles down the road, is certainly preceded by the long, swooping down-grades of Polhill; but the lengthiest descent, by mere measurement in rods, poles, and perches, is only an incident in descending, while the inevitable corresponding rise is, the climbing of it, a long-drawn experience. ”