HINTS FOR A UTOPIA

Evening Star, Issue 22228, 4 January 1936, Page 16

HINTS FOR A UTOPIA

SUSSEX THE TRANQUIL When moving up and down and ’ through the network of ancient roads and Janes in Sussex, an Australian is sometimes jolted by a remembered contrast. Here were three things that impressed me, one after the other, on a bicycle ride early one morning writes .Nettie Palmer, in the ‘ Melbourne Argus ’). They were all, in their roundabout way. comfortable of graceful, or beautiful to some degree; and none of them owed its existence to its practical qualities. As a nation of pioneers wc have had to be practical, to take short cuts, to be realistic, often to be ugly. These three impressions in their easy inconsequence reminded me, more clearly even than the glimpse of a very ancient little church in a wood of beeches, or a couple'of disused windmills over on the downs, that 1 was not in Australia. There they were: A po stman delivering letters before breakfast time and going right up to the house door with them; a signpost with the name of a village in two words, Small Dole, or, another time. Hayward’s Heath; and, last, a small boy drawing water from a farmyard well by turning and turning a handle. L may bo mistaken if I say that none of those things would bo possible in Australia; but it is certain that our reasons against them would all be practical ones. In Australia, with rts enormous size, we have decided that it is more important to deliver a weekly mail to someone at a place beyond Oodnadatta than for the suburban postman to be given time to deliver his letters at every door. It is practical and economical to use letter boxes, and what higher praise could any system receive Then the letter-box probably saves two postmen’s jobs, and, as everyone knows, there are far too many jobs waiting'to bo done . . . let it go at that, a letter-box is practical. A house-to-house delivery is merely luxurious, even if it has its charm, and helps to make up the tranquility of Sussex life that is so much welcomed, not by the authentic farmers and farm labourers, who have their own worries, but by the countless comfortably off people who retire in Sussex as to a haven of incredible calm. The second striking reminder that I was not at home was the signpost “Small Dole.” Remember, that name, probably that very village, will be half as old as the Sussex weald on which it stands: it is not a funny name arising from the exigencies of modern life.' CLINGING TO NAMES. , All that impressed me about it as so un-Australian was the fact that it. recklessly kept its two names, and so does Hayward’s Heath, not far, away, and Hurst Pierpoint, and one after another. Some of these are the names of railway stations as well, and the double name still holds* There are more complex, more awkward names in other parts of England, too, and all of them preserved. On the way to Birmingham 1 noticed a station labelled- simply, if I remember rightly, “ Abbot’s Langley and Bishop’s Langley.” Extremely awkward, you will say. Well, it’s their affair. Obviously the names were there long before the railway was thought of, and when it came to the question of naming the station, which was to be killed off, the bishop or' the abbot ? Obviously you could not make such an act retrospective ; so they both survived. And Hurst Pierpoint survives and Small Dole, and hundreds of places on the wide, full map of Sussex. Has anyone ever suggested to people in those places that it would be a form of retrenchment to make the rule that obtains in a practical and modern country the rule that every railway station’s name shall consist of one word only?- Now I think of it, I am not quite sure that the mle was utterly enforced in Australia—oi was it a rule for Victoria only ? And was it fully and logically enforced there ? ‘ It was reasonable in the case of confusing names like “ South Brighton ’ (when -there were other Brightens) to use single words of another kind; but was it right to cut down the name of “ Digger’s Rest ” and call it “ Digger ” ? Perhaps that was only a suggestion never carried out. “ Digger’s Rest” was one of, our few historical names, the hal.tifor miners on their hot, dusty way to Bendigo, where our grandmothers slept for the night in the tipdray, while our grandfathers mounted guard over the stores; such an unforgettable rest! . . . The impulse to cut down a name like that, and many others in Australia, was savagely practical. Think what paint it would save on railway nameboards, . what ink in timetables, what vocal chords iq porters who had. to shout it. Quite true, but the reductio ad absurdum of all such plans for saving by simplification is clear enough. It has been written in a line:- “It’s reajly cheaper to be dead.” Sussex, in such matters, has decided not to economise, not to die. Its names are what it lives by, and it 1 will not suffer deprivation. THE SUSSEX ROOFS The third spectacle that morning was a small boy working very hard at a farm-yard pump, and it is not to bo supposed.that he was enjoying it. There had been a good deal of rain that week, after a long, golden-warm summer; the wells were still reluctant, as they deE ended on springs that had not yet een renewed. Nearly all the houses wore rather short of water, and certainly of baths, when every drop of water had to be pumped up. The well water was usually very hard, too, the soap making little more lather than on the condensed water at sea. After all the rain of last week why was there all this toil for the drawing of water. As an Australian, I was at last moving on to horribly-dangerous ground. I was about to suggest, actually, that Sussex homes might have, here or there, a small corrugated iron tank. Fortunately I did not suggest it aloud. I might as well have suggested that •under each Tudor house we might place, with well-timed care, a small, accurate bomb. For a galvanised iron tank, hideous and comical as it looks to most European eyes, does not end there. It required an iron roof to feed it. Look at Sussex roofs for a moment, that is, if you have not been looking at them entranced ever since you came. Those that are not thatched have found other ways of achieving gracious age. They, have a special kind of slate, roughly sliced, with many thick layers showing. And these ancient “ Horsham slabs,” graded in size from gabletop to roof-edge, have a trick of growing a neat, becoming moss, and sometimes little squat plants such as you expect on a rockery. The only danger is that such roofs become too attractive and get sold, roof plants and all, to be set up again overseas. Imagine the man who would dare to regard such a priceless possession as a more catchment area for water! Even my impulse to put a bowl or two on the lawn to catch some of the rain water that i-amo pelting and fresh from the thick grey sky—even such a gesture, I felt, was not at all welcomed in Sussex. There was the well to provide water, even if it was rather stingy about it; it was a very old well and deserved to have its feelings respected Bowls on the lawn, indeed; but that was

so wretchedly practical and had nothing else to recommend it! Sussex, in its good time, is acquiring a dignilied and adequate water supply in this direction or that, subterraneously and mysteriously. No makeshifts of glaring tanks attached to some building with a glaring roof! So the pumps and windlasses go on and on, or the water supply is elaborately planned for the future, and tho hamlets and- towns keep their double or "treble names; and the postman calls intimately at every door. These comforts and discretions and preservations may not spell Utopia to-day for those who work them ; but our own practical, short-cut methods, on the other hand, need to be recognised for what they are, merely convenient makeshifts in a new and hurrying country. When wo come to the time of planning our postponed Utopia I hope we can find a humanly possible equivalent of these gentle details.