FOUR YEARS 1887?1891.
At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red?brick house with several wood mantlepieces copied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a baly, and a little garden shadowed by a great horse?chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiously picturesque streets, with great trees casting great shadows, had been ahusiasm: the Pre?Raphaelite movement at last affeg life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place of enthusiasm; the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were said to leak, which they did not, & the drains to be bad, though that was no lorue; and I imagihat houses were cheap. I remember feeling disappointed because the co?operative stores, with their little seveh tury panes, were so like any on shop; and because the public house, called The Tabard
after Chaucers Inn, was so plainly a on public house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre? Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big red?brick church had never pleased me, and I was aced, when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof, where nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some architect friend of my fathers, that it had been put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and helped us to feel not wholly lost iropolis. I no longer went to church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday m I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: The gregation are requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose. In front of every seat hung a little cushion, and these cushions were called kneelers. Presently the joke ran through the unity, where there were many artists, who sidered religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked that particular church.