I was walking with a friend along the Spaniards Road the other evening, talking on the inexhaustible theme of these days, when he asked: "What is the biggest thing that has happened to this country as the outcome of the war?"
"It is within two or three hundred yards from here," I replied. "Come this way and I'll show it to you."
He seemed a little surprised, but accompanied me cheerfully enough as I turned from the road and led him through the gorse and the trees towards Parliament Fields, until we came upon a large expanse of allotments, carved out of the great playground, and alive with figures, men, women, and children, some earthing up potatoes, some weeding onion beds, some thinning out carrots, some merely walking along the patches and looking at the fruits of their labour springing from the soil. "There," I said, "is the most important result of the war."
He laughed, but not contemptuously. He knew what I meant, and I think he more than half agreed.
And I think you will agree, too, if you will consider what that stretch of allotments means. It is the symptom of the most important , the greatest spiritual this country has seen for generations. Wherever you go that symptom meets you. Here in Hampstead allotments are as as blackberries in autumn. A friend of mine who lives in Beckenham tells me there are fifteen hundred in his parish. In the neighbourhood of London there must be many thousands. In the country as a whole there must be hundreds of thousands. If dear old Joseph Pels could revisit the glimpses of the moon and see what is happening, see the vacant lots and waste spaces bursting into onion beds and potato patches, what joy would be his! He was the of the revival, the pilgrim of the Vacant Lot; but his hot gospel fell on deaf ears, and he died just before the of war the .
Do not suppose that the greatness of this thing that is happening can be measured in terms of food. That is important, but it is not the most important thing. The allotment movement will add to our food supplies, but it will add far more to the spiritual resources of the nation. It is the beginning of a war on the disease that is our people. What is wrong with us? What is the root of our social and spiritual ? Is it not the divorce of the people from the soil? For generations the red blood of the country has been sucked into the great towns, and we have seen grow up a vast machine of industry that has made slaves of us, shut out the light of the fields from our lives, left our children to grow like weeds in the slums, rootless and waterless, poisoned the healthy instincts of nature implanted in us, and put in their place the rank growths of the streets. Can you walk through a London working-class district or a Lancashire cotton town, with their of airless streets, without a feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this enormous of life into the channels of death? Can you take pride in an Empire on which the sun never sets when you think of the courts in which, as Will says, the sun never rises?
And now the sun is going to rise. We have started a revolution that will not end until the breath of the earth has come back to the soul of the people. The tyranny of the machine is going to be broken. The dead hand is going to be lifted from the land. Yes, you say, but these people that I see working on the allotments are not the people from the courts and the slums; but professional men, the superior artisan, and so on. That is true. But the movement must get hold of the intelligenzia first. The important thing is that the in the prison is made: the fresh air is filtering in; the idea is born—not still-born, but born a living thing. It is a way of that will not be lost, and that all will traverse.
This is not dithyrambic enthusiasm. Take a man out of the street and put him in a garden, and you have made a new creature of him. I have seen the miracle again and again. I know a bus conductor, for example, outwardly the most ordinary of his kind. But one night I touched the key of his soul, mentioned allotments, and discovered that this man was going about his daily work irradiated by the thought of his garden triumphs. He had got a new purpose in life. He had got the spirit of the earth in his bones. It is not only the humanising influence of the garden, it is its democratising influence too.
When Adam and Eve span,
Where was then the gentleman?
You can get on terms with anybody if you will discuss gardens. I know a public servant and scholar whose allotment is next to that of a bricklayer. They have become fast friends, and the bricklayer, being the better man at the job, has unconsciously assumed the role of a master encouraging a well-meaning but not very competent pupil.
And think of the influence of all this. Light and air and labour—these are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul. It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the compass of our speech. In the great legend of the Fall the spiritual disaster of Man is symbolised by his from a garden, and the moral tragedy of modern industrialism is only the repetition of that ancient . Man lost his garden, and with it that of soul that is found in gardens. He must find his way back to Eden if he is to recover his spiritual heritage, and though Eden is but a twenty-pole allotment in the midst of a hundred other twenty-pole allotments, he will find it as full of wonder and as the garden of Epicurus. He will not find much help from the God that Mr. Wells has discovered, or invented, but the God that dwells in gardens is sufficient for all our needs—let the theologians say what they will.
Not God in gardens? When the eve is cool?
, but I have a sign—
'Tis very sure God walks in mine.
No one who has been a child in a garden will doubt the sign, or lose its impress through all his days. I know, for I was once a child whose world was a garden.
It lay a mile away from the little country town, shut out from the road by a noble hedge, so high that even Jim Berry, the giant coal-heaver, the wonder and the terror of my childhood, could not see over, so thick that no eye could peer through. It was a garden of plenty, but also a garden of the fancy, with neglected corners, rich in growths and full of romantic possibilities. It was in this wilder that I had found the hedgehog, here, too, had seen the glow-worm's delicate light, and here, with my brain excited by "The Story of the Hundred Days," that I knew the Frenchmen in while I at the head of my troop of the Black Watch was careering with magnificent courage across the open country where the potatoes and the rhubarb and the celery grew.
It was ever the Black Watch. Something in the name thrilled me. And when one day I packed a little handbag with a nightgown and ............