FROM A DISTANCE
or what may be a great bay. It is the sense of making discoveries, of a world's opening-up.
In both, at the start, there will be the essential provincialism. The London child, with his unconscious acknowledgement of impersonal vistas, of infinite miles of unmeaning streets, of horizons that are the blur of lamps in fogs, simultaneously acknowledges personalities, local oddities, local celebrities of whom Shepherd's Bush, Highgate or Knightsbridge may be proud. For the provincial adolescent there will be the Squire with his long beard and gouty walk, the Mayor with his shop in the High Street, the Doctor with his face screwed up as if he were tasting the full bitterness of one of his own potions. The London child, however, will earlier overcome his awe. of personalities. He will wonder at the man, sallow, tiny, wizened and skew-featured, who, with the whispered reputation of a miser able to roll himself in sovereigns, and a hazy identity in a child's mind with, say, Sweeny Todd the Demon Barber, sells him spring-pistols, catapult elastic and alley-taws in the dim and evil light of a small shop with windows obscured by broadsheets and penny dreadfuls. He will attach a certain significance to the grimy stretch of waste ground—it will by now have been, ah, so long since "built over"—on which he played cricket with meat tins for a wicket, or fought a dismal battle with a big boy from "another school". But these local feelings sink very soon into the solid background of memories. He will discover other catapult sellers, he will find playing fields larger and more green, he will have it brought home
5
