etty lookin' fruit, but not what I should
call English apples," said Tom--bananas, unfamiliar nuts, grape fruits,
mangoes.

The motor-cars that went by northward and southward grew more and more
powerful and efficient, whizzed faster and smelt worse, there appeared
great clangorous petrol trolleys delivering coal and parcels in
the place of vanishing horse-vans, motor-omnibuses ousted the
horse-omnibuses, even the Kentish strawberries going Londonward in the
night took to machinery and clattered instead of creaking, and became
affected in flavour by progress and petrol.

And then young Bert Smallways got a motor bicycle....

2

Bert, it is necessary to explain, was a progressive Smallways.

Nothing speaks more eloquently of the pitiless insistence of progress
and expansion in our time than that it should get into the Smallways
blood. But there was something advanced and enterprising about young
Smallways before he was out of short frocks. He was lost for a whole
day before he was five, and nearly drowned in the reservoir of the new
water-works before he was seven. He had a real pistol taken away from
him by a real policeman when he was ten. And he learnt to smoke, not
with pipes and brown paper and cane as Tom had done, but with a penny
packet of Boys of England American cigarettes. His language shocked
his father before he was twelve, and by that age, what with touting for
parcels at the station and selling the Bun Hill Weekly Express, he was
making three shillings a week, or more, and spending it on Chips, Comic
Cuts, Ally Sloper's Half-holiday, cigarettes, and all the concomitants
of a life of pleasure and enlightenment. All of this without hindrance
to his literary studies, which carried him up to the seventh standard at
an exceptionally early age. I mention these things so that you may have
no doubt at all concerning the sort of stuff Bert had in him.

He was six years younger than Tom, and for a time there was an attempt
to utilise him in the green-grocer's shop when Tom at twenty-one married
Jessica--who was thirty, and had saved a little money in service. But it
was not Bert's forte to be utilised. He hated digging, and when he
was given a basket of stuff to deliver, a nomadic instinct arose
irresistibly, it became his pack and he did not seem to care how heavy
it was nor where he took it, so long as he did not take it to its
destination. Glamour filled the world, and he strayed after it, basket
and all.