ars, Eastry after Eastry, one parson down
another come, one grocer dead, get another! Any one with any ideas
better go away. They HAVE gone away! Look at all these blessed people
in this place! Look at 'em! All fast asleep, doing their business out
of habit--in a sort of dream, Stuffed men would do just as well--just.
They've all shook down into their places. THEY don't want anything to
happen either. They're all broken in. There you are! Only what are they
all alive for?...

"Why can't they get a clockwork chemist?"

He concluded as he often concluded these talks. "I must invent
something,--that's about what I must do. Zzzz. Some convenience.
Something people want.... Strike out.... You can't think, George, of
anything everybody wants and hasn't got? I mean something you could turn
out retail under a shilling, say? Well, YOU think, whenever you haven't
got anything better to do. See?"

II

So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a little
fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my fermenting head all
sorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was educational....

For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active growth.
Most of my leisure and much of my time in the shop I spent in study.
I speedily mastered the modicum of Latin necessary for my qualifying
examinations, and--a little assisted by the Government Science and Art
Department classes that were held in the Grammar School--went on with my
mathematics. There were classes in physics, in chemistry, in mathematics
and machine drawing, and I took up these subjects with considerable
avidity. Exercise I got chiefly in the form of walks. There was some
cricket in the summer and football in the winter sustained by young
men's clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the big people and the
sitting member, but I was never very keen at these games. I didn't find
any very close companions among the youths of Wimblehurst. They struck
me, after my cockney schoolmates, as loutish and slow, servile and
furtive, spiteful and mean. WE used to swagger, but these countrymen
dragged their feet and hated an equal who didn't; we talked loud, but
you only got the real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a knowing undertone
behind its hand. And even then they weren't much in the way of thoughts.

No, I didn't like those young countrymen, and I'm no believer in the
English countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground for
honourable men.