me cottage all his life: his
father had lived there too; and his family, for several generations
before his father, had lived and worked in Boveyhayne. They had habits
and customs so old that no one knew the meaning of them. When Widger's
wife died, Widger and his family had gone to church on the Sunday after
her burial, as all the Boveyhayne bereaved do, and had sat through the
service, taking no part in it, neither kneeling to pray nor rising to
sing nor responding to the invocations. But Old Widger did not know why
he had behaved in that fashion, nor did any one in Boveyhayne. "Don't
seem no sense in it," he said, but nevertheless he did it, and nothing
on earth would have prevented him from doing it. It was the custom....

But there was no custom in London. There were no habits, no traditions,
nothing to hold on to in times of crisis or distress. There was no one
in London who had been born and had spent all his life in one house, in
a house, too, in which his father had been born and had lived and had
died. People took a house for three years ... and then moved to another
one. Locality had no meaning for them ... they hardly knew the names of
their neighbours ... they were not surrounded by cousins ... the roads
and streets had no meaning or memories for them ... they were just
thoroughfares, passages along which one walked or drove to a railway
station or a shopping centre....

And while Old Widger, if the thought had been put into his mind, would
stoutly have answered, "Us ain't never been beat!" a Londoner would have
answered, "My God, supposing we are beaten?..." Victory might be long in
being won. Widger would admit that. But "us ain't never been beat" he
would maintain. The Londoner would admit that victory might never be won
... and in making the admission, de-nationalised himself. Widger,
obstinate, immovable, imperturbable, kindly, unvengeful and resolute,
was English to the marrow ... and when Henry thought of England as a
conquering country, he thought of it as a nation of Widgers, not as a
nation of Cockneys.

"And it _is_ a nation of Widgers," he said to himself. "The Cockneys
shout more, print more, and they squeal a lot, but the Widgers are in
the majority!"

It was not until night fell that Henry's love of London was restored.
When the sky-signs were put out, and the shop-lights were diminished,
and the running flames announcing the merits of this one's whisky and
that one's tea were quenched, L