little reserve put by for a rainy day. That rainy day had come, and I set
to work.
I soon discovered that writing a play was a longer business than I had
supposed; at first I had reckoned ten days for it, and it was to have a
pied-a-terre while it was in hand that I came to Lympne. I reckoned myself
lucky in getting that little bungalow. I got it on a three years'
agreement. I put in a few sticks of furniture, and while the play was in
hand I did my own cooking. My cooking would have shocked Mrs. Bond. And
yet, you know, it had flavour. I had a coffee-pot, a sauce-pan for eggs,
and one for potatoes, and a frying-pan for sausages and bacon - such was
the simple apparatus of my comfort. One cannot always be magnificent, but
simplicity is always a possible alternative. For the rest I laid in an
eighteen-gallon cask of beer on credit, and a trustful baker came each
day. It was not, perhaps, in the style of Sybaris, but I have had worse
times. I was a little sorry for the baker, who was a very decent man
indeed, but even for him I hoped.
Certainly if any one wants solitude, the place is Lympne. It is in the
clay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea cliff
and stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea. In very wet
weather the place is almost inaccessible, and I have heard that at times
the postman used to traverse the more succulent portions of his route with
boards upon his feet. I never saw him doing so, but I can quite imagine
it. Outside the doors of the few cottages and houses that make up the
present village big birch besoms are stuck, to wipe off the worst of the
clay, which will give some idea of the texture of the district. I doubt if
the place would be there at all, if it were not a fading memory of things
gone for ever. It was the big port of England in Roman times, Portus
Lemanus, and now the sea is four miles away. All down the steep hill are
boulders and masses of Roman brickwork, and from it old Watling Street,
still paved in places, starts like an arrow to the north. I used to stand
on the hill and think of it all, the galleys and legions, the captives and
officials, the women and traders, the speculators like myself, all the
swarm and tumult that came clanking in and out of the harbour. And now
just a few lumps of rubble on a grassy slope, and a sheep or two - and me
And where the port had been were the levels of the marsh, sweeping round
in a broad curve to distant Jungeness, and dotted here and there with tree
clumps and the church towers of old medical towns that are following
Lemanus now towards extinction.
That outlook on the marsh was, indeed, one of the finest views I have ever
seen. I suppose Jungeness was fifteen miles away; it lay like a raft on
the sea, and farther westward were the hills by Hastings under the setting
sun. Sometimes they hung close and clear, sometimes they were faded and
low, and often the drift of the weather took them clean out of sight. And
all the nearer parts of the marsh were laced and lit by ditches and
canals.
The window at which I worked looked over the skyline of this crest, and it
