"Wells, H G - The War In The Air" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

Mr. Stringer nodded his head approvingly, and for a time they
continued to regard the swelling bulks with expressions that had
changed from indifference to disapproval.

Mr. Tom Smallways was a green-grocer by trade and a gardener by
disposition; his little wife Jessica saw to the shop, and Heaven
had planned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately Heaven had
not planned a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of
obstinate and incessant change, tand in parts where its
operations were unsparingly conspicuous. Vicissitude was in the
very soil he tilled; even his garden was upon a yearly tenancy,
and overshadowed by a huge board that proclaimed it not so much a
garden as an eligible building site. He was horticulture under
notice to quit, the last patch of country in a district flooded
by new and prbaa things. He did his best to console himself,
to imagine matters near the turn of the tide.

"You'd hardly think it could keep on," he said.

Mr. Smallways' aged father, could remember Bun Hill as an idyllic
Kentish village. He had driven Sir Peter Bone until he was fifty
and then he took to drink a little, and driving the station bus,
which lasted him until he was seventy-eight. Then he retired. He
sat by the fireside, a shrivelled, very, very old coachman,
full charged with reminiscences, and ready for any careless
stranger. He could tell you of the vanished estate of Sir Peter
Bone, long since cut up for building, and how that magnate ruled
the country-side when it was country-side, of shooting and
hunting, and of caches along the high road, of how "where the
gas-works is" was a cricket-field, and of the coming of the
Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace was six miles away from Bun
Hill, a great facade that glittered in the morning, and was a
clear blue outline against the sky in the afternoon, and of a
night, a source of gratuitous fireworks for all the population of
Bun Hill. And then had come the railway, and then villas and
villas, and then the gas-works and the water-works, and a great,
ugly sea of workmen's houses, and then drainage, and the water
vanished out of the Otterbourne and left it a dreadful ditch, and
then a second railway station, Bun Hill South, and more houses
and more, more shops, more competition, plate-glass shops, a
school-board, rates, omnibuses, tramcars--going right away into
London itself--bicycles, motor-cars and then more motor-cars, a
Carnegie library.

"You'd hardly think it could keep on," said Mr. Tom Smallways,
growing up among these marvels.

But it kept on. Even from the first the green-grocer's shop
which he had set up in one of the smallest of the old surviving
village houses in the tail of the High Street had a submerged