This desolate garden-land had been even in my youth scrappily planned out for building.  The half-built or empty houses had appeared quite threateningly on the edge of this heath even when I walked over it years ago and almost as a boy.  I was astonished that the building had gone no farther; I suppose somebody went bankrupt and somebody else disliked building.  But I remember, especially along one side of this tangle or coppice, that there had once been a row of half-built houses.  The brick of which they were built was a sort of plain pink; everything else was a blinding white; the houses smoked with white dust and white sawdust; and on many of the windows were rubbed those round rough disks of white which always delighted me as a child.  They looked like the white eyes of some blind giant.

I could see the crude, parched pink-and-white villas still; though I had not thought at all of them for a quarter of my life; and had not thought much of them even when I saw them.  Then I was an idle, but eager youth walking out from London; now I was a most reluctantly busy middle-aged person, coming in from the country.  Youth, I think, seems farther off than childhood, for it made itself more of a secret.  Like a prenatal picture, distant, tiny, and quite distinct, I saw this heath on which I stood; and I looked around for the string of bright, half-baked villas.  They still stood there; but they were quite russet and weather-stained, as if they had stood for centuries.

I remembered exactly what I had done on that day long ago.  I had half slid on a miry descent; it was still there; a little lower I had knocked off the top of a thistle; the thistles had not been discouraged, but were still growing.  I recalled it because I had wondered why one knocks off the tops of thistles; and then I had thought of Tarquin; and then I had recited most of Macaulay’s Virginia to myself, for I was young.  And then I came to a tattered edge where the very tuft had whitened with the sawdust and brick-dust from the new row of houses; and two or three green stars of dock and thistle grew spasmodically about the blinding road.

I remembered how I had walked up this new one-sided street all those years ago; and I remembered what I had thought.  I thought that this red and white glaring terrace at noon was really more creepy and more lonesome than a glimmering churchyard at midnight.  The churchyard could only be full of the ghosts of the dead; but these houses were full of the ghosts of the unborn.  And a man can never find a home in the future as he can find it in the past.  I was always fascinated by that mediaeval notion of erecting a rudely carpentered stage in the street, and acting on it a miracle play of the Holy Family or the Last Judgment.  And I thought to myself that each of these glaring, gaping, new jerry-built boxes was indeed a rickety stage erected for the acting of a real miracle play; that human family that is almost the holy one, and that human death that is near to the last judgment.