Great Throughts Treasury

"And behind their frail partitions business women lie and soak, seeing through the draughty skylight flying clouds and railway smoke. Rest you there, poor unbelov'd ones, lap your loneliness in heat, all too soon the tiny breakfast, trolley-bus and windy street!"

"A verge in front of your house and grass and a tree for the dog. Variety created in the fa‡ades of each of the houses - in the coloring of the trees. In fact, the country had come to the suburbs. Roses are blooming in Metro-Land just as they do in the brochures."

"Aylesbury and the Vale. In those wet fields the railway didn't pay. The Metro stops at Amersham to-day."

"And marbled clouds go scudding by the many-steepled London sky."

"And here, screened by shrubs, walled in from public view, lived the kept women. What puritan arms have stretched within these rooms to touch what tender breasts, as the cab-horse stamped in the road outside. sweet secret suburb on the City's rim, St John's Wood."

"But I'm dying now and done for, what on earth was all the fun for? I am ill and old and terrified and tight."

"And is it true And is it true, This most tremendous tale of all, Seen in a stained-glass window's hue, A Baby in an ox's stall."

"And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait; Because I have a luncheon date."

"Child of the First War, forgotten by the Second. We called you Metro-Land. We laid our schemes lured by the lush brochure, down byways beckoned, to build at last the cottage of our dreams, a City clerk turned countryman again, and linked to the Metropolis by train."

"Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows."

"Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, there isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death!"

"Ghastly Good Taste, or a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture."

"He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book. He staggered?and, terrible-eyed, He brushed past the palms on the staircase And was helped to a hansom outside."

"Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans. Spare their women for Thy Sake, and if that is not too easy, we will pardon Thy Mistake. But, gracious Lord, whate'er shall be, don't let anyone bomb me."

"Has it held, the warm June weather?"

"He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer"

"He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer as he gazed at the London skies through the Nottingham lace of the curtains or was it his bees-winged eyes?"

"He would have liked to say goodbye, shake hands with many friends. In Highgate now his finger-bones stick through his finger-ends. You, God, who treat him thus and thus, say, Save his soul and pray. You ask me to believe You and I only see decay."

"History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side."

"Hymn tunes are the nearest we've got to English folk music."

"Hymns are the poetry of the people."

"I am a young executive. No cuffs than mine are cleaner; I have a Slimline brief-case and I use the firm's Cortina."

"I have a Vision of the Future, chum. The workers flats in fields of soya beans tower up like silver pencils, score on score."

"I know what I wanted to ask you; Is trifle sufficient for sweet."

"I don't think I am any good. If I thought I was any good, I wouldn't be."

"In the licorice fields at Pontefract my love and I did meet and many a burdened licorice bush was blooming round our feet; red hair she had and golden skin, her sulky lips were shaped for sin, her sturdy legs were flannel-slack'd the strongest legs in Pontefract.?"

"I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think."

"I heard the church bells hollowing out the sky, deep beyond deep, like never-ending stars."

"Inexpensive Progress, encase your legs in nylons, bestride your hills with pylons O age without a soul; away with gentle willows and all the elmy billows that through your valleys roll. Let's say goodbye to hedges and roads with grassy edges and winding country lanes; let all things travel faster where motor car is master till only Speed remains. Destroy the ancient inn-signs but strew the roads with tin signs 'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!' Command, instruction, warning, repetitive adorning the rockeried roundabout; for every raw obscenity must have its small 'amenity,' Its patch of shaven green, and hoardings look a wonder in banks of floribunda with floodlights in between. Leave no old village standing which could provide a landing for aeroplanes to roar, but spare such cheap defacements as huts with shattered casements unlived-in since the war. Let no provincial High Street which might be your or my street look as it used to do, but let the chain stores place here their miles of black glass facia and traffic thunder through. And if there is some scenery, some unpretentious greenery, surviving anywhere, it does not need protecting for soon we'll be erecting a Power Station there. When all our roads are lighted by concrete monsters sited like gallows overhead, bathed in the yellow vomit each monster belches from it, we'll know that we are dead."

"Is this Buckingham Palace? Are we at the Ritz? No. This is the Chiltern Court Restaurant, built above Baker Street station, the gateway between Metro-land out there and London down there. The creation of the Metropolitan Railway."

"It's strange that those we miss the most are those we take for granted."

"Keep our Empire un-dismembered guide our Forces by Thy Hand, gallant blacks from far Jamaica, Honduras and Togoland; protect them Lord in all their fights, and even more, protect the whites."

"Late-Flowering Lust: My head is bald, my breath is bad, unshaven is my chin, I have not now the joys I had when I was young in sin. I run my fingers down your dress with brandy-certain aim and you respond to my caress and maybe feel the same. But I've a picture of my own on this reunion night, wherein two skeletons are shewn to hold each other tight; dark sockets look on emptiness which once was loving-eyed, the mouth that opens for a kiss has got no tongue inside. I cling to you inflamed with fear as now you cling to me, I feel how frail you are my dear and wonder what will be--A week? or twenty years remain? And then--what kind of death? A losing fight with frightful pain or a gasping fight for breath? Too long we let our bodies cling, we cannot hide disgust at all the thoughts that in us spring from this late-flowering lust."

"Let us hold hands and look."

"Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another-"

"No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm confirm the message. His wife stands timidly by. The opposite brick-built house looks lofty and calm, its chimneys steady against the mackerel sky."

"Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn, furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun, what strenuous singles we played after tea, we in the tournament ? you against me!"

"Oh shall I see the Thames again? The prow-promoted gems again, as beefy ATS without their hats come shooting through the bridge? And "cheerioh" and "cheeri-bye" across the waste of waters die, and low the mists of evening lie and lightly skims the midge."

"Oh wind and water, this is Felixstowe."

"Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold."

"Oh! Would I were her racket pressed With hard excitement to her breast."

"One mark of good verse is surprise"

"Phone for the fish-knives, Norman, As Cook is a little unnerved You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes And I must have things daintily served."

"People's backyards are much more interesting than their front gardens, and houses that back on to railways are public benefactors."

"Safe were those evenings of the pre-war world when firelight shone on green linoleum, I heard the church bells hollowing out the sky, deep beyond deep, like never-ending stars."

"Saint Pancras was a fourteen-year old Christian boy who was martyred in Rome in AD 304 by the Emperor Diocletian. In England he is better known as a railway station."

"Steam took us onwards, through the ripening fields, ripe for development. Where the landscape yields clay for warm brick, timber for post and rail through Amersham to"

"Silver and ermine and red faces full of port wine."

"Soft and sun-warm, see her glide."

"Sing on, with hymns uproarious, ye humble and aloof, look up! and oh how glorious he has restored the roof!"