Today, the complete peace of the English countryside disguises
the bitter struggles fought so recently for the survival of the Eng-
lish people. The yeoman with his inbred and eternal love of the
land tills his soil as earnestly as if two devastating wars had not
passed over his head in one generation; and Nature, with her
casual indifference to the plight of man and the armies that trample
on his breast, nonchalantly casts her opulence over fields and val-
leys, obliterating the scars of war and human sacrifice. Grass and
grain cover the earth with their healing, and orchard trees lift their
heads again to bloom in May.

So it is at Bromsgrove. True, the lorries roar all night through
High Street, which lies along the main thoroughfare to Birming-
ham; but two miles north lies a realm calm with quiet living. In
valleys green and suddenly still, the road where Housman walked
as a boy winds among hawthorn hedges and snug little farms. Gray
stone fences are sprayed with roses, and bearded barley ripples in
the breeze.

Within this area of northwest Worcestershire a ago lived
several notable families: The Housmans, the Brettells, the John
Adamsfamily, and the wealthy Holden family which owned ex-
tensive property two miles north of Bromsgrove in the region
known as Catshill. These families intermarried and from them
descended the poet, A. E. Housman.

The Holden estate two miles outside Bromsgrove centered about
The Clock House,1 a dignified old mansion that dated back to 1640,
so named because from part of the house rose an ancient clock that
used to give time to the little hamlet of Fockbury. The clock was
taken down when extensive repairs were made in the nineteenth
century, and thereafter the house was called Fockbury House,
though it is spoken of to this day as "The Clockus" by the elderly
villagers.

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