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Updated: June 9, 2025
I took up this occupation with so much earnestness that it seriously interfered with my observations from the tower. I hired two men and set them to work to dig a gravel-pit. They made excavations at several places, and very soon found what they declared to be a very fine quality of road-gravel.
A man who has been shovelling in a gravel-pit, or carrying bricks up a ladder, or hoeing in the fields, or carting coal, for ten hours in the day, and has, perhaps, walked six or seven miles to do it, acquires a form of thirst which no other drink he can buy will touch so coolly.
You know the clays and sands of Hook and Newnham, Dogmersfield and Shapley Heath, and all the country to the north as far as Reading. There is a second world. You know the gravel-pit itself; and all the upper soils and gravels, which are spread over the length and breadth of the country to the north. There is a third world. Let us take them one by one. First, the chalk.
Though it was touch and go with it all this time our faith was strong, our courage unshaken. June, 1908, found it in the gravel-pit. It seemed our only hope.... And in the August of that year I went and stayed with the Atherleys. One morning at breakfast I challenged Miss Atherley to an immediate game of tennis. "Not directly after," said Mrs Atherley, "it's so bad for you.
If you are, say so: but as I said at first, I want to show you what steady and sharp head-work this same geology requires, even in the nearest gravel-pit. Well, then. I do not think our gravel-pit will tell us what we want: but I know one which will.
More than once during the winter of 1908-09, it being a time of great distress, gravel-pit workers came to me with some of those worked flints the big paleoliths of the river-gravel which they had found and saved up, but now desired to sell, in order to raise money for pointing their pickaxes.
And the lucky children, who could have anything in the wide world by just wishing for it, hurriedly started for the gravel-pit to express their wishes to the Psammead. Martha caught them at the gate, and insisted on their taking the Baby with them. 'Not want him indeed!
The gamekeeper, who was the cook's cousin, asked leave to drive home with them, and Andrew was only too glad to have someone to protect him from the trap he was so certain of. When the wagonette reached their own house, between the chalk-quarry and the gravel-pit, the children were very sleepy, but they felt that they and the keeper were friends for life.
The other little boys stood round about in speechless envy, or murmured their A B C's and "ba be bi's" along the chapel steps. The lower-form boys were playing leap-frog past the almshouse, and Geoffrey Gosse and the vicar's son were in the public gravel-pit, throwing stones at the robins in the Great House elms across the lane.
This, of course, was the day's wish. Robert rushed to the gravel-pit, found the Psammead, and presently wished for But that, too, is another story. The others were to be kept in as a punishment for the misfortunes of the day before. Of course Martha thought it was naughtiness, and not misfortune so you must not blame her. She only thought she was doing her duty.
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