See this photograph… not really a garden, I admit, but it’s the part of the tunnel that leads from the main house at Uppark to the servants quarters, designed so they wouldn’t be seen or heard.
Here’s what’s above…
But let’s go below again…
Because this is the tunnel that the writer H G Wells would have gone down to visit his mother Sarah Wells, who was housekeeper here from 1990 to 1893. Impossible to know this and wonder if it wasn’t an inspiration for time travel. His book The Time Machcine features after all, the savage Morlocks who live underground and Eloi above. Here’s the slightly wider view from the ‘upper levels’…
And then there’s the famous Doll’s House of which HG Wells said: “.…went to the great dolls’ house…I played under imperious direction with that toy of glory.”
I can’t imagine a more potent example – the tunnels and the dolls house – of teaching a writer to create new worlds. Until I read in the guidebook how he was given free run of the library and the attic, ‘where he unearthed the elements of a telescope, which he carefully put back together.’ OF COURSE HE DID!
Here are some pictures showing the alternative world that would have been run by his mother, Sarah Wells, underground…
“We all have our time machines, don’t we. Those that take us back are memories…And those that carry us forward, are dreams.” HG Wells
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