H G Wells

Another trip to Woking, another good blip.

I think I've mentioned before that Woking, or to be more precise, Horsell Common, is the setting for H G Wells' The War of the Worlds. In fact I trawled back through my photos and I featured the Martian here. Apparently H G Wells only lived here for about 18 months and by all accounts was a bit of a ladies man!

"Very early in the morning Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, rose early with the idea of finding it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far from the sand pits. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every direction over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away. The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against the dawn. The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to fragments in its descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder, caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation … At once, with a quick mental leap, he linked the Thing with the flash upon Mars.”