Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
It was only partly for a holiday that those first visitor-discoverers
came to Llanyglo now. Considerations of business had begun to play a
part in their coming. Mr. Morrell, for example, had sunk quite a lot of
money in the place, and liked to keep an eye on his interests. Philip
Lacey pored over a dozen sketch-drafts of his Floral Valley, a project
for converting a coombe or dean that clove one portion of the Trwyn into
an ornamental arrangement of flower-beds with a bandstand in the centre.
And Raymond Briggs mused on houses and hotels, on hotels and more and
yet more houses. For these Llanyglo was no longer simply a place
"delightfully rural," a place "where you could dress as you liked," a
place for "a real rustic holiday." It was the Tophams who made these
discoveries and bestowed these encomiums now.
Whether or not Barry Topham dressed as he liked, he certainly dressed as
the Briggses and the Laceys disliked. At the Promenade Concerts his
appearance had been just decently unremarkable; alas, it was so no
longer! Now, in the country, he broke out into a loose tweed jacket,
knickers made of a pair of long trousers of striped cashmere cut down,
low shoes, a flannel shirt, no hat, and a tightly knotted red tie, this
last as a voucher for the socialism that, Philip Lacey discovered to his
horror, he talked in and out of season. He was a small, bearded, wiry
man of forty-four or five, who gave you a curious impression of ferocity
and mildness mingled. The mildness was perhaps due to his bolt-upright
shock of frightened-looking sandy hair, the ferocity to the pince-nez
marks on either side of his nose that gave his glance a concentrated
look. His wife did not appear to dress (you cannot call mere concealment
of the person "dressing") until four o'clock in the afternoon, and his
two daughters, aged nineteen and twenty-one, were school-teachers, less
buxom than Miss Nancy Pritchard, but more professionally eager, as if
all the vital force in them had gone, not to the waste of mere pleasant
flesh, but into the severer regions of the mind.
This taking of Llanyglo at its word in the matter of dress was bad
enough, but worse was to come.
Scarcely were the Tophams installed at the "Montgomery" when it became
known that, though they had appeared to come alone, they were merely an
advance party. Two days later the main body arrived, and Llanyglo
experienced its first social slump.
The party called itself a Holiday Camp. It was a union of two
semi-secular, semi-Nonconformist Institutions whose idea of having a
better time than their fathers had had was to botanise, to geologise, to
read, and to discuss these activities afterwards in whirlwinds of
communal talk. Strictly speaking, they did not "camp" at all: they put
up at the "Montgomery"; but they had camped, hoped to camp again, and
called their more convivial gatherings, when studies were cast aside,
Pow-Wows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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