Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
It was a curious and a rather arresting change. To all appearances,
Llanyglo had now got a "better class of visitor" than it had had since
the Briggses and Laceys had shaken the dust of the place from their
feet. Even in this puzzle of gold and silver light and deep mysterious
blue, it could be seen that there was not much Holiday Club money there.
In another fortnight or so those coffers would burst over the town,
drenching it with gold; but in the meantime who were these others, and
what were they doing at Llanyglo?
Let us ask the author of the _Sixpenny Guide_.
* * * * *
"When did you arrive? Only last night? And you're stopping at the
'Majestic'? Well, you've somebody there who can tell you more about it
than I can--Big Annie the head-chambermaid on the first floor. There are
a good many things about Llanyglo now that I've had to keep out of my
_Guide_, you see. But I'll tell you what I can.
"And I don't want to give you any false impression. Don't forget that
scores and hundreds of families come here and bathe, and picnic, and
dance, and go for drives, and enjoy themselves, and go away again
without a notion that everybody here isn't exactly like themselves. And
there's no harm in the Wakes people either. The worst you can say of
them is that now and then one of them gets violently or torpidly drunk,
as the case may be, and that all of them make a most hideous and
infernal noise. So don't think I'm talking disproportionately, and that
this is the only place of its kind I was ever in.
"But I do mean this: that somehow or other we've now acquired a very
peculiar kind of notoriety. You can deny it, disprove it, show that it
isn't there at all, and--there it remains all the time. For one thing,
you'll see if you look round that the place is very much less northern
in character than it was, and as it happens that's very significant. For
it might conceivably happen that a northerner--or a southerner, or
anybody else--might have his reasons for avoiding a place that was full
of other northerners, many of whom might know him (they have an
expression in the North for the kind of thing I mean; they call it
'making mucky doorstones'). So you'll find lots and lots of Londoners
here now, and midlanders, and easterners and westerners. They come here,
where nobody's ever seen them before and will never see them again
perhaps, for much the same reason that some Englishmen are said to go to
Paris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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