Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
"The Pier looks tiny from up here? Yes, but it's three furlongs long for
all that, and those two tart-tin-looking things at the end hold nearly a
thousand people apiece. But, as you say, it is rather like one of those
children's toy railways they sell on the stalls in Gardd Street for
sixpence-halfpenny. And that always strikes me as rather a curious thing
about Llanyglo. It's a big place now--nine thousand winter population;
but somehow it has a smaller look than it had when it was just a score
of cottages, all put together not much bigger than the Kursaal Gardens
there. I don't know why the cottages should have seemed more in scale
with the mountains than all this, but they did. I suppose it was because
they didn't set up for anything, like the Kursaal and the Majestic and
the Imperial.... But it doesn't do to tell the Llanyglo folk that. They
look at it in quite another way. To them the sea and the mountains are
so many adjuncts, something they can turn into money by dipping people
at sixpence a time and motoring them round at four-and-sixpence the
tour.... And sometimes you can't help thinking that it wouldn't take
very much (a wind a bit stronger than usual or an extra heave of the
sea, say) and all these hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of stone
and iron and paint and gilding would just disappear--be sponged out like
the castles and hoof-marks on the sands when the tide comes in--or like
a made-up face when you wipe the carmine and pencilling from it....
Eh?--No, I'm not saying they've spoiled the place--nor yet that they
haven't. You mustn't come here if you want a couple of miles of beach to
yourself. It all depends how you look at it. If Llanyglo's cheapjack in
one way, perhaps it isn't in another. It's merely that I remember it as
it used to be....
"Would it surprise you to learn that the whole place is only about
thirty years old? That's all. It grew like a mushroom; there are people
who were born here who don't know their way about their own town....
Mostly Welsh? Oh dear no, not by any means. I should say about
half-and-half. I suppose you're thinking of the Welsh names of the
streets? They don't mean very much. There's Gardd Street, for instance;
'gardd' is only the Welsh for 'garden,' and Edward Garden, John Willie
Garden's father, built the greater part of it (for that matter, he built
the greater part of Llanyglo). And if anybody called Wood (say) had put
up a house here, he'd probably have called it 'Ty Coed.' And some of it,
of course, is genuine Welsh. The Porth Neigr Road does go to Porth
Neigr, and Sarn, over there, has always been Sarn. But people think
they're getting better value for their money if they come away for a
fortnight and see foreign names everywhere; they've a travelled sort of
feeling; so they give the streets these names, and print all the
placards in two columns, with 'Rhybudd' on one side and 'Notice' on the
other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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