Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The others? Well, Edward Garden's a cleverer man than I, and you can
hardly expect me to explain the workings of his mind to you in detail.
But I think we may assume he knows what he is about. I needn't say
they're all very well-to-do; you can see that even from here; but
there's something else about them, something we saw in Raymond Briggs,
that's a little difficult to describe--perhaps it's merely that they too
intend (_mutatis mutandis_, of course) that their children shall have a
better time than their parents have had--or perhaps we'd better say
their grandparents had, for their parents do themselves very well,
indeed. I don't think you can say more about them than that--it's just
that dash of Raymond Briggs.... Squire Wynne wouldn't understand them in
the least. The Squire's wasted too much time over antiquity. He doesn't
know anything about these people who are coming on. Except in their
clothes, and so on, he'd see very little difference between them and
people Raymond Briggs would look at as if they weren't there. He
wouldn't understand Philip Lacey, for example. (Do you see that
orange-and-black striped blazer--there by the seaweed: he's pointing;
that's Philip Lacey.) Philip is the big Liverpool florist, seedsman, and
landscape-gardener; if he hasn't his "roots in the land" in exactly the
sense the Squire understands, his plants have; and Philip distinctly
does not intend that Euonyma and Wygelia, who are at present at school
at Brighton, shall go into one of his fourteen or fifteen retail shops.
Philip isn't spending all that money for that.... (Understand me, I
think Philip's perfectly right; the only thing I don't quite see is why
he should veneer good sound stuff with something that's an obvious
sham.) Of his wife, frankly, I don't think very much. Her processes show
too plainly. Philip has his business to attend to, but Mrs. Lacey never
leaves her one idea, day or night.... There, Philip's stopped and spoken
to Mr. Morrell. Mr. Morrell has just as many hopes and plans for Hilda
as the Laceys have for Euonyma and Wygelia, but he knows that his "a's"
are past praying for, so he makes rather a display of his native speech.
I needn't tell you what a trial that is to Hilda....
And bear in mind that these are prosperous people, well-travelled people
(though they mostly keep to the beaten tracks where they meet one
another--it's Mrs. Briggs's chief recollection of Florence that she met
some people she knew in Leeds there), people who put up at far better
hotels than you or I do. And if these, who can afford it, can be shown
the way to Llanyglo, the chances are that a crowd of other people, who
certainly can't afford it but as certainly won't be out of it, will come
in their wake.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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