England -- Description and travel; Icknield Way (England); Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917
This contrast between the “private bar” and the taproom round the
corner reminded me of another town which illustrates it perfectly. At
the edge of the town, its large front windows looking up the principal
street, its small back windows over a windy common to noble hills, is a
public house called “The Jolly Drover.” The tap of “The Jolly Drover”
is the one blot upon the face of Coldiston. The town is clean and
demure from the decent old houses of the market-place to the brand-new
cottages, more like conservatories than dwellings, on the outskirts.
The magistrates are busy week after week in sentencing men and women of
all ages for begging, asking for hot water to make tea, sleeping under
hedges or in barns, for being unseemly in act or speech; if possible,
nothing offensive must happen in the streets. A market is held once a
week and is a byword in the county. Any animal can be offered for sale
there; the drover creeps along behind a beast that attracts as much
attention as a menagerie in the wayside villages; they know where it is
going; they have seen a pig resembling a greyhound, except that it had
not the strength to stand up, sold there for a shilling. Three or four
times a year a builder and contractor of Coldiston is sold up, because
he has been trying to get work by doing it for nothing, and these sales
are the chief diversion of the neighbourhood. The town is a model of
neatness and respectability, as if created by a shop-window decorator;
and of all the public-houses--all named hotels--“The Jolly Drover”
is the neatest and most respectable outside, and the most expensive
inside. It is painted white at short intervals. The chief barmaid is
a Londoner, white-faced and coral-lipped, with a love-lock over her
marble brow; and her way is brisk and knowing, and her speech more than
equal to the demands made upon it of an evening by the tradesmen who
will come until they are rich enough to quit the town for ever. Every
form of invitation adorns the exterior.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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