Showing posts with label The Fifties. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Fifties. Show all posts
Monday, June 08, 2015
Wednesday, November 07, 2012
Happiland by William Bedford (William Heinemann 1990)
When his work was finished, Harry went down to the promenade and sat at one of the window tables in Brown's cafe. From the window, he could see the pier and the deserted shores, and the slipway where the inshore fishing boats would come when the tide began to ebb. Great banks of cloud were gathering at the estuary, and as he ordered a mug of scalding hot tea and a bacon buttie with onions, the wind howled and gusted along the promenade, whistling underneath the cafe door. He fed some sixpences into the juke box, selecting Rosemary Clooney and Tennessee Ernie Ford, Frankie Laine and Teresa Brewer, and then sat down to wait for his food. He had spent all day baiting the fishing lines with frozen bait, and now he was waiting for George Bainbridge to get back from his trip to see what fresh lugworms were required tomorrow. During the winter months, when the fairgrounds were closed, Harry's only money came from the casual bait digging he did for the inshore fishermen. In the summer, he worked on the fairgrounds.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Longman Caribbean Writers 1956)
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20210512230541im_/https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Cu5dso1UsQc/TbwWs3Nwm_I/AAAAAAAAEO0/T6Nsd2VSU8A/s320/The%2BLonely%2BLondoners%2B%252B%2BSam%2BSelvon.jpeg)
'The trouble with you,' Galahad say, 'is that you want a holiday. Why you don't take a trip to Berlin or Moscow? Listen, I hear the Party giving free trips to the boys to go to different cities on the continent, with no strings attached, you don't have to join up or anything.'
'Who tell you so?'
'I get a wire. I hear two students went, and they say they had a sharp time, over there not like London at all, the people greeting you with open arms. Why you don't contact the Party?'
'Who tell you so?'
'I get a wire. I hear two students went, and they say they had a sharp time, over there not like London at all, the people greeting you with open arms. Why you don't contact the Party?'
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Saturday, July 19, 2008
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe (Plume/Penguin 1959)
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20210512230541im_/https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0ZRnirp_1fQ/SIKepAPpeiI/AAAAAAAABgA/fZLz63pKRnc/s320/c14152.jpg)
Sitting in what has come to be called my study, a room in the first-floor flat of a ramshackle Majorcan house, my eyes move over racks of books around me. Row after row of coloured backs and dusty tops, they give an air of distinction not only to the room but to the whole flat, and one can sense the thoughts of occasional visitors who stoop down discreetly during drinks to read their titles:
"A Greek Lexicon, Homer in the original. He knows Greek! (Wrong, those books belong to my brother-in-law.) Shakespeare, The Golden Bough, a Holy Bible bookmarked with tapes and paper. He even reads it! Euripides and the rest, and a dozen mouldering Baedekers. What a funny idea to collect them! Proust, all twelve volumes! I never could wade through that lot. (Neither did I.) Doestoevsky. My god, is he still going strong?"
And so on and so on, items that have become part of me, foliage that is grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw these books, or any book at all, come to that.
[From The Decline And Fall Of Frankie Buller]
"A Greek Lexicon, Homer in the original. He knows Greek! (Wrong, those books belong to my brother-in-law.) Shakespeare, The Golden Bough, a Holy Bible bookmarked with tapes and paper. He even reads it! Euripides and the rest, and a dozen mouldering Baedekers. What a funny idea to collect them! Proust, all twelve volumes! I never could wade through that lot. (Neither did I.) Doestoevsky. My god, is he still going strong?"
And so on and so on, items that have become part of me, foliage that is grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw these books, or any book at all, come to that.
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