They Walk in the City

by J.B. Priestley

T

his was one of those mornings when the smoke and the Thames Valley mist decide to work a few miracles for their London, and especially for the oldest part of it, the City, where Edward went to find Uncle Alfred. The City, on these mornings, is an enchantment. There is a faintly lu­minous haze, now silver, now old gold, over everything. The buildings have shape and solidity but no weight; they hang in the air, like palaces out of the Arabian Nights; you could topple the dome off St. Paul's with a forefinger into space. On these mornings, the old churches cannot be counted; there are more of them than ever; ecclesiastical wizards are busy multiplying the fantas­tic steeples. There is no less traffic than usual; the scarlet stream of buses still flows through the ancient narrow streets; the pavements are still thronged with bank messengers, office boys, po­licemen, clerks, typists, caretakers, secretaries, commissionaires, directors, crooks, busybodies, idlers; but on these mornings all the buses, taxicabs, vans, lorries, drays, and all the pedestrians lose something of their ordinary solidity; they move behind gauze: they are shod and tyred in vel­vet; their voices are muted; their movement is in slow motion. Whatever is new and vulgar and foolish contrives to lose itself in the denser patches of mist. But all the glimpses of ancient loveli­ness are there, perfectly framed and lighted: round every corner somebody is whispering a line or two of Chaucer. And on these mornings, the river is simply not true; there is no geography, noth­ing but pure poetry, down there; the water has gone; and shapes out of an adventurous dream drift by on a tide of gilded and silvered air. Such is the City on one of these mornings, a place in a Gothic fairy tale, a mirage, a vision, Cockaigne made out of faint sunlight and vapour and smoke. It is hard to believe that somewhere behind this enchanting facade, directors are drawing their fees, debenture holders are being taken care of, loans are being called in, compound interest is being calculated, mergers are being arranged between a Partaga and a Corona Corona, and sug­gestions are being put forward for little schemes that will eventually bring revolution into Central America and mass murder into the Near East.

Notes and exercises:

1.   The digraph “th” is pronounced [t] in the following words: Thames, Thomas, thyme, Mathilda, thaler.

2.   The sound [z] is denoted by the letter “g” in the following words: mirage, garage, gendarme, prestige, bourgeois, regime, rouge, bourgeoisie, gigue.

3.   Note the spelling and pronunciation of the word façade [f¶´sa:d].

4.   The sound [g] is denoted by the letter “g” in the following words: gild, gilded, gig, giddy, gimlet, gird, girdle, giggle, gear, gynaecology, pedagogy.

5.   Spell the words given in phonetic transcription:

a)       In the street near the shop where we went to buy some [´steiòn¶ri] there was a long row of [´steiòn¶ri] [´vi:klz].

b)      A musician that has good [tek´ni:k] but little expression rarely impresses the public.

c)       Was it a [p¶´troul] or a [ri´konis¶ns] mission?

d)      It seemed wise to [rek¶´noit¶(r)] before entering the wood.

e)       Apart from the City London now consists of twenty eight metropolitan [´bÙr¶z].

6.   Word study:

ecclesiastical         of the Christian Church, of clergymen

caretaker               a person paid to take care of a building during the owner’s absence

commissionaire    a uniformed porter at the entrance to a cinema, theatre, hotel, large shop, etc.

busybody             a person who interferes in other people’s affairs

debenture               a certificate given by a business corporation as a receipt for money lent at a fixed rate of interest until the money is repaid

call in                    to require the payment or repayment of money, debts, or accounts

merger                  combining of business companies, estates, etc.

the Arabian Nights            famous stories of the Arabs in ancient times

Cockaigne             an imaginary country of idleness and luxury

Partaga and Corona Corona          expensive cigars (the implication is that financial arrangements are made unofficially, between two smokes)

7.   Translate the following expressions and use them in sentences of your own:

through the ancient narrow streets, a narrow gauge (railway), the narrow bed/cell/house (the grave), The Narrow Seas (the English channel and the Irish sea), by a narrow margin, narrow means, to take narrow views, in a narrow sense;

shapes out of an adventurous dream drift by, I don’t understand your drift, the general drift of affairs was toward war, to drift apart, to drift from job to job, I used to lead the life of a drifter, drift ice, drift net, drift sand, drift wood