THE GOAT (3)
By:
January 14, 2025
“The Goat: Cardiff, A.D. 1935” was first published in Naomi Mitchison’s 1929 collection Barbarian Stories. Compare with “The Lottery” (The New Yorker, 1948), for which Shirley Jackson would become famous. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize the story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8.
There weren’t very many strangers in the town. Most of the Circuit had gone discreetly on. We heard a lot of Welsh talked in the main streets, and Tom’s voice took on that funny, rather attractive, rather alarming rapid sing-song with the sentences running up at the ends. Even I managed an occasional ‘Borai da i chwi.’
We stayed at the Royal, and had kippers for breakfast.
When we went out afterwards no one seemed to be at work; all out on the pavements or blocking the streets, right across the tram-lines and everything. Sometimes they were quiet, sometimes all talking together, men in black Sunday suits and women in black shawls, and children looking none too well fed or clothed. It was a week-day, but there were thousands of men out of work about there, miners and ironworkers mostly, and they’d come in from miles around. The nearer the docks we got, the less we saw of the decent chapel-goers, and the less Welsh we heard talked. In fact, I’ve never seen so many nationalities, even in a big Mediterranean port, black, white, brown and yellow. But somehow it wasn’t gay, like Marseilles for instance, there was no sort of sparkle about it, no good coming from the clash of races, only more dirt and odder diseases. Those new, half and half lives, that seem in sunnier places to turn to, at any rate, some vividness of intellect or artistic expression, if nothing more, had all gone grey like the stone and slate houses, and crumbled into a horrid religious decay, taking all the worst of chapel and mixing it with mumbo-jumbo, and dishing it up with the old sauces. It was raining pretty steadily too, all the time.
They were all talking about it, or thinking about it, and I suppose that was terrible. But I didn’t think so, and I was glad to see how deserted the Salvation Army bands were. I was thinking of the Haves all over the world, the owners of ships and mines and mills and factories, and the bodies of men and women: how some are good, but others aren’t and don’t want to be, and all are protected by the justice of this country and most others, and by that queer feeling of property in things and persons that is one of the oldest-established evils in the world, and has been fostered by all religions and almost all laws.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.