THE GOAT (1)
By:
January 1, 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.
CARDIFF
A.D. 1935
(FOR DICK)
I suppose, if one tries to remember before the war, all these things are quite unthinkable. All that incredibly gentle, peaceful time before one was quite grown-up. We were all softer, with more raw places to our hearts, more sensibilities, less armour. I’ve only got to remember the plays and books I used to cry over! They make me laugh now — or just cross. Besides the war itself, there were all these extra things, of course; all that very grim business of putting down the big strikes, and then the curious brutalities we seem to like now in our amusements, beginning, perhaps, with the Rodeo and going on to the regular sort of gladiator shows they had last winter. I expect we all got used to the idea at second-hand, with all those early films, Ben Hur, for instance, where, however accidentally, some of the actors got really and genuinely killed.
Even if one doesn’t go to them they do something to one’s mind: something good, I suppose, in so far as it’s a real frankness. And yet, if I think of myself now and, say, ten years back, I like myself much less, though perhaps I respect myself more! I should have been terribly shocked not so long ago by the play Tom and I went to on Wednesday; now it was just funny. But we leave our dear old Lord Chamberlain warm in his last castle and don’t mention one or two names except — oh so filthily reverently! But they lost whatever case they had a long time ago, first over the war, then over the strikes, and they’ll never pick it up again however much they Morris-dance in all the best churches.
But all this is just to say that if I’d seen the thing I’ve just come from twenty years ago — but then it would have been utterly impossible.
It all came about, I suppose, because Tom is on the South Wales circuit. He’d been up at the Cardiff Assizes pretty often and was sufficiently sick of them. Cardiff seems to be a bad place for contrasts: no worse than London really, I suppose, but we’re all used to London, and the Haves offer their civilization some sort of compensation, and the Have-nots are often remarkably unclass-conscious. South Wales is worse, with the ship and mine-owners on one side and the dockers and miners on the other. Tom is quite enough of a wild Welshman to get terribly worked up every time he goes. It was really that sort of thing that induced him to do his extremely rapid and exciting, but rather uncomfortable, plunge in and out of politics. That was the year we got rid of Lloyd George — however it all was, and I’ve always supposed it was the obvious member of the National Liberal Council, though of course she was never even formally accused. However much one deplores even such a well-arranged political murder, it did open the way at once for all the young theorists.
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.
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