Home life
Ruined castle
Alice Thomas Ellis
I'm writing this on the train — 15 minutes late. The one down was late too. Object on the line. Someone tells me that the word is used here entirely correctly in the sense of something thrown in the way. How very educated of the guard who relayed this frustrating information. But I wish they wouldn't be so delicate in their descriptions. It leaves one consumed with morbid curiosity — what sort of object? Cow? Body? Cardboard box?
I had to wait for hours at Llandudno junction for a taxi to turn up before we drove through the night to the coastal watering place where I was reared. The route is dreadfully untidy on account of the four-lane highway they're in the course of constructing. It looks as though millions of mindless moles had been at work, and the local ambience will not be improved when it's completed. It shears along the shore line which, while not unspoiled (there are caravan sites along it and the sort of council housing which only Celtic councils seem able to produce), was not entirely ruined. It is now.
I kept remembering the heir to the throne, whose principality this is, and wondering what he would make of it. Conway Castle is nice. If I'd been him I'd have had it repaired and redecorated and lived in it myself, but as it happens it would've been a mistake since the motor- way will now be roaring round it and he wouldn't have got a wink of sleep. Actually the motorway may be going underground there, or underwater — it isn't very clear — so subsidence may well turn out to be the problem. In any event the view is going to lack the je ne sais quoi it once had.
I've never really been able to work out why the coast road is so congested. Where is everybody going? After a very short while you get to Bangor and Caernarvon, and after that to Anglesey and Holyhead. I wondered for a trice if it was the Irish going home, but it can't be that because they're all still in Camden Town. Whoever they were I shouldn't think they'll be going anywhere in future since whatever charm the coast possessed has now gone. They can't all have been on business bent. There isn't all that much business west of Pen- maenmaur.
I wonder if the Prince of Wales knows. I, together with many of my contemporaries, have been inclined to republicanism ever since our mothers made us listen to the then Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose on Children's Hour commiserating with us on being parted from our loved ones and piping 'Good night, children, everywhere.' They wore white socks and their hair was neatly curled and they were held up to us as role models. Most of us of whatever sex had a tendency to identify with William, Henry, Douglas and Ginger and not with Violet Elizabeth, so this instilled in us a certain resentment. Much later I flew into a rage and tore an invitation to a garden party into little bits because the Prince had said something half-witted about the Roman Church not letting Prince Michael marry what's-her- face with full rite and ceremony.
However, since then the heir has come a long way and I find his views on almost everything perfectly sound — i.e. similar to my own — and I could almost lie down and die for king and country when he's rude about architects (known round here as `earth-attacks).
I say awful things about them myself but nobody listens. I've been saying for years that the whole profession should be dis- couraged from practising — by force if need be — until they learn to get it right. How wonderful to be in the position of future ruler and tell the Visigoths what you think of them. How even more delightful if they mind — and some of them, at least, must. I do hope he sticks to his guns when he succeeds to the throne and refuses to give any of them knighthoods or those honours that are signified by letters after the name. ARIBA is enough to distinguish them from the rest of the human race and they should be avoided like the plague. Just look at what they've done. Si monumentum requiris, as they say.
BBC 2's Bookmark on Wednesday will be about Alice Thomas Ellis.
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