No Roaring Whores Still, I by passed Leigh the other
day, and sedate Chalkwell. and the thin beaches of Westcliff, and found the last vacant parking space on the front just west of Southend's prodigious pier. Three or four years ago half the cars would have been decrepit summer-licensed crocks, lucky to have wobbled all the way from East Ham with- out falling apart. Not so now that the refrigera- tors and washing machines in the kitchens are matched by the Consuls, Miniminors, Cam- bridges and Veloxes at the gates. And their owners: not long ago one would have seen Giles's family writ large. Agate (who lived first in a suite in the Palace Hotel and then in a house in Westcliff) was a romantic soul and he liked Southend because he liked to see the lower orders disporting themselves in the music-hall manner. He liked the thought of roaring whores in feather boas. But the lower orders, as you can see nowhere more vividly than at Southend in the summer, are no longer with us. How smashing the hair-styles, how crisp and clean the dresses, how vivid the general effect. The women set the pace and the men follow—at a distance, but they follow. There are those who see in this embourgeoisement of the people a sad and sorry thing: those whom affluence has deprived either, on the one hand, of the enjoyable moral uplift they got from going on about the down- trodden or, on the other, of the comfortable benefits of cheap and meek labour. For myself, I rejoice in it.
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