The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley — Read

The March wind went shrieking over the Midland Plain. Under a sky as rapid, ragged, and tumultuous as a revolution, all the standing water, the gathered thaws and rains of February, filling the dykes and spreading over innumerable fields, was ruffled and whitened, so that the day glittered coldly. There was ice even yet in this wind, but already there were other things too, shreds and tatters of sunlight, sudden spicy gusts, distant trumpetings of green armies on the march. Unless you were one of the patient men of the fields, following the great shining flanks of your horses across the ten-acre and already hearing the sap stirring, you did not know what to do in the face of such a wind. It was up to all manner of tricks. "Grrrr! Get indoors and stay there! " it would go screaming. "Poke the fire! Whe‑ew! " And it might send a lash of hail after you. But then not quarter of an hour later, it might be crying "Come out, come out! The year's begun," promising primroses, and spilling a little pale sunlight down the road. The moment you did go out, however, it would give a sharp twitch, darkening the sky again, and with a long Whe‑ew Grrrr! would sting your cheeks and set your eyes watering. A most mischievous wind.

Away it went, across the central plain of England, until at last it pounced upon those three little industrial towns, Gatford, Mundley, and Stort, that are known as the Triangle, and more recently, since the towns gave themselves up to the mass production of cheap cars, the Tin Triangle. There are very few towns in this island so close together as Gatford, Mundley, and Stort, and a stranger might easily imagine they were all one town. On the other hand, there are hardly any other towns that seem farther away from anywhere else: Gatford jostles Mundley and Stort, and Mundley and Stort creep closer to one another; but the three of them appear to be almost as remote as a constellation from any other place of importance. Those short nonstop runs on the railway from Gatford to either Manchester or Birmingham always seem miraculous; and when that daily procession of brand-new cars, shiny saloons or chassis with drivers perched on boxes, slides away down the London Road, it strikes the visitor as a most hazardous enterprise, an adventure. The Trianglers themselves, too, regard this daily departure of new Imperial Sixes and Lumbdens and Baby Sceptres as part of a great adventure. Nowadays cars pour out and money pours into the Triangle. It is said that J. J. Lumbden, the son of old Lumbden who kept the bicycle shop in Cobden Street, Gatford, is worth nearly half a million and steadfastly refuses the most gigantic offers from America. The Sceptre people are building yet another factory between Mundley and Stort. And nobody can say there is anything tinny about the Imperial Six, the pride of North Gatford and Stort, where every other man is a mechanic. There is hardly a schoolboy in the Triangle, even in South Gatford, where there are detached villas and tennis clubs and boulevards, who does not groan with impatience, to think he is wasting his time with stuff about Magna Carta and Rivers of South America and Adverbs when he might be working in one of the car factories, swaggering out at half past five, very black and knowing. Useless to talk to the Triangle about bad trade and what might be done with the unemployed; it never knew such days before; Gatford is nearly twice the size it was twenty years ago, and Mundley and Stort, invaded by mechanics from every part of the Midlands, are growing visibly, at the rate of so many new little red bricks per fine working day. These are adventurous times for the three towns. The March wind, itself supremely adventurous, pounced upon them with glee. Here, it seemed to shout, was something better to play with than naked fields and branches and thin tremulous sheets of water.