Happy Valley Read Online Free PDF

your nose. On the whole it was pretty dull. He had torn up her card and thrown it down the lavatory in the train. That was the worst of women, they were dull, talking about ginger beer, or when you began to tell them about yourself they shut up at once and began to hum and then came out with something about a paper pattern they’d got out of a magazine or who was taking them to the races Saturday week. You cut up rough with them sometimes, and you wouldn’t go with them any more, and then you went. Or sometimes you gave them a date, like that night about eleven girls waiting outside the King’s Cross picture show, and you went past in a tram and laughed to see them all there, looking at each other and waiting and people wondering what was the gala show.But it served women right, coming up to you in the street, served them bloody well right.
    Hagan laughed.
    Eh? said Chuffy Chambers.
    All sorts of girls, said Hagan, spitting over the side again.
    Lurching away, he’d have to get down or…
    Here, you, he said. What’s your name?
    Chambers.
    What Chambers?
    Chuffy Chambers.
    What sort of a name do you call that? Anyway, stop this bus. I’ve got to get down and have a leak.
    The truck gave a complicated emotional groan and stopped to let Hagan get down. Chuffy Chambers sat at the wheel. He had gone a little red because he had said his name was Chuffy Chambers, but he couldn’t help it, they called him that. He could not remember how it began, but it had always been like that, they said come here Chuffy, and he came. His real name was William.

3
    If you could go up with the hawk you would see Happy Valley there in the hollow, the township I mean, still some way from the truck. The truck won’t get there till later on. But we have to go on a bit, only spatially, that is. For it is still pretty early, and not much activity trickling through the streets, not that there ever is in Happy Valley, except for the show or the races or polling day. So now there is very little doing, and we are looking down from above, and we are not particularly impressed by any beauty of design. Because somebody once built a house, I think it was probably old Quong, and someone else come along and built another, some little way off, just far enough to show that there was no love lost in the act. And it went on like that, just building here and there, without co-operation. There never was co-operation in Happy Valley, not even in the matter of living, or you might even say less in thematter of living. In Happy Valley the people existed in spite of each other.
    To go one step farther, the country existed also in spite of the town. It was not aware of it. There was no connecting link. Just as Oliver Halliday noticed when he got back from Europe, the country slept, inwardly intent on some secret war of passion or trying to separate the threads of old passions spent. This made the town seem very ephemeral. In summer when the slopes were a scurfy yellow and the body of the earth was very hot, lying there stretched out, the town, with its cottages of red and brown weatherboard, reminded you of an ugly scab somewhere on the body of the earth. It was so ephemeral. Some day it would drop off, leaving a pink, clean place underneath.
    But that day has not arrived yet. And as it is not even summer, the town does not look so much like a scab, though most of the snow has melted to slush and you can see the country round about, and the road to Kambala, and the road to Moorang, and the less official road out to Glen Marsh, which is the Furlows’ place. Up at the top of the hill, where the Belpers live, there is a bright red water-tank. It is a nice bit of unconscious colour. I say unconscious because nobody thought about that sort of thing, not even Mrs Belper, who in spite of breeding dogs had her Artistic Side. She even did pokerwork in her spare time. But mostly at Happy Valley you just lived. That was unconscious too, but more unavoidable. You ate and slept