PRINCES STREET PARADE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 714, 20 March 1953, Page 13

PRINCES STREET PARADE

Vw 4h SMIYEOD £U ML, DY oir William Darling; Odhams Press through Whitcombe & Tombs, Price, 26/3. \/ HEN I was a schoolboy in Edinburgh my way home each day lay along Princes Street, then, as now, the fashionable shopping parade. _ along, gazing with benign satisfaction at one of the largest and most fashionable establishments, there was invariably the same figure; tall, well-fed, frock-coated, top-hatted; the owner; Darling gazing at Darlings. He was part of the Princes Street parade. The fashionable ese it. The unfashionable darkly regarded him as the apotheosis of the smug bourgeois, the bloated capitalist. He sieges looked the part. Reading this iutébioeianny, I can understand the satisfaction. Draper’s assistant at £20 a year ("You are not a museum attendant; you are a salesman’), unemployment, a hawker’s licence. selling hatpins from a stance in the gutter in Gray’s Inn Road to make the price of a night’s lodging at a common boarding house-it was quite a step from this (via jobs in Ceylon and Australia, then Flanders, Gallipoli, Passchendale, and peace-as an insurance salesman), to the headship of a great store, the City Council, the Lord Mayorship,

knighthood and @ seat in Parliament. | As if this were not enough, Darling séme 20 years ago published (at first anonymously) a volume of essays, The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller, and found himself-probably to his own sur-prise-a best-seller in letters as in soft goods. He promptly bought a couple of bookshops, which did not go bankrupt. Indeed they are two of the best bookshops in a city where bookshops just have to be good. ‘ For cag one those who insist on taking their Social studies straight from Orwell-a_ stimulating and enjoyable

book.

I.A.

G.