Patrick Hamilton

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy

1934. Hogarth/Chatto & Windus, 1987.

Bob, barman at a nearby pub, goes for 'eighty-pound strolls' in the park on his days off, absorbed in his dreams and his savings (The Midnight Bell). Ella, barmaid at the same pub, goes reluctantly for a walk with her monster-bore of a suitor, 'up the main avenue towards the Zoo amidst the winter-gripped flowerbeds and the rippling murmur of a post-prandial Sunday crowd disporting its undistinguished self in the sun' (The Plains of Cement). There is a similarly dyspeptic view of the park during an evening walk (The Plains of Cement).