ABSTRACT
Loyalty to Hunslet did not prevent us from favouring Holbeck Feast, the bigger, on a bigger wasteland; and Holbeck Feast was on Aunt Annie’s route from work. Hunslet girls were likely to be different from Lawrence’s. In Hunslet or Holbeck a shy girl, almost by definition proper as well as shy if still a virgin at sixteen, would not allow herself to be led into the darker by-ways of the fourth rim. Those who did go were more likely to be girls who ‘knew a thing or two already’ and were excited by the incandescent bustle and glare of the Feast which threw their repetitive days in the clothing factory into the drabbest of backgrounds, so that those shabby young men looked dashing. There was a touch of the clean Hemingwayesque world about the Wall of Death, as compared with the rigged boxing ring next door where young labourers who fancied themselves were invited to take on the professionals.
