Cheltenham Quotes

But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.

The world won’t leave things be. It’s always injecting endings into beginnings. Leaves tweezer themselves from these weeping willows. Leaves fall into the lake and dissolve into slime. Where’s the sense in that? Mum and Dad fell in love, had Julia, had me. They fall out of love, Julia moves off to Edinburgh, Mum to Cheltenham, and Dad to Oxford with Cynthia. The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

Hancock: You're not particularly bothered about the impending stagnation of Western Civilization, are you? Sid: No, not really. As long as my horses don't stagnate I don't care what happens. Hancock: Exactly. The struggle of the human race is nothing compared with your struggle up to the two-bob window at Cheltenham, is it? Sid: No, it's not.

No, but on the other hand you don't enact me Cheltenham tragedies when I've barely swallowed my breakfast.

He stared at her in insolent silence, unable to believe the alluring, impulsive girl he remembered had become this coolly aloof, self-possessed young woman. Even with her dusty clothes and the smear of dirt on her cheek, Elizabeth Cameron was strikingly beautiful, but she’d changed so much that-except for the eyes-he scarcely recognized her. One thing hadn’t changed: She was still a schemer and a liar. Straightening abruptly from his stance in the doorway, Ian walked forward. “I’ve had enough of this charade, Miss Cameron. No one invited you here, and you damn well know it.” Blinded with wrath and humiliation, Elizabeth groped in her reticule and snatched out the handwritten letter her uncle had received inviting Elizabeth to join Ian there. Marching up to him, she slapped the invitation against his chest. Instinctively he caught it but didn’t open it. “Explain that,” she commanded, backing away and then waiting. “Another note, I’ll wager,” he drawled sarcastically, thinking of the night he’d gone to the greenhouse to meet her and recalling what a fool he’d been about her. Elizabeth stood beside the table, determined to have the satisfaction of hearing his explanation before she left-not that anything he said could make her stay. When he showed no sign of opening it, she turned furiously to Jake, who was sorely disappointed that Ian was deliberately chasing off two females who could surely be persuaded to do the cooking if they stayed. “Make him read it aloud!” she ordered the startled Jake. “Now, Ian,” Jake said, thinking of his empty stomach and the bleak future that lay ahead for it if the ladies went away, “why don’t you jes’ read that there little note, like the lady asked?” When Ian Thornton ignored the older man’s suggestion, Elizabeth lost control of her temper. Without thinking what she was actually doing, she reached out and snatched the pistol off the table, primed it, cocked it, and leveled it at Ian Thornton’s broad chest. “Read that note!” Jake, whose concern was still on his stomach, held up his hands as if the gun were pointed at him. “Ian, it could be a misunderstanding, you know, and it’s not nice to be rude to these ladies. Why don’t you read it, and then we’ll all sit down and have a nice”-he inclined his head meaningfully to the sack of provisions on the table-“supper.” “I don’t need to read it,” Ian snapped. “The last time I read a note from Lady Cameron I met her in a greenhouse and got shot in the arm for my trouble.” “Are you implying I invited you into that greenhouse?” Elizabeth scoffed furiously. With an impatient sigh Ian said, “Since you’re obviously determined to enact a Cheltenham tragedy, let’s get it over with before you’re on your way.” “Do you deny you sent me a note?” she snapped. “Of course I deny it!” “Then what were you doing in the greenhouse?” she shot back at him. “I came in response to that nearly illegible note you sent me,” he said in a bored, insulting drawl. “May I suggest that in future you devote less of your time to theatrics and some of it to improving your handwriting?” His gaze shifted to the pistol. “Put the gun down before you hurt yourself.

When Christmas came a month after we arrived at the Cheltenham, we sort of assumed that Helen and Steve would invite us to their house for the holiday. We had often spent Christmas with them before we went into foster care, when Mum was still alive, and we knew they had been told that we were no longer at Cathy and Pete’s, but no invitation was forthcoming. One of Mum’s cousins, who we had only ever met two or three times, kindly offered to have us for a few days, but he explained that there would be a lot of family members there who we wouldn’t know. When

Alex and I didn’t have any spare money that year at Cheltenham, so we each bought the other a CD, which meant opening our presents took about twenty seconds. The staff had cooked us a Christmas lunch, but none of them ate it with us because they were saving themselves for their own family meals once they got home.

The GCHQ staff were sporty, providing most of the players in the Foreign Office football team that won the Civil Service Football Cup in 1952. This could present some peculiar problems. When local reporters covered matches in Cheltenham, they were told they could name the goal-scorers of the visitors, but not of the local team. Reporting these games tested their copywriting skills to the very limits.

Your father is in England. Remember? You gave him tickets to the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

I couldn't possibly repeat the words he used .They were so unsettling that I sent Nancy indoors to find my spectacles.

Two hours later, Paulina, their housekeeper, pulled up in her car. Her job was to clean the house twice a week, not to drive all the way to the outskirts of Cheltenham to pick up forgotten children. Paulina’s English was poor, and she had little to say to Stephen or the people at the school. She was always kind, though, and greeted him with a Twix bar and a sympathetic manner. Stephen tried to make some conversation on the drive back. He didn’t really speak Polish, but had taken the first two levels of an online, self-teaching course in order to try to communicate with her. She always appreciated his efforts and smiled, though it was a wincing smile that suggested he was destroying her language with the dull edge of his tongue.

The Cheltenham magician W.G. Gray was more specific, and held quite a different opinion to Raleigh, when he wrote in 1969 that magic is: ‘Man’s most determined effort to establish an actual working relationship through himself between his Inner and Outer states of being. By magic, Man shows that he is not content to be simply a pawn in the Great Game, but wants to play on his own account. Man the meddler becomes Man the Magician, and so learns the rules the hard way, for magic is concerned with Doing, while mysticism is concerned with Being’.

Tirpitz’s admiration extended to English education and the English language. He spoke English, read English newspapers and English novels, and enrolled his two daughters at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

Men may often do much without knowing that they do anything, and such probably had been the case with Reginald Morton during the journey from Dillsborough to Cheltenham.

CHAPTER XXX AT CHELTENHAM

Mum had been working as a waitress in a tea room in Cheltenham when Dad first saw her. It was 1969 and she was fifteen. He was twenty-eight

Fuchs’s transfer of scientific secrets to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943 was one of the most concentrated spy hauls in history, some 570 pages of copied reports, calculations, drawings, formulae and diagrams, the designs for uranium enrichment, a step-by-step guide to the fast-moving development of the atomic weapon. Much of this material was too complex and technical to be coded and sent by radio, and so Ursula passed the documents to Sergei through a “brush contact,” a surreptitious handover imperceptible to a casual observer. If Ursula needed to pass on urgent information, or bulky files, she alerted Aptekar by means of an agreed “signal site”: “I had to travel to London and, at a certain time and in a certain place, drop a small piece of chalk and tread on it.” Two days later she would cycle to the rendezvous site, a side road six miles beyond the junction of the A40 and A34 on the road from Oxford to Cheltenham; Aptekar would drive from London in the military attaché’s car and arrive at the pickup site at an appointed time for a swift handover. At one of these meetings, the Soviet officer presented her with a new Minox camera for making microdots and copying documents, and a small but powerful transmitter measuring just six by eight inches, a sixth of the size of her homemade radio and easier to conceal. She dismantled her own equipment, but kept it in reserve “for emergency use.” Fuchs was privy to the innermost workings of the atomic project and he held nothing back. In the first year, he and Peierls wrote no fewer than eleven reports together, including seminal papers on isotope separation and calculating the destructive power of

In my mind, that factory worker now had a face, and his dormitory now had a mattress stuffed with all the cash foreign spies had been paying him in bribes to swap in their spiked encryption chip—the one with the weak crypto that cryptographers back at Fort Meade, or Cheltenham, or Moscow, or Beijing, or Tel Aviv, could easily crack. Or maybe it was the factory worker’s supervisor? Or maybe the C-level execs? Or maybe the CEO himself? Or maybe that factory worker wasn’t bribed, but blackmailed? Or maybe he was a CIA line officer all along?

The Elliots is a fable of another aging woman, her bloom quite gone off, whose family is too dependent on her compliant spirit. I had sketched the initial scenes of an interesting dilemma—an heroine confronted with the return of a man she once loved and refused—earlier this winter. But the demands of family and ill-health had limited my time at the small, twelve-sided table in the dining parlour where I prefer to write. Now, however, with a full two weeks of leisure before me, matters were otherwise. While I sought refuge in Cheltenham, Anne Elliot might enjoy a renewal of youth and good fortune . . . in Mr. West’s streets in Bath. In writing of her, I might even think of him, in the familiar beauties of that city. Tho’ I dare not set foot among them myself.

ago in Cheltenham Library,

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This meant that on the relevant nights Colonel Wicksteed and Mr Dawlish would not miss any of their favourite programme, Coronation Street. (This the two of them, neither of whom had ever in their lives travelled north of Cheltenham, watched with the fascinated bewilderment many people accord to Science Fiction.)

We are marginally—but crucially—less likely to question the soundness of an article about a rationale for going to war when it comes presented beneath the neo-Gothic Cheltenham typeface of the New York Times, or to probe the coherence of a thesis defending a presidential budget when it is laid out in the sober yet sensuous columns of Le Monde's Fenway font. Brands alone dissuade us from picking sceptically at their underlying content.

Unfortunately it is nowadays the fashion to pretend that the glass is penetrable. Of course everyone knows that class-prejudice exists, but at the same time everyone claims that he, in some mysterious way, is exempt from it. Snob-bishness is one of those vices which we can discern in every- one else but' never in ourselves. Not only the croyant et pratiquant Socialist, but every 'intellectual' takes it as a matter of course that he at least is outside the class-racket; he, unlike his neighbours, can see through the absurdity of wealth, ranks, titles, etc., etc. 'I'm not a snob' is nowadays a kind of universal credo. Who is there who has not jeered at the House of Lords, the military caste, the Royal Family, the public schools, the huntin' and shootin' people, the old ladies in Cheltenham boarding-houses, the horrors of 'county' society, and the social hierarchy generally? To do so has become an automatic gesture.

Cheltenham, admittedly, is a bit far-fetched. Blues players from Cheltenham, there ain’t a lot. And we didn’t want to make money. We despised money, we despised cleanliness, we just wanted to be black motherfuckers.

Christmas is utterly unsuited to the modern world. It presupposes the possibility of families being united, or reunited, and even of the men and women who chose each other being on speaking terms. Thus thousands of young adventurous spirits, ready to face the facts of human life, and encounter the vast variety of men and women as they really are, ready to fly to the ends of the earth and tolerate every alien or accidental quality in cannibals or devil-worshippers, are cruelly forced to face an hour, nay sometimes even two hours, in the society of Uncle George; or some aunt from Cheltenham whom they do not particularly like. Such abominable tortures cannot be tolerated in a time like ours…. It was never supposed that Parents were included in the great democratic abstraction called People. It was never supposed that brotherhood could extend to brothers. G.K.’S WEEKLY (1933)1