Word: eisteddfod
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...performs naturally and unaffectedly. Durante, as a high-school janitor, hasn't much to do beyond proving, without any strain, that he is one of the most likable entertainers in the business. Miss Grayson, prettier and more animated than ever, warbles an aria from Lakmé like an eisteddfod of thrushes, and does even better by Mozart's Lá Ci Darem la Mano, in which she is supported by Sinatra. For good measure young Billy Roy plays the piano impressively, and Peter Lawford hangs around amiably as the shy son of an English duke...
...every year since the modern Eisteddfod (pronounced eye-steth-vud, means "get together") began in the 18th Century, men & women from all Wales and Welshmen from all parts of the world came to sing around the Druids' Circle, marked out last week by old moss-covered stones in a cool oak-shaded glade just outside Mountain Ash. They heard the venerable Arch Druid (Congregationalist Minister Crwys Williams) open the six-day festival with the traditional words, "A oes heddwch-Is it peace?" The voices of 11,000 Welsh miners and farmers cried an answering "Heddwch!" The Arch Druid smiled...
...always, the Eisteddfod's main attraction was the solemn Parliament of the Bards (Gorsedd). Here, in colorful array (musicians in blue robes, poets in white, honorary bards in green), the bards met to honor this year's prizewinning poets with their wild applause and with Wales's most coveted trophies: the traditional silver crown and pulpit chair. Last week the applause rose even higher to honor royalty: pretty, bareheaded Princess Elizabeth, clad in a green Druidic robe...
Elizabeth had come from London to give royal blessings to Eisteddfod-and to deliver a thinly veiled message from Britain's coal-hungry Ministry of Mines. Graciously she paid tribute to the Welsh miner, but gently, plainly prodded him: "His name is . . . a symbol of tenacity and achievement. Never before have so many looked to him for those qualities as today...
...rather enjoyed killing four men, he is shocked out of his faith in violence or in anything else. He returns to London, is picked up by some "adult Bohemians." At the end he is on the verge of rebuilding the world through a Gloucestershire bacon-cooperative and handicraft-eisteddfod. World War II interrupts these frowsy plans, ends this "record of what many young men in England thought and experienced during the latter half of the vanished...