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The character sketch of Smith

Herbert Norman Smeeth is one of the main characters of the novel ' Angel Pavement" by J.B.Prestley. This novel is realistic and describes the years of economic depression in Great Britain. Smeeth is one of the typical office workers in the City, the business center of London. He wasn't young, in his fifties. "His appearance was deceptive. He looked what he ought to have been, and what he was not a grey drudge. Angel Pavement had thinned his hair and turned it grey, wrinkled his forehead and the space of each side of his short grey moustache, put eye­glasses at one end of his nose and slightly sharpened and reddened the other end, and given him a prominent Adam's apple. Nevertheless, he wasn't a grey drudge." He was the only one in the office who really liked his job: He was a man of figures. He had gratitude, a zest, an eagerness that couldn't be found in the others. They merely came to earn their money. Mr. Smeeth came to work."He was more himself in the office, than he was in the street outside. He was eager and industrious at work. He felt proud of doing his job and loved the importance, the dignity of his position.

It took years before he became an accountant, he actually started as an office boy 35 years ago. Then he got a position of a junior clerk. For the last 10 years he had been working at Twigg and Dersingham. As he called it, triumphantly arrived. He thought he achieved great heights in his profession and admired it when bank cashiers greeted him in a respectful manner. He felt himself a man of real importance.

Smeeth had a so called fobia of loosing his job, going back to the streets and ending up in a working house. "His days at the office were filled with important and exciting events, all the more important and exciting because they were there in the light, for just beyond them was the darkness in which lurked (скрываться) one great fear, the fear that he might lose his job. Once he stopped being Twigg and Dersingham cashier, what was he?" This fear could easily be explained as it was the time of the Great Economic Depression and it was not so easy to find a job. There were long queues of the unemployed who were desperate. Sometimes "he felt queerly insecure, not at all happy with his books, his neat little figures, now that he no longer knew what was happening to the firm".

When Golspie arrived, he was careful and suspicious about him. But when he talked to him, Smeeth felt that the business was getting right.

It should be mentioned that nobody in the office really liked his personality. Miss Matfield found him a vaguely pathetic creature who loved a grey life in some grey suburb". The pleasure he got from the job sometimes irritated her. Stainley sometimes wished that in the future he might help Mr. Smeeth when he was in danger. Mr. Dersingham trusted Smeeth.

Prosperity for Smeeth was extra working hours which he didn't mind at all. Priestley calls him "a man of business and a careful householder". When he got a rise, he was planning to save money or buy a house. But he knew that he couldn't keep the secret from his wife, who was quite extravagant.

He was fond of his children, but he couldn't understand them. He didn't understand the whole younger generation. He thought that young girls didn't have "a scrap (кусочек, клочок) of sense". His son George was both a disappointment.

The bankruptcy of the company was surely a shock for him. "He was shaking a little, not with fear, but with indignation. For years there had been a great shadow haunting and terrifying him."

But it wasn't such a stroke for him as he had expected it to be. He understood that life goes on, and one needs to live. His family was quite supportive and understanding. So he accepted the idea that he had to join the lines and start looking for a job, quite calmly.

"It was a world that could play all manner of tricks with Herbert Norman Smeeth but could never capture, swallow, and digest the whole of him."