unearths some literary gems.
***
It is, indeed, just credible that the past is meant to be left behind you, in spite of what the time-experts say, and that I didn’t realize this fact. This must be why people who live in the present are so uniformly contented and easygoing. I see their point.
***
Poor Mell as the elder got the largest jorum, and once whoever mixed it mixed it too strong, and when she tried to say her prayers, got her petitions handsomely mixed up with an old tune on my musical-box and began, ‘Oh Lord, God bless the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’. The nurse tumbled to the situation first (she had brothers of her own) and looked incredulous and then scandalized, and poddled off to inform, as she warned Mell, ‘y’mother or father’, and Mell shouted, ‘Publish and be damned!’, from one of father’s biographies,
***
But one or two houses, quite monstrously closing their eyes to the juvenility of the illustrated invitation, sent stern, adult white squares of printed announcement, to acknowledge which that baffling, treacherous and currishly snapping commodity, the third person singular, had to be resorted to, a medium in which I am not at my best to this day.
***
The Randolph parties were null affairs in which the iced cake of the tea-table made its ravaged reappearance at supper, a circumstance that I found depressing, for if you were faced with the same cake four hours later you lost all sense of time and couldn’t enjoy the fact of still being out of bed at nine o’clock, as the cake still leered at you that it was only four-thirty.
***
I sensed that Mr. Field was licensed to be queer just as some people are licensed to sell wines and spirits …
***
Evelyn Stortford said, ‘I like a party where everything goes wrong, you know where you are with that sort. It’s when only one or two contretemps happen that it’s really frightful’.
***
Even now I can’t overcome my unease at merry-go-rounds. Is it possibly because their musical repertoire is almost never current, but of an era forgotten or superseded?
***
Stiles specialized in horticultural Malapropisms which I was then too young to appreciate; to him an Antirrhinum was an Anteroom.
***
His principal verb was ‘to mystify’. It covered all the ground – literally, just as the house servants employed the word ‘fornicate’ in several connections but the right one. With them to fornicate or to be fornicating signified alternatively insincere flattery, a state of fluster, a waste of time, and a cook’s complaint that the sweep had been fornicating half the morning with the flues was entirely typical. Between the lot of them they have so confused me that I have practically had to eliminate the word from my own vocabulary, not that it ever occupied a prominent place therein, just as in the same way and through a similar abuse of the word on the part of one of my friends who positively ought to know better I have been compelled to jettison ‘criterion’, unless I put in some uncommonly hard thinking beforehand!
***
I succeeded, on the principle that if you sit about looking like a distinctly rusé edition of Emily Brontë and then smash the effect by a catchword or gag, you bludgeon the company into curiosity and interest.
***
And what a company! Never in my life had I seen the pleasantest insincerity brought to a higher pitch, or dreamed that such a percentage of words in one lorn sentence could be only conveyed if in manuscript by italics.
***
'You’re Barbara Morant, and we knew each other’.
‘Ohhh … are you – Trevor Ackworth-Mead?’
‘Not in the least.’
***
To me quite unexpectedly, the ha-ha-ha’s of the laughing lines gave the producer trouble; half-sung and half-laughed he pronounced the effect patchy and muddled: rhythmically laughed by the chorus in unison he swore was artificial and unoriginal and perfectly flat and a little bloody. Painfully and eventually it was threshed out and tried out and finally confirmed that the chorus should only laugh in rhythm on the first line and disintegrate into laughter on the second: that on the repeat, the conductor should be allowed a fractional pause in which to join in, and be followed by the whole orchestra who would cease to play but be privily timed by the first violin who would signal them to resume. This exact calculation took about a day on and off to get smooth.
***
'I shall hope to be honoured by another lyric soon: shall be a better judge of serious toshery – like the younger Strauss and Gipsy Love, for instance. But toshical toshery is, as I say, rather beyond my scope …’
[Cf. Kenneth Williams's "rubbishy" rubbish.]
***
[Nonexistent Songs dept.]
I wrote Well, it’s Something to Know You Can Buy Them, They All Get an Answer from Me, I Began as I Meant to Go On, I Can Get it Much Cheaper Than That and You’d Never Think I was a Lady. They were what I called ‘build-up’ numbers in which the verses from innocuousness grew progressively more blue, if your mind elected to take them that way.
***
‘It’s as though the people in a family album suddenly got up and walked out of their mounts.’
***
[Speaking of "silly pillows" as an epithet]
"You unmitigated Chesterfield sofa of damnable stuffed obtuseness!"
***
A Beatrice Lillie number, I think, sung with dispassionate understatement and almost no punctuation.
***
Bonus:
A reference to cheating at Snakes and Ladders [I think we've encountered that elsewhere]
