unearths some literary gems.
From Miss Hargreaves, by Frank Baker:
[This book boasts a postscript from the future! The body of the first-person narrator's chronicle is dated 1939-1940, and it recounts experiences that took place in 1939. Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker was indeed published in 1940; but it included a postscript by the narrator written later in life, which is dated "1965."]
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No doubt about it. I was precariously poised on the Spur of the Moment.
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"What are trousers compared to truth?"
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"The way she looked me up and down through those what-d'you-call-'ems."
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"Remember you have to live up to a nine-foot hat and be brave."
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Wadge, the other tenor, a pleasant fellow who has a habit of putting in aspirates in unlikely places (he has a favourite solo in which he sings "Thou crownest the h-year!") turned and patted me on the back. "A faithful female friend is very nice for a h-young man," he said.
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"It has often occurred to me," she said a little breathlessly, "that since there exists a beetle who resembles a stag, there may possibly exist a stag who resembles a beetle."
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"We're here to-day gone to-morrow and some say to-morrow never comes, so perhaps we don't go."
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"Janus lost the three-thirty," he said. "Backed him both ways, my boy. Had to with a name like that. What did Janus have--two ears or two elbows, something."
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"A ghost couldn't play a harp as well as she does," he said.
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Uncle Grosvenor! I'll Uncle Grosvenor you!"
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"You and I couldn't write like that, not even if we kept ten white owls in our bathrooms."
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We saw an avaricious-looking brass fowl with one eye cocked sideways as though it feared somebody were going to bag the Bible—or perhaps as though it hoped somebody were going to.
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I read it a dozen more times, held it up to the light, shook it, smelt it, and finally spilt some tea over it.
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"Parrots are intelligent birds," said father. "Knew one once that could recite a Shakespeare sonnet. All except the last line."
"Oh well," said mother, "I certainly don't want a harp and a parrot in the house."
***
Nothing ever surprises father. He can’t even surprise himself.
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Sir Hugh Allan, who once attended Evensong, mistook him for a bassoon.
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“Wait till we’re through the lock.”
If you’ve got anything to say, it might as well be said in a lock as out of it, I thought.
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I reckon that if I could really bring myself to believe she didn’t exist—well, she wouldn’t exist. But that’s damned hard when you see her sitting in the Bishop’s Throne with a fifteen-inch hat.”
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“Swans are funny creatures. I wouldn’t trust a swan with a five-pound note. No, I wouldn’t.”
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She doesn’t understand the sort of things father and I talk about. Not that we understand them ourselves, as a matter of fact.
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It wasn’t at all an easy question to answer. If I had it in an examination, I don’t suppose I should be able to fill up both sides of the paper.
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She was asked to open a Conservative bazaar and she opened it damn well; I wandered in there after she had left and I had the strongest feeling that it was the best-opened bazaar I had ever been to. Not a bit of it was closed, you could see that.
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Another matter brought her bang into the middle of Cornford, between the “n” and the “f” as you might say.
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“Here, old boy, don’t go on like this.”
“I will go on like this.”
But instead of going on like that, I turned suddenly and went out of the bar.
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"/Atalanta in Calydon/ was written entirely with arrows, Miss Hargreaves. He'd take the manuscript, pin it to the board, and fire at it. Any words that the arrows pierced, he'd take out."
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Canon Auty, it was said, had first met his wife on a mountain in Switzerland, where he found her presiding over an impending avalanche.
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Canon Auty... stroked his beard reflectively as though there, and only there, could a good time be found.
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