Round 121 - 26 May 2002

1. "It's a topping morning. (...) Spring and all that. (...) In the spring a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove. (...) Right-o! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg. I'm going into the park to do pastoral dances."

He went to the closet and took from among a number of hats a Homburg. Then, having selected from a bowl of flowers on the mantelpiece a simple white rose, he pinned it in the coat of his pyjama-suit and announced himself ready.

Round 122 - 2 June 2002

2. ____(Y)____ was one of those girls who, if they have not plenty of precious stones on their persons, feel nude. Her aim in life was to look as like a chandelier as possible.

Was this high maintenance fashion plate Veronica Wedge, Mrs Adela Shannon Cork, Cora McGuffy Spottsworth, Mavis Mulligan, or Lady Pauline Wetherby?

3. "Silly fathead!" (...) He was alluding to a young gentleman with a vacant, fish-like face who (...) had thrown his cigarette into the wastepaper basket, causing it to burst into a cheerful blaze. Not one of the little company of amateur fire-fighters but was ruffled. (...) The satin-clad bosom of Miss ______ (...) was still heaving.

Was the lady with the heaving satin-clad b. Miss (Marlene) Wellbeloved, Miss (Amanda) Biffen, Miss (Dinty) Moore, Miss (Jill) Mariner, or Miss Postlethwaite?

4. The thing about her that immediately arrested the attention and drew the startled whistle to the lips was the aura of wealth which she exuded. It showed itself in her rings, her hat, her stockings, her shoes, her platinum fur cape and the Jacques Fath sports costume that clung lovingly to her undulating figure. Here, you would have said to yourself, beholding her, was a woman who had got the stuff in sackfuls and probably suffered agonies from coupon-clipper's thumb, a woman at the mention of whose name the bloodsucking leeches of the Internal Revenue Department were accustomed to raise their filthy hats with a reverent intake of the breath.

Was this spectacularly turned out vision Mrs Eugenia Crocker, Mrs Rosalinda Spottsworth, Lora Delane Porter, Princess Heloise von und zu Dwornitzchek, or Grayce Llewellyn?

5. ___(A)___'s statement that the lady required a hat brought (the hat shop proprietor) up on her toes in an instant, and when he added that in the matter of price the sky might be regarded as the limit, it seemed to arouse all that was best in her. She hustled about, exhibiting specimen after specimen, but it was the one that looked like a fruit salad that received ___(B)___'s vote. She came out with it poised on her head, and ___(A)___ quivered to the soles of his suede shoes as he gazed at it. He had not supposed that it would have been possible to enhance her radiant beauty, but the fruit salad did it by as much as twenty per cent.

Is the fruit-salad-loving couple Mr and Mrs Archie Moffam, Mr and Mrs Richard "Bingo" Little, Cyril "Barmy" Fotheringay-Phipps and Eileen "Dinty" Moore, Wilberforce "Battling" Billson and his Flossie, or Freddie Rooke and Nelly Bryant?

Artists We Have Known

Plum's artists are generally either romantic heroes or comic foils and quite often manage to fill both roles simultaneously. Can you identify the following brush-wielders?

1. A portrait-painter, he called himself, but as a matter of fact his score up to date had been nil. You see, the catch about portrait-painting – I've looked into the thing a bit – is that you can't start painting portraits till people come along and ask you to, and they won't come and ask you to until you've painted a lot first. This makes it kind of difficult, not to say tough, for the ambitious youngster.

____(X)____ managed to get along by drawing an occasional picture for the comic papers – he had rather a gift for funny stuff when he got a good idea – and doing bedsteads and chairs and things for the advertisements.

2. "I think where I must have gone wrong," said ___(A)___, stepping back and closing one eye, "was in trying to get some animation into her face. You've no notion how disheartening it is (...) for an artist to come up against a sitter like that. She just lay on her side with her eyes shut and bits of potato dribbling out of the corner of her mouth. Velasquez would have been baffled. It seemed to me that I had somehow got to create a bit of sparkle, so I prodded her with a stick and shoved the result down like lightning before she could go to sleep again. But I see what you mean. The expression isn't right."

"Nor the shape. You've made her oblong."

"Oh, that's nothing. I should probably have altered that. I have been experimenting in the cubist form lately and I just tried it as an idea. Purely tentative."

3. (...) his object was not, as it usually was when he went to Scantlebury Square, to propose to ___(Y)___. He had a more unselfish motive. For some time past, by hints dropped and tentative remarks thrown out, he had been made aware that Mrs __(Y)__ greatly desired him to paint her daughter's portrait: and until now he had always turned to these remarks and hints a deaf ear. Mrs ___(Y)___'s mother's heart wanted, he knew, to get the portrait for nothing: and, while love is love and all that, he had the artist's dislike for not collecting all that was coming to him. ___(Z)___, the man, might entertain the idea of pleasing the girl he worshipped by painting her on the nod, but ___(Z)___, the artist had his schedule of prices. And until today it was this second ___(Z)___ who had said the deciding word.

4. As an artist he belonged to the ultramodern school, expressing himself most readily in pictures showing a sardine can, two empty beer bottles, a bunch of carrots and a dead cat, the whole intended to represent Paris In Springtime. He doubted his ability to work in another vein.

"Would I be any good at a portrait?"

"Good enough for a gaggle of explorers. All explorers have weak eyes through staring at the sunrise on the Lower Zambesi. They won't notice a thing."

The Maple Leaf Forever!

A year or two ago an Australian Quiz-Master commemorated her country’s national day with an Antipodal Wodehouse quiz. With Canada’s 135th birthday fast approaching on July 1, it seems timely to do something similar to honour the True North, Strong and Free.

Two of the following questions deal with Canadians in Wodehouseland, one deals with a Wodehouse character who may (or may not) be about to emigrate to Canada and the other one deals with Wodehouse characters who had off-stage adventures in the Canadian wilderness before the commencement of the action described in their stories and/or novels.

1. An easy one to begin: Can you identify the Singer of Saskatoon, who is, perhaps, the only person in the world capable of defining a pale parabola of joy?

2. Can you identify the following speaker, who apparently took Prince Tamino’s correspondence course on portrait appreciation?

"Do you see anything funny, anything laughable, anything at all ludicrous, in a fellow going for a fishing trip to Canada and being stuck in a hut miles from anywhere with nothing to read and nothing to listen to except the wild duck calling to its mate and the nifties of a French Canadian guide who couldn’t speak more than three words of English, (...) finding the photograph of a beautiful girl tacked up on the wall of the hut by some previous visitor, and having nothing else to look at for five weeks, should have fallen in love with the photograph?"

And for extra points, which two characters had an off-stage meeting on a fishing expedition to my home province of British Columbia which resulted in ‘A’ supplying ‘B’ with a letter of introduction, with ‘A’ being unaware that he was inadvertently introducing an impostor into the bosom of his New York family?

3. "___(X)___," said ___(Y)___ without preamble, "is a son of Belial, a leper, and a worm. (...) He’s let me down, the weak-minded Tishbite! Doesn’t want that house in the country after all. My gosh, if ___(X)___ is the sort of man Canada is producing nowadays, Heaven help the British Empire. (...) When I knew ___(X)___ out in Canada, he had the constitution of an ox. Ostriches took his correspondence course in digestion. But directly he comes into a bit of money (...) he gets the idea that he’s a sort of fragile, delicate flower. (...) He went to one of those Harley Street sharks who charge a couple of guineas for saying, ‘well, how are we this morning?’ (...) Tapped him here and prodded him there, said he was run down, and finally told him he ought to spend six months in a dry, sunny climate. Recommended Egypt. Egypt, I’ll trouble you, for a bloke who lived fifty years thinking that it was a town in Illinois. Well, the long and short of it is that he’s gone off for six months, doesn’t want a place in England, and I hope he gets bitten by a crocodile."

4. "Good God! (...) Three hundred and four pounds fifteen shillings and eightpence! Probably owes as much, too, in a dozen other places. And in the red to that extent he’s planning, I hear, to marry the fat woman in a circus." (...)

"That’s my (niece) you’re talking about, and he’s going to marry her or else get sued for breach of promise." (...)

"Well, she’ll have to go to Canada to bring her action, (...) because that’s where ___(Z)___’ll be off to on the next boat, and when he’s there he won’t have money to fritter away on breach of promise cases. It’ll be as much as he can manage to keep body and soul together on what I’m going to allow him. If he gets a meat meal every third day, he’ll be lucky. You tell that (niece) of yours to forget ___(Z)___ and go and marry the Demon King."

Round 125 - 1 July 2002

Wodehouse often takes us into the suburbs, and most of us could probably find our way around Valley Fields (a.k.a. Dulwich) without too much trouble by now. But who can spot where these slightly more obscure parts of the Metropolis appear? As usual, bonus points for giving chapter and verse.

1. Can you identify the speakers who are at cross-purposes here (for a bonus point, explain what is going on, and whose fault it is)?

"Mr X__," she cried, "you are quite mistaken!"

"I beg your pardon," said X__, with not a little asperity. "Nothing of the kind!"

"You are!"

"I assure you I am not. Quickness in the draw is essential ..."

"You have been misinformed."

"Well, I had it direct from the man at the Rupert Street range," said Mr. X__, stiffly. "And if you've ever seen a movie called 'Two-Gun Thomas' ..."

"Mr. X__," cried Y__ desperately. He was making her head swim with his meaningless ravings. "Mr. X__, hear me! I am not married to a man at Ealing West!"

2. Who is this keen entrepreneur, and into which other suburb is he hoping to lure the disciples of Cecil Sharp?

"I happened to see their advertisement in the papers. The North Kensington Folk Dance Society they called themselves, and they were offering spot cash for some place, not too far from the centre of things, where they could hold their annual beano. I dare say you've heard of these birds, A__? They tie bells to their trousers and dance old rustic dances, showing that it takes all sorts to make a world."

3. When the great revolution against London's ugliness really starts and yelling hordes of artists and architects, maddened beyond endurance, finally take the law into their own hands and rage through the city burning and destroying, Wallingford Street, West Kensington, will surely not escape the torch. [...] Sensitive young impressionists from the artists' colony up Holland Park way may sometimes be seen stumbling about it with hands over their eyes, muttering between clenched teeth "How long? How long?"

Who lives at this distinguished address: Sally Painter, Nelly Bryant, Phyllis Jackson, or Kay Derrick?

4. Rapidity of movement had never been congenial to B__. Finding therefore that on reaching the end of the Prince of Wales Road that he was not being pursued, he slowed down. At a leisurely walk he turned the corner into Queen's Road and presently found himself on Chelsea Bridge. Here he decided to halt. For B__ had man's work before him. He intended to count his money. [...] The view from Chelsea Bridge is one of the most stimulating in London, but B__ had no eyes for it. However picturesque, it could not hope to compete with the view afforded by the palm of his left hand. Thirteen shillings, two sixpences and five pennies – a noble sum.

Who is this Battersea plutocrat, and where is his more usual habitat?

Round 126 - 10 July 2002

Bucket and Spade

If you're reading this, then you are probably at home or at work sitting behind your computer. This is the time of year when most of the Northern hemisphere rolls up its trousers, puts a knotted handkerchief on its head, and heads off to Roville, Marvis Bay, Bingley-on-Sea, or Chuffnell Regis, so it may be pleasant to reflect that sometimes you're better off at home ...

1. Who is this melancholy holidaymaker, and who are his little friends (two possible answers in the second case)?

I don't know if you know Marvis Bay. It's in Dorsetshire; and, while not what you would call a fiercely exciting spot, has many good points. You spend the day there bathing and sitting on the sands, and in the evening you stroll out on the shore with the X___s. At nine p.m. you rub ointment on the wounds and go to bed. It was a simple, healthy life, and it seemed to suit poor old Y___ absolutely. Once the moon was up and the breeze sighing in the trees, you couldn't drag him from the beach with ropes. He became quite a popular pet with the X___s.

Now two young men who find themselves looking on the seaside with a jaundiced eye: can you identify them?

2. P___, in addition to all the advantages of the usual village, has a quiet charm of its own, due to the fact that it has seen better days. In a sense, it is a ruin, and ruins are always soothing to the bruised soul. Ten years before, P___ had been a flourishing centre of the South of England oyster trade. It is situated by the shore, where Hayling Island, lying athwart the mouth of the bay, forms the waters into a sort of brackish lagoon, in much the same way as Fire Island shuts off the Great South Bay of Long Island from the waves of the Atlantic.

3. The view which he had had of it from his brother's window should no doubt have prepared Q___ for the hideous loathsomeness of Bingley-on-Sea: but, as he walked along, he found it coming on him as a complete surprise. Until now he had never imagined that a small town could possess so many soul-searing features. He passed little boys, and thought how repulsive little boys were. He met tradesmen's carts, and his gorge rose at the sight of them. He hated the houses. And, most of all, he objected to the sun. It shone down with a cheeriness which was not only offensive, but, it seemed to Q___, deliberately offensive. What he wanted was wailing winds and driving rain, not a beastly expanse of vivid blue.

4. Finally a more positive picture of the seaside. It will all end in tears, of course ...

It became a regular thing with [R___] to take the half-portion down to the beach and stand by while it mucked about with its spade and bucket. And it was as he was acting as master of the revels one sunny day that there came ambling along a well-nourished girl with golden hair, who paused and scrutinised the S___ issue with a genial smile. "Is the baby building a sand castle?" she said. "Well, yes and no," replied R___ civilly. "It thinks it is, but if you ask me, little of a constructive nature will result." "Still, as long as it's happy."

Who was babysitting for whom?

Round 127 - 18 July 2002

Fish without bicycles

Contrary to what one might think, there are quite a lot of feminist ideas knocking around in the chivalrous world of Wodehouse. Up to a point, that is ...

1. 'I want you,' said Mrs A__, 'to come here and watch some men --'
'Men! Thought so! Wh' there's trouble always men't bottom'f it!'
'You do not like men?'
'Hate 'em! Suff-gist!' She looked penetratingly at Mrs A___. Her left eye seemed to pounce out from under its tangled brow. 'You s'porter of th'cause?'
Mrs A___ was an anti-suffragist, but, though she held strong opinions, nothing would have induced her to air them at that moment. Her whole being quailed at the prospect of arguing with this woman.

Who is Mrs A__, and why does she need the help of this fiery individual?

2. "We happened to have a word or two," said B___ at length, "on the way home from church on the subject of Women's Suffrage."
"That fatal topic!" murmured C___.
"In Australia --" began D.
"I was rayther -- well, rayther facetious about it," continued B__.
C___ clicked his tongue sympathetically.
"In Australia --" said D.
"I went talking on, laughing and joking, when all of a sudden she flew out at me. How was I to know she was 'eart and soul in the movement? You never told me," he added, accusingly, to his host.
"In Australia --" said D.
"I'll go and try to get her round. How was I to know?"
B___ thrust back his chair and bounded from the room.

What is D___ trying to tell us about the Land of Oz? There's a small bonus for identifying B, C and D.

3. "...I love my work. I love my recreations. I love life."
"You're wonderful!"
"And why shouldn't I? I earn every bit of pleasure that I get. I like nice clothes, nice shoes, nice stockings -- because I buy them myself. I'm like the village blacksmith -- I owe not any man. I wonder if you've the faintest idea how happy it can make a woman feel just to be a worker and alive -- with good nerves, good circulation, and good muscles. Feel my arm. Like iron."
"Wonderful!"
"And my legs. Hard as a rock. Prod 'em."
"No, really!"

Who is the unfortunate drone (or Drone?) on the receiving end of this hymn to honest toil: Freddie Widgeon, Bill Bannister, Pongo Twistleton, or Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps?

4. "...Do you know a local blister by the name of E___?"
"Who lives in River Row?"
"That's the one."
"She's a barrister."
"She looks it."
"You've met her."
"I've met her."
"She's F___'s opponent in the election."
"I know. Is Mr E___ still alive?"
"Died years ago. He got run over by a municipal tram."
"I don't blame him. I'd have done the same thing myself in his place."

Name E___ and F___. What has brought the speaker into contact with E___?

Round 128 - 27 July 2002

Tired nature's sweet restorer

Weariness can snore upon the flint, but Wodehouse characters who snore are usually heading for trouble. Be a bit careful when answering the following questions: not all the snorers are who we think they are at first hearing ...

1. A sound like two or three pigs feeding rather noisily in the middle of a thunderstorm interrupted his meditations. A___ laid his book down and gazed in a pained way across the compartment. [...] The man in the corner went on snoring. There is always a way. Almost immediately, A___ saw what Napoleon would have done in this crisis. On the seat beside the sleeper was lying a compact little suitcase with hard sharp edges. Rising softly, A___ edged along the compartment and secured this. Then, having balanced it carefully on the luggage rack above the sleeper's stomach, he returned to his seat to await developments.

No prizes for guessing what happens next, but who is the snorer, and what immortal work is he distracting A___ from?

2. For an instant, [...] B___'s love, deep as the sea though it was, definitely wobbled. It was not simply the discovery that the girl he loved was a snorer that unmanned him: it was the thought that she could snore like that. There was something about those snores that had seemed to sin against his whole conception of womanly purity. Then he recovered. Even though this girl's slumber was not, as the poet Milton so beautifully puts it, "airily light" but rather reminiscent of a lumber-camp when the wood-sawing is proceeding at its briskest, he loved her still.

Once again, please identify the snorer in question. What is B___ intending to do to mitigate the nuisance?

3. ... there's this door with someone snoring behind it, and I twist the handle and it ain't locked. Swell, I think to myself, and i give it a pull and what do you know? The damn thing squeals like putting on the brakes in a second-hand flivver, and the next thing there's this white-haired bird pulling a gun on me and telling me to close the door gently and walk to the window. [...] So I walk to the window. And the next thing I know I'm sitting outside of it and the guy's closing the shutters. And after awhile out breaks the snoring again, and I see he's in for the night and I'm out for the night.

What colour are the white-haired bird's pyjamas?

4. I was a good deal cheered at this juncture to hear a fruity snore from the direction of the pillows. Reason told me that a bloke who could snore like that wasn't going to be awakened by a trifle. I edged forward and ran a hand in a gingerly sort of way over the coverlet. A moment later I had found the bulge.

Who is the snorer here, and what is about to happen to him?

Round 129 - 15 August 2002

In addition to Shakespeare (or rather Bacon), Tennyson and all those chaps, Wodehouse often quotes from songs by Broadway lyricists, as in the following passages. Identify the novels or stories in which the following appear. For bonus points, identify also the lyricists who wrote the lines quoted (or the show in which they were first sung).

1. From somewhere near at hand music made itself heard. The servants' hall, its day's labours ended, was refreshing itself with the housekeeper's gramophone. To A___ the strains were merely an additional annoyance ...

"Yes, I can distinctly recall as much as that ..."

"WHO--"

A___ leaped in the air. It was as if an electric shock had been applied to his person. "WHO stole my heart away?" howled the gramophone. "WHO--?"

WHO is A, and how does this song inspire him?

2. B___ was full as usual. All the tables were occupied, and there were several couples already on the dancing-floor in the centre. The band was playing "Michigan":

I want to go back, I want to go back,
To the place where I was born.
Far away from harm
With a milk-pail on my arm.

I suppose the fellow who wrote that would have called for the police if anyone had ever really tried to get him on to a farm ...

Name the narrator making this critique, and name also the establishment (B) at which he/she works.

3. C__ expelled a deep breath.

"Bill, you put heart into me."

"That's good."

"I suppose it's because one doesn't associate a butler with safeblowing that I was doubtful for a moment. I always thought butlers went about saying ‘Yes, m'lord,’ ‘No, m'lord,’ ‘Pardon me, m'lady, Her Grace the Duchess is on the telephone. She desires me to ask if you can spare her a cup of sugar,’ and all that sort of thing, not blowing safes. But if he carries your guarantee, that's a different matter. I feel now that prosperity is just around the corner."

"Let's sing to every citizen and for'gner prosperity is just around the corner."

What is the LAST name of "Bill" (possibly Wodehouse's favourite name), and who is the butler? (For still more extra credit, cite another quotation of the "for'gner" couplet in a non-fiction Wodehouse work.)

4. Some sort of smoking-concert seemed to be in progress in the large room across the passage from the bar-parlour of the D___ ... Now the piano began to tinkle again and a voice broke into a less familiar number. The words came to us faintly, but clearly:

The days of Chivalry are dead,
Of which in stories I have read,
When knights were bold and acted kind of scrappy;
They used to take a lot of pains
And fight all day to please the dames,
And if their dame was tickled they was happy ...

Oh, it makes me sort of sad
To think about Sir Galahad
And all the knights of that romantic day ...

Identify D, the establishment which is being treated to this song.

Round 130 - 23 August 2002

Games are prominent in Wodehouse -- cricket, baseball, boxing, and of course golf (though that's more of a religion). But he also alludes to the games of ancient Rome. Identify the novels or stories in which the following passages occur.

1. The butler had betrayed no emotion on beholding what appeared to be a corpse on the floor of the Garden Suite. Nor did the two footmen, Charles and Henry, who subsequently carried out the removal ... A__ disappeared feet foremost, like a used gladiator being cleared away from the arena, and B__ was left to his thoughts.

Who is A, and why was he lying corpselike on the floor?

2. There was a sheet lying on the bed where C__ had dropped it when disturbed at his knotting, and to snatch this up and envelop D__ in it was with me the work of a moment. It is a long time since I studied the subject, and before committing myself definitely I should have to consult E__, but I have an idea that ancient Roman gladiators used to do the same sort of thing in the arena, and were rather well thought of in consequence.

Who has entangled whom in a sheet, in emulation of the Roman retiarius?

3. The squarest man, left suddenly homeless in London and faced with the prospect of earning his living there, is likely to quail for a moment. A gladiator, waiting in the centre of the arena while the Colosseum officials fumbled with the bolts of the door behind which paced the noisy tiger with whom he was to confer, must have had some of the emotions which F__ experienced during his first hours as a masterless man in the metropolis.

Who is the F who (like so many Wodehouse heroes) has just been sacked, and what "situation" is he about to find to replace his lost job?

4. One hesitates to apply the term "joy-rider" to so eminent a leader of contemporary thought as the authoress of "The Dawn of Better Things," "Principles of Selection," and "What of To-morrow?" but candour compels the admission that she was a somewhat reckless driver. Perhaps it was due to some atavistic tendency. One of her ancestors may have been a Roman charioteer or a coach-racing maniac of the Regency days.

Who is this possible descendant of Ben-Hur?