Bill the Conqueror

This round is dedicated to the man who was responsible for the spot of bother in 1066 and all that, and to the Wodehousian descendants of some of his pals.

1. "He's charming."

"He charms me."

"Very fine family."

"Grade A. One of his ancestors came over with William the Conqueror, or would have if he hadn't missed the boat. Some trouble about losing his passport."

"It's a pity he won't succeed to the title."

"No, there are about fifty-seven sons ahead of him."

"And of course one is always taking a chance with someone as good-looking as that."

"I'll risk it."

(...)

"You have to be prepared for anything."

"I'll manage."

"Yes, I think you will," said A___. As they were walking side by side, it was B___'s profile that presented itself to her most of the time, and that firm chin gave her confidence. It was not likely that much could go wrong matrimonially with a chin like that. She was filled with maternal pride. To C___ B___ might be the menace in the treatment, but the very qualities that made him quail were those which appealed to her. A panther woman likes to feel that her daughter has inherited the panther strain and is well able to cope with the handsomest of husbands.

2. "After we had been dancing for some time, a most annoying thing occurred. Just as we were enjoying ourselves – everybody cutting up and having a good time – who should come in but a lot of interfering policemen. A most brusque and unpleasant body of men. Inquisitive, too. One of them kept asking me my name and address. But I soon put a stop to all that sort of nonsense. I plugged him in the eye."

"You plugged him in the eye?"

"I plugged him in the eye, D___. That's when I got this suit torn. The fellow was annoying me intensely. He ignored my repeated statement that I gave my name and address only to my oldest and closest friends, and had the audacity to clutch me by what I suppose a costumier would describe as the slack of my garment. Well, naturally I plugged him in the eye. I come of a fighting line, D___. My ancestor, E___, was famous in William the Conqueror's day for his work with the battle-axe. So I biffed this bird."

3. "I had not expected this, F___," said G___ reproachfully.

"You knew I was saved, didn't you?"

"Yes, but can't you understand that this is a far, far better thing that we are asking you to do than you have ever done? Consider the righteousness of our cause."

"Busting a pete is busting a pete, and you can't get away from it."

"You aren't forgetting that H___'s ancestors came over with the Conqueror?"

For an instant F___ seemed to waver.

4. Watching the animal sitting there like a bump on a log, I soon found myself chafing a good deal. (...) One doesn't want to make a song and dance about one's ancient lineage, of course, but after all the I___s did come over with the Conqueror and were extremely pally with him: and a fat lot of good it is coming over with Conquerors, if you're simply going to wind up by being given the elbow by Aberdeen terriers.

Round 252 - 17 November 2005

Summer Lightning

As a rule, the weather, in your average Wodehouse novel, is giving uniform satisfaction, with the sun shining down from a sky of cornflower blue, the gentle breeze breezing gently, and flitting butterflies, tooting birds, and buzzing bees all busy at the old stand. But thunderstorms do occur from time to time – and when they do, they nearly always have a providential rôle to play in the narrative, as is demonstrated by the following fragments.

1. The first thing A___ noticed on arriving at the sty was a complete shortage of B___s and he could make nothing of it, for C___ had distinctly told him that his host was awaiting him there. Some mistake, he assumed, and glad of the respite he lit a cigarette. And he had scarcely done so when there was a flash and a roar and the storm which had been threatening all the afternoon broke with a violence which probably came as a surprise to the barometer C___ had tapped in the hall. It had predicted dirty weather, but it could hardly have anticipated anything on this scale. To A___, whose nervous system was not at its best, what was in progress seemed to combine the outstanding qualities of the Johnstown flood and the Day of Judgment.

2. D___ gasped. The blow had been as severe as it was unexpected. From time to time, as happens to every leader of men, he had had difficulties with his little flock, but never before because one of them had got religion.

"Happened yesterday, he tells me," said E___. "He went to one of those revival meetings. Funny thing was, he'd only gone in to get out of the rain. There was a thunderstorm round about four in the afternoon, and this revival place was handy. Afraid this rather gums up your arrangements, guv, because he says if you showed him a pete with the Crown jewels in it, he wouldn't so much as stir a finger to bust it, not if the Archbishop of Canterbury begged him on his bended knees."

3. The only consolation I had in the black period of the opening of the tourney was the fact that F___ had taken a seat among the spectators and was wedged in between a couple of females with parasols. Reason told me that even a kid so steeped in sin as young G___ would hardly perpetrate any outrage on a man in such a strong strategic position. Considerably relieved, I gave myself up to the game, and was in the act of putting it across the local curate with a good deal of vim, when there was a roll of thunder and the rain started to come down in buckets.

We all stampeded for the house, and had gathered in the drawing-room for tea, when suddenly H___, looking up from a cucumber-sandwich, said:

"Has anybody seen F___?"

4. "I say," he said, "what about this?"

"What?"

"This bally rain."

"Just a Scotch mist."

"Don't you think you had better chuck it?"

I___ stared.

"Are you suggesting that I give up the match?"

"That's the idea."

I___ stared again.

"Give up my chance of getting into the final just because of a drop of rain?"

"Well, we're getting dashed wet, what? And golf's only a game, I mean, if you know what I mean."

I___'s eyes flashed liked the lightning which had just struck a tree not far off.

"I would not dream of forfeiting the match," she cried. "And if you leave me now, I'll never speak to you again."

Extra credit: Whose day was made when a thunderstorm prevented another match (not a golfing one) from taking place?

Round 253 - 25 November 2005

Scrum Halves

Ukridge claims it is an advantage for someone running a chicken farm to know nothing about chickens. This quizmaster knows nothing about rugby, so he should be eminently qualified to set a rugby-themed quiz. Identify the scrum halves or scrum half look-alikes in the following passages (four scrum halves, making two full scrums in all).

1. "Stick it!" said A__, encouragingly. He was running easily and well, as becomes a man who, in his day, had been a snip for his international at scrum-half.

B__ saved her breath. The train was beginning to move slowly out of the station as they sprinted abreast on to the platform. A__ dived for the nearest door, wrenched it open, gathered B__ in his arms, and flung her in. She landed squarely on the toes of a man who occupied the corner. ...

"I'm so sorry," she said breathlessly. "I hope I didn't hurt you." ...

"Not at all," he said in answer to her question, though it was far from the truth. His left big toe was aching confoundedly. Even a girl with a foot as small as B__'s can make her presence felt on a man's toe if the scrum-half who is handling her aims well and uses plenty of vigour.

2. In the demeanour of C__, as she entered, there was none of the elation of the ardent lover at the sight of his lady. All the joy which had been thrilling him, as he thought of that visit to Tunbridge Wells on the morrow, was swept away as by a squeegee, to be replaced by dismay and panic. He did not say "She is coming, my own, my sweet," but leaped like a pea on a hot shovel, spraying brilliantine in all directions.

"Good Lord!" he cried, appalled. "What on earth are you doing here?"

If he had studied for weeks, testing and examining every possible conversational opening, he could scarcely have found one less calculated to remove from C__'s mind that feeling of being out of sympathy with him. She started violently, as if she had been stung by a wasp or kissed by a scrum-half in a rhododendron walk, and for an instant stood staring incredulously. Then there fell upon her an ominous calm.

3. Life in a London suburb can never be luxurious, but it has its advantages. A house there does not require a large staff for its maintenance. D__ employed no butler, no parlourmaid, no upper and under housemaids, just E__ to dust, make the beds and do the cooking. E__ was not as expert at cooking as at climbing up the sides of houses, but in one branch of the art he could not be rivalled. He fried a superb egg.

Two of these and the bacon that went with them were on the table before D__ on the morning after his visit to Mallow Hall, but he was not giving them the attention they deserved. He was thinking of F__.

Normally, D__ was not much of a squire of dames these days. ... F__, however, had made a deep impression on him, though physically, it could not be denied, she lay open to criticism. Hers, though pleasant, was definitely not the face that launched a thousand ships, and she was additionally handicapped by a square, sturdy figure suggestive of someone who in the football season turned out regularly at scrum half for the London Scottish.

4. I never see this relative without thinking how odd it is that one sister – call her Sister A – can be so unlike another sister, whom we will call Sister B. G__, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while H__ is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football.

Extra Credit: In which book does the following passage appear? (Or you can name the periodical in which this originally appeared.)

A scrum is formed, the ball is heeled out, the scrum-half gathers it, and instantaneously two fourteen-stone forwards fling themselves on his person, grinding him into the mud. Are we to abolish Twickenham and Murrayfield because some sorry reasoner tells us that if the scrum-half had been a cat he would have been squashed flatter than a Dover sole? And no use trying to drive into these morons' heads that there is no recorded instance of a team lining up for the kick-off with a cat playing scrum-half.

Round 254 - 7 December 2005

Wodehouse on the Niblick

1. "She expects to win the Women's Singles."

A__ drew herself up sharply. She was expecting to win the Women's Singles herself.

"She does, does she?"

"Yes, she does."

"Over my dead body."

"That would be a mashie niblick shot," said B__ thoughtfully. "She's wonderful with her mashie niblick."

Who is the mashie niblick expert?

2. "I want your advice," said C__.

"Certainly. What is the trouble? By the way," I said, looking round, "where is your fiancé?"

"I have no fiancé," she said, in a dull, hard voice.

"You have broken off the engagement?"

"Not exactly. And yet – well, I suppose it amounts to that."

"I don't quite understand."

"Well, the fact is," said C__, in a burst of girlish frankness, "I rather think I've killed D__."

"Killed him, eh?"

It was a solution that had not occurred to me, but now that it was presented for my inspection I could see its merits. ...

"I killed him with my niblick," said C__.

I nodded. If the thing was to be done at all, it was unquestionably a niblick shot.

Who thinks she has killed whom, and why?

3. "My dear E__, when you get to my age, you don't overpower burglars. I let him sleep on. I hadn't the heart to disturb him."

"I'll disturb him," said E__, leaping from his bed in a flash of yellow and purple, and F__ agreed that it was perhaps time that the reveillé was sounded. He suggested that E__ should arm himself with something solid from the bag of golf clubs which was standing in a corner of the room. He recommended the niblick, and E__ felt that it was a wise choice. He had had no previous experience of intimidating a burglar, but instinct told him that it was a niblick shot.

Who is E?

4. "She then said that she would marry you?"

"Yes. And what could I do? A girl," said G__ fretfully, "who can't distinguish between the way a man looks when he's admiring a chip shot thirty feet from the green and the way he looks when he's in love ought not to be allowed at large."

There seemed nothing to say. The idea of suggesting that he should break off the engagement presented itself to me, but I dismissed it. Women are divided broadly into two classes – those who, when jilted, merely drop a silent tear and those who take a niblick from their bag and chase the faithless swain across country with it. It was to this latter section that H__ belonged. Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings.

Name the woman who has acquired a reluctant fiancé.

5. "I don't see why you should worry, I__. How, by any stretch of the imagination, can you make out that you are to blame for J__'s misfortune? It looks to me as if these eccentric wills of old K__'s came in cycles, as it were. Just as he was due for another outbreak he happened to meet you. It's a moral certainty that if he hadn't met you he would have left all his money to a Home for Superannuated Caddies or a Fund for Supplying the Deserving Poor with Niblicks."

Identify the potential philanthropist.

Round 255 - 15 December 2005

Santa Claus

1. "If you were really grateful, you would play Santa Claus at my Christmas party."

I could see her point. It was well taken. I clenched the hands. I set the jaw. I made the great decision.

"Very well, aged relative."

"You will?"

"I will."

"That's my boy. What's there to be afraid of? The worst those kids will do is rub chocolate éclairs on your whiskers."

"Chocolate éclairs?" I said in a low voice.

"Or strawberry jam. It's a tribal custom. Pay no attention, by the way, to stories you may have heard of them setting fire to the curate's beard last year. It was purely accidental."

No points for identifying the speakers. To receive credit, name either the story in which this exchange appears, or the person who ultimately is assigned the role of Santa Claus (the person who appears to be for it in this passage gets a reprieve).

2. "Well, there's just one gleam of comfort in this business, A__. We shall now be able to talk to B__ and put a stop to any nonsense of his giving C__ his money."

"That's true," said A__, brightening a little.

As she spoke, the door opened and D__ came in.

Everybody, as the poet so well says, is loved by someone, and it is to be supposed, therefore, that somewhere in this world there were faces that lit up when even D__ entered the room. But never, not even by his mother, if he had a mother, nor by some warm-hearted aunt, if he had a warm-hearted aunt, could he have been more rapturously received than he was received now by A__, by E__, and by F__. Santa Claus himself would have had a less enthusiastic welcome.

Name D, the unlikely Santa Claus.

3. "But why would a man, staying peacefully at a country-house, suddenly develop a craving to play football?"

"I could not say, sir."

"And why an Irish water-spaniel? ... Why should I sweat about the place collecting dogs – of whatever nationality – for G__? Does he think I'm Santa Claus?"

Name G, the person who apparently wants an Irish water-spaniel in his Christmas stocking.

4. Most of the time H__ stood in one spot and just looked thoughtful; but now and again he would wander to the marble slab behind which he kept the desk-clerk and run his eye over the register, to see who had booked rooms – like a child examining the stocking on Christmas morning to ascertain what Santa Claus had brought him.

Who is the stocking-examiner?

5. "I really must be getting along," said I__. "I may have to spend the rest of the afternoon with these people. You know what lawyers are like."

Gently but firmly detaching J__'s fingers, she instructed the driver to snap into it, and he did so. The cab rolled off, and J__ was left to ponder over this extraordinary occurrence alone.

Her mind was in a whirl. If this news was true, strange things must have been happening to K__. It was obvious that no balanced person would employ L__. Nobody but a Santa Claus would even contemplate it. The only explanation, therefore, that offered itself was that K__ must suddenly have turned into a Santa Claus. He must have been overcome by one of those curious fits of universal benevolence hitherto confined to characters in the novels of Charles Dickens. Yet why? It was not Christmas-time. He could not have been hearing carol-singers.

Who has uncharacteristically acted like Santa Claus, and why?

Round 256 - 23 December 2005

The Voice of Conscience

1. The Good Samaritan had been stooping. Now he straightened himself and looked about him with an apprehensive eye. He raised the lantern, and its light fell on his face. And, as she saw that face, A__, forgetting prudence, uttered in a high, startled voice a single word. "B__!" cried A__. Down below, B__ stood congealed. It seemed to him that the Voice of Conscience had spoken. Conscience, besides having a musical voice, appeared also to be equipped with feet. B__ could hear them clattering down the stairs, and the volume of noise was so great that it seemed as if Conscience must be a centipede.

Whose voice has congealed B?

2. From somewhere above, a voice had spoken. "Coo!" it said. "Who's there?" If it hadn't been for the "Coo!" I might have supposed it the voice of Conscience. As it was, I was enabled to ticket it correctly as that of C__. Glued against the wall, as if I had been a bit of treacled paper, I could just see him leaning out of an adjacent window. And when I reflected that, after all I had gone through, I was now being set upon by Boy Scouts, I don't mind admitting that the iron entered into my soul.

Whose is the voice of C. this time?

3. "This for it," he said. And, as he spoke, there was a rapid pattering of feet, and what looked like a bundle of black cotton-wool swooped past him, seized the ball in its slavering jaws and bore it away. At this crucial moment, with D__'s fortunes swaying in the balance, the poodle E__ had got the party spirit. The shocked "Hoy!" that sprang from my lips must have sounded to the animal like the Voice of Conscience, for he started visibly and dropped the ball.

Name E, the poodle at whom the narrator has Hoyed.

4. F__ had spoken of this girl as a friend of his nephew G__. G__ could provide official information concerning her financial standing. He went in search of him and found him in the billiards room practising moody canons. "G__," he said, making him miss an easy one, "do you know a girl called H__?" The cue fell from G__'s grasp and clattered to the floor. He had an odd illusion that his heart had leaped from its moorings and crashed against his front teeth. It was as if the voice of conscience had spoken. Not for an instant since his callous cancelling of their dinner engagement had he been free from a corroding sense of guilt. He saw himself as the lowest of created beings, the man who asks a girl to dinner and at the last moment stands her up.

Name the billiard player and the voice of Conscience.

5. But after he had sat for a while, silently glowing, his mood underwent a change. A gunman's complacency after getting his man can never remain for long an unmixed complacency. Sooner or later there creeps in the thought of Retribution. It did with X__. Quite suddenly, whispering in his ear, he heard the voice of Conscience say: "What if your sister Y__ hears of this?"

Name the gunman with the tender conscience.

Round 257 - 6 January 2006

The Maddest, Merriest Day

With 2006 now upon us, we at the UK PG Wodehouse Society’s webpage would like to take this opportunity to extend the hope that during the coming year you will have cause at the conclusion of every day to look back with satisfaction and say to yourself, “That was the maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year”.

Can you identify the following Wodehouse characters who have expressed similar sentiments?

1. “Annoyed? What the dickens is there to be annoyed about?”

“The animal ate one of ___(A)___’s new camisoles.”

“Well, finding itself in the bedroom, it would naturally assume that it had been invited to take pot luck. Stick to the point, which is that you can’t get away from it that but for my subtle strategy business would never have resulted. Dash it, which would the girl rather have – a mouldy camisole or a wealthy and devoted husband whose only thought will be to gratify her lightest wish? Young ___(B)___ will be able to provide ___(A)___ with diamond camisoles, if she wants them. So stop cursing and swearing like a bargee, and let’s see that sunny smile of yours. Can’t you realize that this is the maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year?”

2. The feelings of Mr ___(C)___, as he stood wedged in the crowd that moved inch by inch towards the gates of the Chelsea Football Ground, rather resembled those of a starving man who has just been given a meal but realizes that he is not likely to get another for many days. He was full and happy. He bubbled over with the joy of living and a warm affection for his fellow-man. At the back of his mind there lurked the black shadow of future privations, but for the moment, he did not allow it to disturb him. On this maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year he was content to revel in the present and allow the future to take care of itself.

Mr ___(C)___ had been doing something which he had not done since he left New York five years ago. He had been watching a game of baseball.

3. “You seem to be approving of everything and everybody this morning.”

“I am. This is the maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year, and you can quote me as saying so. Now then, what is it to be?”

Having finished his ordering, a task which he approached on a lavish scale, ___(D)___ leaned forward and gazed fondly at his guest.

“Gosh!” he said rapturously. “I never thought, when I was sitting in that fishing hut staring at your photograph, that only a month or two later I’d be having lunch with you at the Savoy.”

4. A wild cry, a piercing whoop of pure joy, broke the summer stillness.
“Come and have a drink, old man!” babbled ___(E)___. “This wants celebrating!” His face fell. “Oh, I was forgetting! I’m on the wagon.”

“On the wagon?”

“Sworn off, you know. I’m never going to touch another drop as long as I live. I began to see things – monkeys!”

“I had a pal,” said Mr ___(F)___ sympathetically, “who used to see kangaroos.”

___(E)___ seized him by the arm, hospitable though handicapped.

“Come and have a bit of bread and butter, or a slice of cake or something, and a glass of water. I want to tell you about Uncle ___(G)___ and I want to hear all about your end of it. Gee, what a day!”

“The maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year,” assented Mr ___(F)___. “A slice of that old ‘eighty-seven cake. Just the thing!”

Round 258 - 14 January 2006

It’s Never Too Late

Young couples happily embracing on the final page are a dime a dozen in Wodehouse but, happily for those of us of “a certain age”, the Master sometimes permits couples of middle-age or beyond to find true love and happiness. We have five such examples for you to identify this week.

1. “Your uncle has been speaking to me on the telephone. He is not going to marry that girl. (…) But what is astonishing is that he is going to be married!”

“He is?”

“Yes, to an old friend of his, a Mrs ___(A)___. A woman of a sensible age, he gave me to understand. I wonder which ___(A)___s that would be. There are two main branches of the family – the Essex ___(A)___s and the Cumberland ___(A)___s. I believe there is also a cadet branch somewhere in Shropshire.”

“And one in East Dulwich.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

2. It is proof of the depth of __(B)___’s love for ___(C)___ that though __(D)__’s departure left him alone and unobserved he did not immediately go to the safe, pick up the money-laden suitcase and disappear with it (…) at the highest rate of speed of which he was capable. Sidney Carton might have done it, and so might the Chevalier Bayard, but one is proud to say that to ___(B)___ the idea did not even occur. (…)

He mused on ___(C)___. It had, as we have seen, been her cooking that had first turned his thoughts in the direction of orange blossoms and wedding cake, but his admiration for her culinary skill had been merely the spark that ignited the fuse. Since then he had come so to appreciate her other excellent qualities that he was now more deeply in love than he had been when, taken at the age of twelve to his first pantomime, he had been swept off his feet by the charms of the principal girl playing Cinderella. He was stout, bald and middle-aged, and when a stout, bald middle-aged man bestows his heart, it stays bestowed. Without ___(C)___, he was vividly aware, life would be a blank.

3. It was over the meal that he first realized strange things were happening to him this afternoon, strange emotions stirring within him. His whole outlook seemed to have changed. As he watched his hostess sip her tea and tucked into the superlative scones which, he learned, were of her own baking, he became more and more convinced that for the last twenty years he had been proceeding on entirely wrong lines. In supposing that the bachelor’s was the ideal life he had been guilty of a gross error. More and more clearly as the scones disappeared into his interior he saw that what the sensible man wanted was a wife and a home with scones like these always at his disposal. He had, in a word, like Romeo, (…) fallen in love at first sight (…).

It seemed to be a law of nature that when a confirmed bachelor falls in love, he does it with a wholeheartedness beyond the scope of the ordinary man who has been scattering his affections hither and thither since he was so high. As a child of eight, Mr ___(D)___ had once kissed a girl of six under the mistletoe at a Christmas party, but there his sex life had come to an abrupt halt, with the result that for forty years passion had been banking up inside him like water in a dam. Sooner or later the dam was bound to burst and his meeting with ___(E)___ had brought this about. Quite suddenly he found himself abandoning the principles of a lifetime. No longer the silver-tongued denouncer of love (…), he yearned for ___(E)___ as harts are said to yearn for waterbrooks. If somebody had happened to come along at this moment bearing a sprig of mistletoe, he would have kissed her under it without hesitation.

4. “Oh dear, I do hope ___(F, the speaker’s son)___ will approve of this step I’m taking. I mean, it isn’t as if I were a young girl. I’m nearly fifty, ___(G)___. He may think it odd.”

“That you are joining the chorus at the Hippodrome?”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“Isn’t that what you are trying to tell me?”

“Of course it isn’t. I’m going to marry again.”

The receiver jumped in ___(G)___’s right hand, the cigar in his left. This was big stuff. (…) “Tell me how it all happened. Be frank, forthright, and fearless.”

(… One page of off-topic dialogue dealing with everything from the temperature of dogs’ noses to the eccentricities of frog-gathering barristers later, the lady who wasn’t planning to audition for a spot on the Hippodrome’s chorus line finally found her way back to the item at the top of the agenda …)

“I couldn’t help it. I broke down and sobbed. And the next thing I knew, ___(H)___ was striding up to me and seizing me by the wrist and pulling me about till I felt quite giddy. And then he said ‘My mate!’ and clasped me to him and ---”

“Showered burning kisses on your upturned face?”

“Yes. He told me later that something seemed to snap in him.”

5. “If he catches you, you’ll come up before yourself and have to send yourself to the cooler for ninety days, coupled with some strong remarks from the bench. H’m. Not so good. But I see a way out.”

“You do?”

“Sure. I’ll take on the job. Much better that way. Much more likely to get results. You’re kind of frail, you mightn’t push hard enough, but I’m the muscular type and if I lean on someone who’s sitting on a bank and dabbling his feet in a brook, he goes into that brook special delivery. I’m glad that’s settled. Takes a weight off your mind, I shouldn’t wonder.”

And as she spoke these words love came to ___(I)___. It had come to him twice before in his earlier days and had flickered out, which was what had led to his two breach of promise cases, but this time he knew that it had come to stay.

Round 259 - 22 January 2006

Taking Issue

Most children in Wodehouse entered the world some time BEFORE they and their parents were introduced to the reader. But there are a few examples of couples the reader is privileged to see courting and getting married and later having children, who are either introduced to the reader or merely (as in the case of John San Francisco Earthquake Mulliner, for example) mentioned in passing.

Can you identify the parents of the following offspring, consisting of two poached eggs and four others who have outgrown that stage?

1. All the mother-love in her was shrieking at her, reproaching her. She realized now how paltry, how greedily self-centred she had been. Thinking only of her own pleasures, how sorely she had neglected her duty as a mother! Long ere this, had she been worthy of that sacred relation, she would have been brooding over her child, teaching him at her knee the correct Vardon grip, shielding him from bad habits, seeing to it that he did not get his hands in front of the ball, putting him on the right path as regarded the slow back-swing. But, absorbed in herself, she had sacrificed him to her shallow ambitions. And now there he was, grasping the club as if it had been a spade and scooping with it like one of those twenty-four handicap men whom the hot weather brings out on seaside links.

She shuddered to the very depths of her soul. Before her eyes there rose a vision of her son, grown to manhood, reproaching her. “If you had but taught me the facts of life when I was a child, Mother,” she seemed to hear him say, “I would not now be going round in a hundred and twenty, rising to a hundred and forty in anything like a strong wind.”

2. ___(A)___ was the most wonderful child. Of course, you had to have a certain amount of intelligence to see this. To the vapid and irreflective observer he was not much to look at in the early stages of his career, having a dough-like face almost entirely devoid of nose, a lack-lustre eye, and the general appearance of a poached egg. His immediate circle of intimates, however, thought him a model of manly beauty; and there was the undeniable fact that he had come into the world weighing nine pounds. Take him for all in all, a lad of promise.

__(B)__‘s sense of being in a dream continued. His identity seemed to have undergone a change. The person he had known as __(B)__ had disappeared, to be succeeded by a curious individual bubbling over with an absurd pride for which it was not easy to find an outlet. Hitherto a rather reserved man, he was conscious now of a desire to accost perfect strangers in the street and inform them that he was not the ordinary person they probably imagined, but a father with an intensely unusual son at home, and if they did not believe him they could come right along and see for themselves.

(…) This remarkable child had a keen sense of humour. Thus he seldom began to cry in his best vein till the small hours of the morning; and on these occasions he would almost invariably begin again after he had been officially pronounced to be asleep. His sudden grab at the hair of any adult who happened to come within reach was very droll, too.

3. “(…) Here’s the first commission I have ever had to paint a portrait, and the sitter is that human poached egg that has butted in and bounced me out of my inheritance. Can you beat it! I call it rubbing the thing in to expect me to spend my afternoons gazing into the ugly face of a little brat who to all intents and purposes has hit me behind the ear with a black-jack and swiped all I possess. I can’t refuse to paint the portrait, because if I did my uncle would stop my allowance; yet every time I look up and catch the kid’s vacant eye, I suffer agonies. I tell you, __(C)__, sometimes when he gives me a patronising glance and then turns away and is sick, as if it revolted him to look at me, I come within an ace of occupying the entire front page of the evening papers as the latest murder sensation. There are moments when I can almost see the headlines: ‘Promising Young Artist Beans Baby With Axe’.”

4. (Can you identify Mr and Mrs (F), the parents of the beautiful (E) in this example?)

There was rather a lot of __(D)__. (..) His face was red, the back of his neck overflowed its collar, and there had recently been published a second edition of his chin. It is not surprising, therefore, that such passers-by as had a love for the beautiful should have removed their gaze from him after a brief glance and transferred it to the girl who was standing beside him.

__(E)__ unquestionably took the eye. Nobody, looking at her, would have supposed her to be the daughter of a Shoreditch public-house proprietor who had formerly been a heavyweight boxer. It often happens that fathers, incapable themselves of finishing in the first three in a seaside beauty contest, produce offspring who set the populace whistling, and this had occurred in the case of __(E)__’s parent, __(F)__. He himself, partly because Nature had fashioned him that way and partly as the result of the risks of his profession, looked like a gorilla which had been caught in machinery of some sort, but his child was a breath-taking brunette of the Cleopatra type. One felt that she would have got on well with Marc Antony.

5. And, for a bonus point, who are the parents who “now have two bonny bairns – the small, or Percival, at a preparatory school in Sussex, and the large, or Ferdinand, at Eton”?

Round 260 - 30 January 2006

Golf – Should It Be Banned?

Golf. A pleasant form of recreation combining light exercise, skill, fresh air and companionable competition or one of the deadliest pastimes conceived by mankind? You be the judge.

1. “Goo!” said ___(A)___. Or it may have been Coo!

Whatever it was, it was in the nature of a battlecry or slogan of war. __(A)__’s worst suspicions had obviously been confirmed. His eyes shone with a strange light. His chin pushed itself out another couple of inches. He clenched and unclenched his fingers once or twice, as if to make sure they were working properly and could be relied on to do a good, clean job of strangling. Then, once more observing “Coo!” (or “Goo!”) , he sprang forward, trod on the golf-ball I had been practising putting with, and took one of the finest tosses I have ever witnessed. The purler of a lifetime. For a moment the air seemed to be full of arms and legs, and then, with a thud that nearly dislocated the flat, he made a forced landing against the wall.

And, feeling that I had had about all I wanted, I oiled from the room and was in the act of grabbing my hat from the rack in the hall, when ___(B)___ appeared.

“I fancied I heard a noise, sir,” said ___(B)___.

2. Up on his balcony, meanwhile, ___(C)___ was stopping, looking, and listening. The looking brought no results, for all below was black as pitch; but the listening proved more fruitful. Faintly from down in the well of the hall there floated up to him a peculiar sound like something rustling in the darkness. (…) With stealthy steps he crept to the head of the stairs and descended.

One uses the word ‘descend’ advisedly, for what is required is some word suggesting instantaneous activity. About ___(C)___’s progress from the second floor to the first there was nothing halting or hesitating. He, so to speak, did it now. Planting his foot firmly on a golf-ball which ___(D)___, who had been practising putting in the corridor before retiring to bed, had left in his casual fashion just where the steps began, he took the entire staircase in one majestic, volplaning sweep. There were eleven stairs in all separating his landing from the landing below, and the only ones he hit were the third and tenth. He came to rest with a squattering thud on the lower landing, and for a moment or two the fever of the chase left him.

3. “I was strolling along and I had stooped to tie my shoe-lace, when suddenly something came whizzing along like a bullet and struck me.”

“Good heavens! Where?”

“Never mind,” said __(E)___, austerely.

“I mean,” I hastened to explain, “where did this happen?”

“Down in that field there.”

“You mean the eighteenth fairway?”

“I don’t know what you call it.”

“Was the man driving off the tee?”

“He was standing on a sort of grass platform thing, if that’s what you mean.”

“What did he say when he came up to you?”

“He hasn’t come up to me yet. Wait till he does! Yes, by the sacred crocodile of the Zambesi, just give me two minutes to rub in arnica and another to powder my nose, and I’ll be ready for him. Ready and waiting! I’ll startle his weak intellect, the miserable little undersized microbe!”

4. “The subject (…) proceeded to the Golf Club, where she took out her hockey-knockers and started playing round with one associate, the junior professional, self following at a cautious distance. For some time nothing noteworthy transpired, but at the fourteenth hole (…) as you pass (…) along the fairway you come opposite a house with a hedge in front of it. And just as The Subject came opposite this house, there appeared behind the hedge two males, one with cocktail-shaker. They started yodelling to The Subject, evidently inviting her to step along and have one, and The Subject, dismissing her associate, went through the gate in the hedge and by the time I came up was lost to sight in the house. (…) Acting in your interests, I, too, passed through the gate and crept to the window behind which I could hear chat and revelry in progress. And I was just stooping down to investigate further, when a hand fell on my shoulder and, turning, I perceived one male. And at the same moment, The Subject, poking her head out of the window, observed, ‘Nice work, Barmy. That’s the blighter that’s been following me about all the week. You be knocking his head off, while Catsmeat phones for the police. We’ll have him sent to the guillotine for ingrowing molestation.’ And I saw there was only one course for me to pursue. (…) I could clear myself by issuing a full statement. (…) While the male, Barmy, was calling me a trailing arbutus, and the male, Catsmeat, was saying did anyone know the French for ‘police’, and The Subject was talking about horsewhips, I explained the situation fully (…) and was permitted to depart, The Subject saying that if she ever set eyes on me again -”

“Miss ___(F)___,” announced (the valet).

“Well, good-bye, all,” said ___(G)___.

5. For a bonus point, can you identify the “doddering old museum piece” of a clock-golfer whose conversational methods while putting were so exasperating that a fellow paying-guest, desperately anxious to establish the whereabouts of his brother, needed a powerful effort to “restrain himself from snatching the putter from this obtuse septuagenarian and beating out his brains, if you could call them that”?