Quite apart from snapping at asparagus, there are some things that simply are not done, according to the rigid Codes of the Woosters, the Mulliners, the Catsmeats, and other true English gentlemen. Here are a few noteworthy illustrations.

As usual, extra credit for references and other details.

Please note that due to quiz personnel holidaying in various parts of France, the closing date for this round has been set just over two weeks away, leaving few, if any, excuses for poorly researched answers.

1. The thing I wanted most at this juncture was to have a heart-to-heart talk with this young femme fatale (...) and I found her in my room (...) She greeted me with a bright smile, and said: "Back already? Did you find it?"

With a strong effort I mustered my emotion and replied curtly but civilly that the answer was in the negative. "No," I said, "I did not find it."

"You can't have looked properly."

Again I was compelled to pause and remind myself that an English gentleman does not slosh a sitting redhead, no matter what the provocation.

Who was the red-headed femme fatale whom the long-suffering narrator would gladly have biffed had he not been shackled by the Code? Billie Bennett, Lottie Blossom, Bobbie Wickham, or Mabel Winchester?

2. "How are you, X? Good Lord, this certainly puts the clock back. The last time I saw you must have been that night at Romano's when Plug Basham started throwing bread and got a little over-excited, and one thing led to another and in about two minutes there you were on the floor, laid out cold by a dashed great side of beef and all the undertakers present making bids for the body. (...) Poor old Plug!" he sighed. "A fellow who never knew where to stop. His only fault, poor chap. (...) I took the whole thing up with him at the Pelican next day. I tried to reason with him. Throwing sides of beef about in restaurants wasn't done, I said. Not British. Bread, yes, I said. Sides of beef, no. (...)"

Please name the Undertakers' Hope (X). Was he ‘Beefy’ Bastable (aka Sir Raymond), ‘Pimples’ Glossop (aka Sir Roderick), ‘Tubby’ Parsloe (aka Sir Gregory), or ‘Stinker’ Pyke (aka George Pyke, later Lord Tilbury)?

3. If there is one thing that startles the well-bred Londoner and throws him off his balance, it is to be addressed unexpectedly by a stranger. Freddie's sense of decency was revolted. A voice from the tomb could hardly have shaken him more. (...) This was one of the things which didn't happen. Absolutely it wasn't done. During an earthquake or a shipwreck and possibly on the Day of Judgment, yes. But only then. At other times, unless they wanted a match or the time or something, chappies did not speak to fellows to whom they had not been introduced. He was far too amiable to snub the man, but to go on with this degrading scene was out of the question. There was nothing for it but flight.

Which ‘Freddie’ was (very properly) appalled here? The Hon. Freddie Chalk-Marshall, Freddie Rooke, the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, or Freddie Widgeon?

4. The whole trend of Y's education and upbringing had gone, from his earliest years, towards the instilment in him of a deep love of Good Form. There were things, he had been taught at Eton, at Oxford, and subsequently during his brief career as a member of His Majesty's Household Brigade, which were not done. And one of these things, he felt instinctively, was the stealing of square-topped bowler hats from men to whom he had never been introduced.

Who was Y?

Perhaps P. G. Wodehouse came to love ducks when he was enjoying peace and quiet on the moat at Hunstanton Hall. Be that as it may, waterfowl keep popping up everywhere in the œuvre. There are swans, Widgeons and others – mostly just ducks: diving ducks, ducks in articulo mortis, ducks on ponds, ducks with peas, ‘Lord-love-a-ducks' ... Here are a few memorable sightings.

Bonus marks for full references (book and chapter or short-story title) and other relevant details.

1. The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the merry old W.

Was the narrator (W) Reggie Havershot or Bertie Wooster?

2. One has, of course, to make allowances for writers, all of them being more or less loony. Look at Shakespeare, for instance. Very unbalanced. Used to go about stealing ducks. Nevertheless, (...) in springing Joke Goods on the guardian of the girl he loved X had carried an author's natural goofiness too far. Even Shakespeare might have hesitated to go to such lengths.

Who was X? Sam Bagshott, ‘Boko’ Fittleworth, James Rodman, or Joe Vanringham?

Special bonus marks will be awarded to anyone who can explain (either convincingly or in a pleasingly imaginative manner) how duck-stealing happened to be added to the notorious poacher's criminal record.

3. "(...) I want to tell her to go and explain to Y that my behaviour towards her throughout was scrupulously correct. At present, he's got the idea that I'm a kind of ... Who was the chap who was such a devil with the other sex? ... Donald something."

"Donald Duck?"

"Don Juan. That's the fellow I mean. (...)"

Who was Y? ‘Chuffy’ Chuffnell, Ronnie Fish, ‘Ricky’ Gilpin, or Ambrose Tennyson?

4. "That settles it," said Z. "What was good enough for a duck who owned half Illinois is good enough for me. (...)"

Who was Z?

The Red-Headed League

With apologies to Sandy Callender, Ginger Kemp and one or two others, red hair in Wodehouse usually spells Trouble (with, as you may have noted, a capital 'T'). Your task this week is to identify the red-headed menaces referred to in the following extracts and, for extra points, name the relevant story or novel containing the quote.

1. "I would always hesitate to recommend as a life's companion a young lady with quite such a vivid shade of red hair. Red hair, sir, in my opinion, is dangerous."

2. And when I finally let myself into my lodgings in Ebury Street and sought the soothing haven of my sitting-room, the first thing I saw on opening the door was this enormous red-headed man lying on the sofa.

He made no move when I came in, for he was fast asleep; and I can best convey the instantaneous impression I got of his formidable physique by saying that I had no desire to wake him. The sofa was a small one, and he overflowed it in every direction. He had a broken nose, and his jaw was the jaw of a Wild West motion-picture star registering determination. One hand was under his head; the other, hanging down to the floor, looked like a strayed ham congealed into stone. What he was doing in my sitting-room I did not know; but, passionately as I wished to know, I preferred not to seek first-hand information. There was something about him that seemed to suggest that he might be one of those men who are rather cross when they first wake up.

3. "It's your red hair!" said Mr ___(A)___ at length with the air of a man who had been solving a problem. "It's your red hair that makes you like this, ___(B)___. Your father has red hair too."

___(B)___ laughed. "It's not my fault that I have red hair, Uncle ___(A)___. It's my misfortune."

Mr ___(A)___ shook his head. "Other people's misfortune too!" he said.

The Missing Link

We offer something a little different in this week's quiz. Instead of the usual collection of amusing "nuggets" drawn from some common theme you'll be provided with a list of names and asked to come up with something they have in common.

As an example, if we listed "Percy Pilbeam, Adrian Mulliner, Pillingshot, Monty Bodkin and Maudie Stubbs" you would immediately ring the bell and be entitled to help yourself to a cigar or coconut by responding that they all, at one time or another, were engaged as private detectives. If, on the other hand, you were presented with a list of Percy Pilbeam, Monty Bodkin, Ashe Marson and Sam Shotter, the correct response would be, "They all, at one time or another, worked in an editorial capacity for one of Stinker Pyke's Mammoth Publishing Co. publications." A list consisting of Miss Julia Ukridge, Lady (Georgiana) Alcester and Mr and Mrs Richard Little would no doubt cause you to scratch your head for a moment or two before exclaiming, "Aha! They all own a gaggle of Pekes; six each in the case of the Bingese and Aunt Julia and four in the establishment of Freddie Threepwood's Aunt Georgiana."

Got the idea? Right ho then, we're off! With five names on each list, unless you're feeling particularly energetic, there's no need to go bustling about providing your sources this week although they will be provided in due course when the answers are posted.

1. Sir Roderick Glossop, Mr Roddis, Major "Bimbo" Brabazon-Plank, George Robinson (of 14 Nasturtium Road, East Dulwich), Inspector Jervis (from the yard).

2. Lord Brancaster, Nelly Bryant, Mr Roddis, Lady Lakenheath, Wilfred Waterson. (A special bonus point is on offer if you can identify Wilfred Waterson.)

3. Lucius Pim, George Pennicut, Lord Havershot (who was operating out of Joey Cooley's body at the time), the Mixer, Teddy Weeks.

4. Bishop "Boko" Bickerton, Lord Emsworth, Augustus Mulliner, Lord Herbert "Bertie" Fendall, Kay Derrick's kitten.

Three Ways of Saying the Same Thing

This business of plighting one's troth is no easy task. Some chaps have the knack and collect fiancées the way J. Preston Peters collects scarabs. Others aren't so fortunate. Can you identify the following would-be bridegrooms and the objects of their affection? As usual, extra points if you provide the sources.

1. "It cannot have escaped your notice that I have long entertained towards you sentiments warmer and deeper than those of ordinary friendship. It is love, ___(X)___, that has been animating my bosom. Love, first a tiny seed, has burgeoned in my heart till, blazing into flame, it has swept away at the crest of its wave my diffidence, my doubts, my fears, and my foreboding, and now, like the topmost topaz of some ancient tower, it cries to all the world in a voice of thunder: 'You are mine! My mate! Predestined to me since Time first began!' As the star guides the mariner when, battered by boiling billows, he hies him home to the haven of hope and happiness, so do you gleam upon me along life's rough road and seem to say, 'Have courage! I am here.' ___(X)___, I am not an eloquent man - I cannot speak fluently as I could wish - but these simple words which you have just heard come from the heart, from the unspotted heart of an English gentleman. ___(X)___, I love you. Will you be my wife, married woman, matron, spouse, help-meet, consort, partner or better-half?"

2. "So I got her alone up at the club-house and said, 'I say, old girl, what about it?' and she said, 'What about what?' and I said, 'What about marrying me? Don't if you don't want to, or course,' I said, 'but I'm bound to say it looks pretty good to me.' And then she said she loved another (...). A nasty jar, I can tell you, it was. I was just starting off a round, and it made me hook my putts on every green."

3. "Do you read Blondie? Then you will admit that the best husband in America is Dagwood Bumstead. Well, I have much in common with him - a loving heart, gentle nature, a fondness for dogs and a taste for exotic sandwiches. Marry me, and you will be getting a super-Dagwood. Never a harsh word. Never a cross-eyed look. Your lightest wish would be law. I would bring you breakfast in bed every morning on a tray and sit and smoke to you when you had a headache."

Fore!

And now, by popular request - well, to be accurate a total of one request poured in - it's time to get out the cleek, the baffy and the mashie-niblick and try to make bogie on The Golf Quiz. We're looking for the names of the following golfers and the usual sources. As I will be away on a toot at The (U. S.) Wodehouse Society convention in Philadelphia Oct. 11-14, I have asked Ye Olde Webmaster to extend this week's deadline to Oct. 16. Should you pop in your entry during the convention weekend the lack of a prompt acknowledgement won't be because I'm ignoring you - it will be because I'll be a good 5,000 kilometres and three time zones away from my computer.

1. Not long before this story opens a sliced ball, whizzing in at the open window, had come within an ace of incapacitating Raymond Parsloe Devine, the rising young novelist (who rose at that moment a clear foot and a half) from any further exercise of his art. (...) To make matters worse, a ring at the front-door bell followed almost immediately, and the maid ushered in a young man of pleasing appearance in a sweater and baggy knickerbockers who apologetically but firmly insisted on playing the ball where it lay and, what with the shock of the lecturer's narrow escape and the spectacle of the intruder standing on the table and working away with a niblick, the afternoon's session had to be classed as a complete frost. Mr Devine's determination, from which no argument could swerve him, to deliver the rest of his lecture in the coal-cellar gave the meeting a jolt from which it never recovered.

2. A young man is discovered on a Piccadilly sidewalk looking earnestly up Shaftesbury Avenue, frowning slightly and giving the impression that here was a man with a secret sorrow.

___(A)___ had no secret sorrow. All that he was thinking of at that moment was the best method of laying a golf ball dead in front of the Palace Theatre. It was his habit to pass the time in mental golf when ___(B)___ was late in keeping her appointments with him. On one occasion she had kept him waiting so long that he had been able to do nine holes, starting at the Savoy Grill and finishing up near Hammersmith. His was a simple mind, able to amuse itself with simple things.

3. Scene: An important golf match. Situation: A young man had easily won the first eight holes, halved number nine and deliberately lost the next eight, setting up this (slightly edited for space) confrontation on the 18th green with the man he hoped would become his father-in-law. Your task is to identify the participants.

He was on the green in four. I was on it in three. His sixth stroke took him out. I putted carefully to their very mouth of the hole. I walked up to my ball, and paused. I looked at ___(C)___. He looked at me. (...)

"That looks a simple shot," I said, eyeing him steadily, "but I might miss it. (...) And then you would win the Championship."

He dabbed at his forehead with a wet ball of a handkerchief.

"It would be very pleasant for you after getting so near it the last two years. (...) Sudden joy would almost certainly make me miss it."

We looked at each other. He had the golf fever in his eyes.

"If," I said slowly, raising my putter, "you were to give me your consent to my marriage to (your daughter) -"

He looked from me to the ball, from the ball to me, and back again to the ball. It was very, very near the hole. (...) He looked up, and burst into a roar of laughter. "You young devil," said he, smiting his thigh, "you young devil, you've beaten me."

I swung the putter, and the ball trickled past the hole. "On the contrary," I said, "you have beaten me."

Friends - we use the term loosely - in Wodehouseville come in different shapes and sizes. While some pals like Bingo are merely a little troublesome if you don't see them coming and side step; others can be downright dubious. One wonders if the natty George Tupper has quite forgiven Ukridge for bringing the effervescent Flossie to dinner at the Savoy Grill.

You are required to identify the 'not-nice-friends-to know' as also those who were burdened with them. Extra points, of course, for identifying the book, and other little details.

1. "But J, you don't know what they're like. Think of the life G led as a young man. He seems to have known everybody in England who is looked up to and respected today and to have shared the most disgraceful escapades with them ... The book is full of that kind of story, and every story about somebody who is looked on today as a model of propriety. If it is published, it will ruin the reputations of half the best people in England."

Who was this young man about town best avoided when sowing your wild oats?

Who, in addition to all his other shortcomings, was apparently dropped on his head as a baby?

3. It was not often that B did approve of P's friends. It sometimes seemed to her that each was more repulsive and impossible than the last. She herself, except for a taste for the society of intellectuals, was exclusively County in her intimacies. P on the other hand, seemed to like everybody. You could never be sure when you met him that you would not find him hobnobbing with a prize fighter or worse. The discovery that he was on cordial terms with this V, of whom she had heard so much from time to time, did nothing to diminish her already rather pronounced resemblance to a smartly dressed ice-berg.

B and P obviously have differing views on the company they keep. Who are they?

4. "I'm not saying anything against Mr C personally. I haven't had time to find out much about him, except that he's an Englishman; but he looks respectable. Which, as he's a friend of yours, is more or less of a miracle ... You surely aren't going to suggest at this hour of the day, N, that your friends aren't the most horrible set of pests outside a prison? Not that it's likely after all these months that they are outside a prison. You know perfectly well that while you were running round New York, you collected the most pernicious bunch of rogues that ever fastened their talons into a silly child who ought never to have been allowed out without his nurse."

Who is this hapless ‘N’?

Blood is thicker than water, they say. We can think of a whole host of Plum's brain children who wish it wasn't so! Who is a respectable relative is a matter of personal opinion. While Gally considers himself a credit to an otherwise staid family; his long-suffering sisters would hotly disagree.

This week, we ask you to identify the disreputable kin, and the unfortunate souls who were saddled with them. Needless to say, extra points are awarded for other trivia.

1. X gave up the struggle. He knew the futility of arguing, and he had just perceived the bright side to the situation - to wit, that after tomorrow more than a hundred miles would separate him from his amiable but hair-bleaching relative. The thought was a very heartening one. Going by the form book, he took it for granted that ere many suns had set the old buster would be up to some kind of hell which would ultimately stagger civilization and turn the moon to blood, but what mattered was that he would be up to it at Y's rural seat and not in London. How right, he felt, the author of the well-known hymn had been in saying that peace, perfect peace is to be attained only when loved ones are far way.

2. But he was up against a nimbler dialectician, and was having the worst of the exchanges when he was saved from total demolition by the arrival of a new-comer. This was a woman of mature years, and a rather dishevelled aspect. X was wearing her best Sunday black satin and had applied to her hair some roguish unguent borrowed from Y's stock, but she still looked subtly disreputable. Her face was red, and her eyes, which had a glazed appearance, seemed to find difficulty in focusing their objective.

3. 'So that's where he got that cigarette case, dash him!" said X bitterly. "Of all the dirty tricks! Robbing his own flesh and blood! The fellow ought to be in chokey".

4. You see, X wasn't everybody's money. To begin with, he had an apparently incurable dislike of O.B.Es, and then he combined with a hot blooded and imperious nature the odd belief that eggs were a suitable food for adult human beings at five o'clock in the afternoon. And he was so touchy, too, so ready to resent opposition. I had had visions of him standing over Y and shoving eggs down his throat at the point of a table knife. He was better away, and I hoped he had fallen into a ditch and couldn't get out.

Who was this thin-skinned O.B.E?

Another very good reason for a lay shareholder to closely scrutinize the Board! Who were these two plotters?

3. He's hoping for more than tuppence. I'm afraid he's planning to try to talk to you into putting up money for some wild-cat scheme he's got. As far as I could make out, it's some sort of land and building operation down in Florida. The Venus Island Development Corporation he calls it. The very name sounds fishy, don't you think? …… What's worrying me is that you may feel tempted to invest, because he'll make the thing sound so good. He's very plausible. But don't dream of doing it. Be on your guard.

Makes your flesh creep, just contemplating this financier's villainy. Who was he?

4. He had just parted from X, who had been rather plain-spoken with regard to the recent financial operations; and, though possessed only of a rudimentary conscience, Y was aware that his next interview with young Z might have certain aspects bordering on awkwardness and he would have liked time to prepare a statement for the defence.

Who was this conscience-less operator?

1. (….. the locality….), though situated in Mayfair, and entitled to put 'London W.1.' after its name, not a fashionable locality. It's a small, dark, dingy cul-de-sac, far too full of prowling cats, fluttering newspapers and derelict banana skins to attract haut monde. Dukes avoid it, marquises give it a wide berth, earls and viscounts would not settle there if you paid them.

Well ... a lot of Plum's impecunious young men did (and paid to do so!). The name of the locality, please. Extra points for a list of all the young men who ever resided there.

Who was this silver tongued-orator, and what was this modern Hades?

Who was X, and what was he doing in one of London's meaner locales?