Sublime

croquetons—

The “poor chap” of whom the Colonel was thinking was his son, Denis, now a prisoner of war in Japanese hands. Whether the Colonel’s epithet was due to Denis’s plight or to the wife he had married was uncertain, but Colonel St Cyres disliked his daughter-in-law as heartily as any well-bred man allowed himself to dislike a woman.

Macdonald accepted the invitation, much interested in this product of Shoreditch. Alf’s Cockney origin still sounded in his speech, despite the slurring burr which association with Devonshire children had developed, but the great difference between Alf and his country schoolmates was the quickness of the Cockney’s reactions. He was still as sharp a

In company he claimed they got on like a house on fire, but it was clear which of them provided the petrol.

devoted coterie of admirers. Edmund Crispin was among them, enthusing over Write on Both Sides of the Paper (1969): “her insights into human behaviour are tethered, wonderfully effectively, to the availability of spending money and the frequency of buses…