The Old Bank House

by Angela Thirkell

Genres: Classics; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

'Charming, very funny indeed. Angela Thirkell is perhaps the most Pym-like of any twentieth-century author, after Pym herself' - Alexander McCall Smith

Edgewood Rectory may be set in an ancient landscape, but the Grantly family are very much of their time. Caught up in the uncertain world that has emerged since the outbreak of peace, the Rector and Mrs Grantly are bewildered by the challenges facing their eldest children: Eleanor, longing for more excitement than can be found in the Red Cross Library; and Tom, struggling to readjust to student life at Oxford after his military service.

When their elderly neighbour Miss Sowerby sells her beloved Old Bank House to self-made MP Sam Adams, the one-time outsider finds himself at the heart of Barsetshire society. And while Sam may dismiss her advice that the house needs a mistress, even a contented widower can be surprised by love.

Release date: March 7, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 448

Sample

Edgewood Rectory is a comfortable early nineteenth century house in the small market town of Edgewood, over Chaldicotes way. Up till the middle of last century the name Edgewood fitted it well, for it lies on the confines of what is still by tradition called Chaldicotes Chase. But through various causes, among them the gambling debts of Mr Sowerby, a small remount depot between 1914 and 1918 and a very large camp during the last war (or Second World War to end War), the forest in which Kings of Wessex and later Kings of England had hunted has dwindled to scattered woods and thickets which lose ground year by year under the saw or the tractor. Edgewood is now almost entirely surrounded by arable or grazing land and only to the north does a piece of forest approach the town. The Rectory stands at the north end of Edgewood, and just outside the far end of its large garden which no Rector since the beginning of the century has quite been able to afford to keep up properly, is a very large oak far gone in age and decay, with gaunt, bare, skeleton branches sticking up like giant antlers among its summer green, a relic of the days when Chaldicotes Chase was a royal hunting lodge. No one knows its age and probably when it becomes so dangerous that it has to be felled it will be found rotten to the core, so that no one will ever be able to count the rings. That part is rotten is well known, and each generation of Rectory children has poked with sticks or excavated with its maiden pocket knife a large gaping hole on the north side, trippers have put the revolting paper and broken meats of their picnics into the hole and set fire to them, but the oak still stands.

‘It makes me think of Falstaff,’ said Eleanor Grantly, elder daughter of the Rectory, looking from the breakfast table one Saturday morning in June.

‘What makes you think of Falstaff, and why?’ said her father, ‘which,’ he added, ‘sounds like Mangnall’s Questions, whatever they are.’

‘They sound rather like Eno’s Fruit Salts,’ said her younger brother Henry who was daily expecting what he wittily called his subscription papers, or in other words his calling-up papers for military service, and was quite old enough to know better.

‘Why Eno anyway?’ said Grace Grantly, younger daughter of the Rectory, who was a weekly boarder at Barchester High School. ‘Eno isn’t a real word.’

Mrs Grantly, who had created for herself a myth that she was the stupid one of the family on no grounds at all, said there was a place called Arnos Grove at one end of one of the London Tubes and she was sure that wasn’t a real word either and when one got there it wouldn’t be in the least like what one expected and she really must go and telephone to the butcher.

Or, said Tom, the eldest of the family, who had gone back to Oxford after demobilization and was trying not to feel too old to be an undergraduate, it might be an anagram, though he couldn’t at the moment think of an anagram of Arnos that made sense.

‘Roans,’ said his sister Grace scornfully. Henry rashly said it wasn’t a word.

‘Well,’ said Grace, who dearly loved to dogmatize and was Secretary of the Barchester Girls’ High School Senior Debating Society, ‘if you had a lot of roan horses and you wanted to talk about them I suppose you’d say roans, whatever roan is,’ she added.

The four young Grantlys then explained simultaneously each his or her own views on the word roan, which led to a very ill-informed argument on piebald and skewbald and a good deal of noise.

‘I do wish,’ said Mr Grantly, who was tall and handsome with a kind gentle expression like the portrait of his great-great-grandfather Bishop Grantly which hung on the dining-room wall, ‘I do wish that you children wouldn’t have such jumping conversations. They make my reason totter. How did we get from Falstaff to skewbald?’

‘That’s like the unravelling game,’ said Grace. ‘You all sit in a circle and someone says a word and the next one says a word it reminds her of and the next one says a word the other word reminds her of and then when you’ve been round about ten times you have to go backwards and say the word that reminded you of your word. We did it at Miss Pettinger’s party last Christmas and I was the only one that remembered the word that reminded Ruby Alcock of Paradise Lost.’

‘And what was the word?’ said her father, with the kind courtesy he used to young and old alike.

‘Mouthwash,’ said Grace.

‘The point is beyond me,’ said the Rector, slightly dejected.

‘It isn’t beyond you, father, it is just silly,’ said Eleanor, who had from her earliest years constituted herself her father’s protector. ‘There is a mouthwash called Milton, and Milton wrote Paradise Lost.’

‘Very ingenious,’ said Mr Grantly admiringly. ‘Are you going to Barchester to-day, Eleanor?’

‘Lady Pomfret said I could take to-day off,’ said Eleanor. ‘There isn’t much to do at the office to-day. Oh, who do you think came in yesterday? Susan Belton.’

‘Do I know her?’ said Mr Grantly anxiously, for he felt it his duty as a clergyman to remember people and was perpetually falling short of his own standards.

‘Of course you do, father,’ said Eleanor. ‘She was our Depot Librarian. Susan Dean she was. You know her father over the other side at Winter Overcotes and her sister Jessica Dean the actress. She’s going to have a baby in August you know.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Grantly. ‘Or rather, I do know now because you have told me, but I didn’t know. But I am very glad. I like babies,’ he added thoughtfully.

‘I shall have five before I am thirty,’ said Grace.

‘Don’t you boast, my girl,’ said Tom. ‘I don’t suppose anyone will want to marry you. I wouldn’t.’

Grace said being married didn’t matter now. Look, she said, at Edna and Doris, and then she fixed her reverend papa rather fiercely with the look that had quelled members of the Barchester Girls’ High School Senior Debating Society who spoke out of their turn.

The Rector looked and felt a little uneasy. Life had been very hard at the Rectory during the war with the house full of evacuees and very little help to be got and he had felt both unhappy and guilty, though for this latter feeling there were no grounds at all, when he thought of the hours, days, months, and years that his wife had not only borne the brunt of evacuees and her own young, but also slaved in the kitchen. Then, soon after Peace broke out, Providence in the guise of Sir Edmund Pridham who knew more about the county than anyone alive had intervened with the offer of Edna and Doris Thatcher, handsome young women from Grumper’s End with various children of shame; which offer had sorely exercised Mr Grantly.

‘I know we ought not to cast the first stone, nor indeed any other stone,’ he said to his wife after all the washing-up was done, ‘but on the other hand, would having them at the Rectory be – dear me, what is the word I want?’

His wife suggested eyesore.

That, said the Rector, was a very good word, but not exactly what he meant. He meant something more like a bone of contention, though that wasn’t exactly it either.

‘You mean stumbling block, darling,’ said Mrs Grantly. ‘But I really don’t think they would make anyone stumble. Mrs Miller, the Vicar’s wife at Pomfret Madrigal, has known them for a long time and says they are very nice. Besides the house seems rather empty without any children and Mrs Miller says they are very good mothers and Edna is a very good cook.’

Mr Grantly was about to say, as charitably as he could, that one might be a good cook and yet give scandal to the congregation by one’s manner of life. But he looked at his wife and his heart smote him as he noticed, which he often did and every time with a fresh pang, for he was not unobservant, how completely tired she looked and how much harder she had worked than he had ever worked in his life. So he swallowed all his doubts as to the propriety of having unmarried mothers as domestic helps and expressed to his wife his complete approval of, nay enthusiasm for, Mrs Miller’s plan. And if he expected a reward for this he was the more deceived, for Mrs Grantly did as most women in her place would have done and instead of saying ‘Thank you, darling, how splendid,’ she broke down for the first time since 1939 and cried till she had not a tear left to shed, nor could her husband succeed in calming or comforting her till he thought of asking if he could have a cup of tea before he went to the meeting of the Parish Council.

So Edna and Doris Thatcher took up their abode in Edgewood Rectory and brought with them youth, health, zeal and good spirits, and if they had the kitchen wireless on from 6.30 a.m. to 11 p.m. and joined lustily in everything from Lifting Up Their Hearts to Old Favourites of the Halls, it was all from joy of life. And the winter when Eleanor had pneumonia very badly they kept silence themselves and smacked their children of shame into hushed voices and made them wear their woollen stockings over their boots in the house.

Edna, the elder of the sisters, had contented herself with one boy, Purse, called after an Army Service Corps corporal named Percy who had dallied too often and too long with Edna Thatcher and vanished when his regiment left Barsetshire. Purse was now about twelve years old and quite stupid at school which he despised, preferring to frequent the local garage where the proprietor said he was as good as two men when it came to taking down a car. But Doris, not content with Glad, or Gladys, whose father she had never quite been able to place, had continued a career of being quite incapable of saying No to any gentleman (for so she artlessly called the probable fathers of her young) and had since produced Sid, Stan and Glamora, this last called after the famous film star Glamora Tudor. All five children were beautiful, healthy and very well brought up on the family system of alternate sweets and smacks, and all were useful about the house and in the large understaffed garden. It had taken Mrs Grantly some time to get used to being greeted with a smile in her own kitchen and enthusiastically pressed to have cups of tea instead of spending her life making them for other people who despised her for doing it, but gradually she got used to it. And if ever she wondered whether the peculiar household seemed quite normal to her children, she told herself not to be silly and put the thought where it should be, out of sight and out of mind.

So there was a silence, very brief but just long enough to give a slight feeling of uncomfortableness, when Mrs Grantly came back from telephoning the butcher who was being obliging enough to have liver and sending her up a nice piece only it did need thoring out first a bit coming straight out of the fridge, he said; a remark which to the housewife needs no explanation.

‘Anything wrong?’ said Mrs Grantly, who was very brave.

‘Nothing mother; really,’ said Eleanor.

‘Well, what unreally then?’ said Mrs Grantly.

‘It was my fault,’ said Tom, who had his father’s kind and gentle nature. ‘Grace said she meant to have five children by the time she was thirty and I said perhaps nobody would want to marry her and Grace said Look at Edna and Doris, and then father looked anxious. But I don’t think it mattered much,’ he added.

‘Not in the least,’ said Mrs Grantly calmly. ‘Edna and Doris are very nice, good girls and that’s that. But let it be clearly understood,’ she added, looking round her family with the air of a benevolent lecturer, ‘that the middle classes still get married before they have their families. And I think you will find,’ she continued, interested in the field of speculation opening before her, ‘that it works better in the end. And Grace will have plenty of time to think about her family when she has passed her School Certificate. Though why,’ said Mrs Grantly thoughtfully, ‘people should have to pass that silly thing I cannot tell. I’d like to see the Government passing it themselves. Which reminds me that we must have that defective ball-cock in the storage tank seen to, Septimus. And I do think and always shall think, though I daresay I don’t really understand these things, that it was silly to christen you Septimus when you were an only child.’

The Rector said he was extremely sorry and if he had been in a state to give an opinion when he was christened he would certainly have made a protest.

‘But it is extraordinary,’ he added, ‘how used one gets to one’s own name over a period of sixty years or so. Of course my great-great-grandfather Harding was a seventh child, though as the other six all died before he was born it doesn’t seem quite to count.’

‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t call any of us after the multiplication table,’ said Eleanor. ‘I think it makes people rather frightening to have mathematical names. Like Mrs Needham, the one that her husband’s Vicar of Lambton and only has one arm. If she weren’t called Octavia she wouldn’t be so frightening. She came into the Red Cross the other day and quite bullied me about books for the Cottage Hospital.’

‘So what did you do?’ asked her father, amused, but secretly very proud of having a daughter who was Depot Librarian of the Barchester St John and Red Cross Library in succession to Miss Susan Dean, now Mrs Freddy Belton and a happy mother about to be made.

‘I temporised,’ said Eleanor. ‘And then Lady Pomfret came in and said about two words and Mrs Needham stopped roaring and did what she was told. It’s an extraordinary thing how Lady Pomfret always seems to come at the right moment. Oh, and she said would I come to the Towers one week-end, mother.’

Mr and Mrs Grantly were pleased to hear this news. They were very fond of their elder daughter and very proud of her and possibly felt that their Eleanor was quite as good stock as Sally Wicklow, sister of the Pomfret Towers agent, though whether Eleanor could have filled the position of Countess of Pomfret as the present holder of the title did was another question. But even if Mrs Grantly was conscious of good county blood it was none the less pleasant that her daughter should be asked to stay with the Lord Lieutenant of the county and to know that she was asked on her own merits.

‘Good girl,’ said Tom approvingly, at which Eleanor almost blushed, for praise from Tom had been one of her greatest pleasures ever since nursery days. ‘I’ll come and hang round the back door and you can give me beef and ale. Oh bother, I can’t,’ he added. ‘I’ve got to go back to Oxford to-morrow night. I must get through these wretched Schools somehow, though I must say it seems silly at my time of life and being a Major to have to do lessons again.’

His parents both looked anxious but said nothing and Tom blamed himself for depressing them, and wondered if he would ever have the courage to face them if he didn’t take a first, or at any rate a very good second in Greats. And then Doris came in, with golden hair, blue eyes, a rose-petal flush on magnolia skin, and an air of dewy, candid innocence, accompanied by Stan and Glamora who were in a fair way to being a most accomplished butler and parlourmaid, and began to clear away the breakfast things with such zeal that the family were routed.

‘When breakfast is over the day is practically done,’ said the Rector sadly to his eldest son as they walked over the lawn towards the ha-ha. ‘There must be something in the Bible to that effect, but I cannot put my finger on it.’

Perhaps, Tom said, in Ecclesiastes. One got some jolly good depressing things in Ecclesiastes, he added.

‘It is curious,’ said his father, ‘how cheerful being depressed makes one feel. In dark times I have often read Ecclesiastes and come away refreshed.’

Tom said, diffidently, for he loved and respected his father and would not for the world have hurt him, that perhaps it was because Ecclesiastes was rather pagan and people often felt a bit pagan themselves.

‘Not pagan,’ said his father thoughtfully. ‘Not even in a Pecksniffian sense. I think what you mean, Tom, is heathen, which is rather different.’

‘How exactly, father?’ said Tom.

‘I don’t quite know if I am clear in my own mind as to what I mean,’ said the Rector. ‘One is so often in a muddled way of thinking. But I think – mind you, I only say think – that whoever wrote or collected Ecclesiastes was far more like a Norseman than an inhabitant of the Middle East. If you read the sagas you will find much the same attitude to life and a feeling of the inevitability and the coldness of death. Real ice and icy winds and black desolation. But I daresay,’ said the Rector, ‘that the Bishop would think quite differently.’

Tom, rather glad of this change of subject, said whatever the Bishop thought would be wrong anyway and had his father heard what Sir Edmund Pridham said about bishops.

If, said Mr Grantly, it were not too disrespectful to gaiters and aprons he would very much like to hear it, as Sir Edmund had a great deal of sound common sense.

‘It was when the Bishop made everyone have a kind of celebration because he had been a clergyman for twenty-five years,’ said Tom. ‘And Sir Edmund came up to a Gaudy at Paul’s and he said being a clergyman for twenty-five years was quite common and if the Bishop had been a bishop for twenty-five years there would be something to boast about. And then he said that whenever any man he knew personally became a bishop he always seemed to lose any sense he had previously had.’

The Rector smiled and said Sir Edmund certainly had the root of the matter in him, but he hoped Tom had not repeated the story.

‘Well, only to people like the Dean and Bishop Joram,’ said Tom, naming two of the strongest supporters of the anti-Palace faction. ‘But I think Sir Edmund was rather pleased with saying it and told everybody. And Charles Fanshawe, my tutor you know, turned it into a nice elegiac couplet.’

He then repeated the verses which owing to our ignorance of Latin we are unable to reproduce.

‘Very neat, very neat,’ said the Rector. ‘And what does Fanshawe think of your chances, Tom? Or oughtn’t I to ask?’

Tom said nothing. There was a great deal that he wanted to say, but he did not quite know how to say it and he was afraid of hurting his father. Not that his father would ever be annoyed, or even show it if he grieved, but Tom could not bear the thought of possibly grieving him, let alone annoying him. So he remained silent and wondered if one could burst or go mad through sheer inability to speak.

‘I have been wondering if I made a mistake when I let you read Greats,’ said his father. ‘Did I, Tom?’

‘I really don’t know, father,’ said Tom, the words forcing themselves out of his mouth in a kind of desperation. ‘I did want to, father. Really. I mean I did love Latin and Greek at school, especially Greek. But only the poetry kind and the plays and historical things. It’s the philosophy that gets me down. It all seems so silly. I mean I don’t really know anything about philosophy but I think one has to make one’s own as one goes along. I mean one tries to behave decently and all that, but I can’t see why one should make such a fuss about it. I’m most awfully sorry, father.’

‘Then I take it that Fanshawe thinks poorly of your chances on the philosophy papers?’ said Mr Grantly, who much to his son’s relief appeared to be more interested than disturbed.

‘Absolutely,’ said Tom. ‘And if I’d tried that stupid P.P.E. I’d have come a cropper just the same and not had the fun of the literature.’

‘P.P.E.?’ said the Rector. ‘What is that?’

‘Philosophy, Politics, Economics, father,’ said Tom.

The Rector was silent for a moment.

‘The only comment I can make,’ said he in a quiet measured voice, ‘upon that school, if school one can call it, is in the words of the prophet Haggai, the favourite writer of my dear old friend Dale of Hallbury. You never knew Dale,’ he added accusingly.

‘No, father,’ said Tom.

‘The words,’ the Rector continued dispassionately, ‘are, “I smote you with blasting and with mildew and with hail in all the labours of your hands.” And even that is really hardly adequate treatment for such a so-called school.’

‘Yes, father,’ said Tom.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the Rector. ‘It will be all right.’

Tom felt much comforted but rather at a loss.

‘It is,’ said the Rector, apparently embarking upon a perfectly new train of thought, ‘extremely lucky that my great-grandfather was a very wealthy man.’

‘Yes, father,’ said Tom.

‘And although the wealth has been divided and each share has decreased in accordance with the wishes of the present Government,’ continued the Rector, ‘I am very comfortably off. When I die there will still be pickings, unless the people whom His Gracious Majesty has to call His Government, which must be a sore mortification to His Majesty, decide to confiscate all the property of the dead. Do your best, Tom. If you want to earn your living in some way that we haven’t as yet tried, you might let me know. I daresay you haven’t really thought about it. This peace has made things difficult for us all and very difficult for the young. And if you change your mind more than once I am prepared to back you. But the sooner you decide the better, because at your age you need work and work and work.’

‘Thank you, father,’ said Tom. ‘Lord! I do seem to have made a hash of it.’

‘We all do,’ said Mr Grantly mildly. ‘And then we pick ourselves up and go on again.’

‘I say, father,’ said Tom, encouraged by his father’s words, ‘it’s rather awful, you know, being so much older than the others. It makes one feel no end of a fool.’

‘That is exactly what I felt,’ said the Rector.

‘But there wasn’t a war when you were at Oxford, father,’ said Tom. ‘You went up at the ordinary age, didn’t you?’

‘I did,’ said the Rector. ‘But I had no idea of going into the Church then. I meant to be an estate agent. But I suppose having two great-grandfathers and a great-great-grandfather in orders was rather infectious and at last I felt the Church was really my place. So I went to a Theological College and was one of the oldest there, not counting of course the old men with beards who had failed every year for the last fifty years. I felt rather foolish at times, but it was well worth it. And I must say,’ he added reflectively, ‘that my people were extraordinarily kind about it.’

‘Well, so are you, father,’ said Tom, going red in the face.

‘Why not?’ said his father. ‘By the way, Tom, do you want to be an estate agent by any chance?’

Tom looked across the glebe, examined a little piece of moss on the stone balustrade which divided the garden from the ha-ha, straightened his tie and made a noise which might have meant anything.

‘Because if you do,’ said his father, apparently unconscious of his son’s peculiar behaviour, ‘there is a great deal to be said for it. Do as well as you can in your Schools, and then we can consider the matter. One thing at a time. Which reminds me,’ he added, taking out of his waistcoat pocket the gold watch that had belonged to Archdeacon Grantly, ‘that I have to go down to the Old Bank House. That man Adams at Hogglestock has an idea of buying it and old Miss Sowerby asked me to come and support her. I think she feels that a Labour M.P. might confiscate her house at sight.’

‘Thanks awfully, father,’ said Tom. ‘Eleanor says the lawnmower isn’t working too well. I’ll have a look at it, because she wants to mow the croquet lawn.’

In a kind of happy embarrassment, or embarrassed happiness, he went off to the old stables where no horses lived now, nor any brougham nor wagonette nor open carriage, though a faint smell of oats and leather still hung about the stalls and loose-boxes and harness-room making a nostalgic atmosphere of a life that was dead. The Rectory car, shabby but useful, was the only inhabitant of the coach-house and here were also kept various garden implements including the lawn-mower which Eleanor Grantly was examining.

If Tom had thought to come as a deus ex, or rather pro machina, he was the more deceived, for Master Percy Thatcher was already in charge with an assortment of tools and needed no help at all.

‘Hullo, Purse,’ said Tom, who always felt ashamed of himself for so truckling to the slip-shod speech of the Thatcher family but could not bring himself to be so peculiar as to say Percy. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Everything, I think,’ said his sister Eleanor, almost crossly, for half an hour’s wrestling with a machine that set its teeth firmly when she tried to propel it had made her hotter and crosser than she had been since the Hospital Library took over another storey of the house where it lived and about five hundred books had to be moved by hand up two flights of stairs and the shelves weren’t what the carpenter would like, or so he said, shelves to be; and most of the staff weltered among books and sawdust and a window stuck and one of the junior helpers put her hand through a pane and bled all over a nice new six foot length of beading that the carpenter had set his heart on nailing into place before all them heavy books went in; evidently looking upon books as agents of wrath specially directed against bookshelves.

‘Let’s have a look,’ said Tom, squatting beside the unfriendly machine, which Purse, who had his mother’s wide tolerance of the gentry, allowed him to do. ‘There’s something queer here, among these cogs.’

‘I know,’ said Eleanor. ‘It’s a beastly little bit of metal that won’t stay in its place. I’ve tried for half an hour to put it back and it falls out every time and gets all entangled in the machinery.’

‘You did ought to treat her koind, miss,’ said Purse, who much to the Rector’s pleasure remained pure Barset in his speech, unmoved by school to which he paid little or no attention or the wireless which only interested him as a machine, the more especially when it went wrong as the kitchen wireless not infrequently did owing to a rooted belief held by Doris and Edna that if it went wrong the best treatment was to throw something at it: possibly the remains of some primitive belief in exorcising evil spirits by violence. ‘Let her feel your fingers, miss, loike. She’s all roight.’

Under Tom’s and his sister’s fascinated gaze he felt delicately among the machinery with his small, very dirty fingers and by what seemed to the onlookers a miracle everything fell into place. Purse gave the machine a slight push to which it responded with a smooth movement and a happy purring sound. He then produced an oil can from a wooden shelf, carefully oiled the machine and wiped off any superfluous oil with the cotton waste which he habitually carried in the front of his jersey owing to his pockets being full of other useful things.

‘You run her easy, miss,’ said Purse, ‘and she’ll be all roight. Me and Sid’s going to the pictures this afternoon, Mr Tom. It’s a lovely film about motor races and there’s a bad lot and he puts sand in the hero’s bearings, miss, to stop him winning the race, but the hero’s girl she dresses up like a man and she’s got a car just loike her friend’s and she droives it and wins the race. Me and Stan sor it at the Barchester Odeon, miss, and Sid croyed ever so because he didn’t go, so Oy’m taking him to the threepennies.’

‘Suppose you take him to the ninepennies,’ said Tom, these being the most expensive seats at the Edgewood Cinema which only had films on Thursday and Saturday. And he took some money from his pocket and gave it to Purse.

‘Please, Mr Tom,’ said Purse, ‘if Oy was to take Sid to the threepennies Oy could boy mint gums with the rest.’

‘All right, Purse, you do whatever you like,’ said Tom and Purse, stuffing the cotton waste back into his jersey so that he bulged in an alarming way, went off to the kitchen to tell his mother, while Tom pushed the lawn-mower over the cobbled yard and round to the croquet lawn and began to unroll the carpet of green striped moiré silk, while the machine purred gently and the grass and the daisies flew before it.

‘Do you suppose we’ll ever play croquet again?’ said Eleanor, as her brother stopped to empty the grass-holder or whatever is the correct name for the thing the grass flies into; though heaven knows that as a rule almost as much flies outside as goes inside and has to be swept away afterwards, rather spoiling the striped pattern.

‘I don’t know why not,’ said Tom. ‘The tennis court won’t ever be fit to play on again as far as I can see, and anyway it would cost an awful lot to get it really put right. Quite a lot of people do play croquet. Let’s get the things out when I’ve finished mowing.’

Eleanor said, with a slight bitterness unusual in her, that it served people right for trying to be patriotic and mother could just as well have grown potatoes in the glebe field instead of digging up the tennis court.

‘Well, if it hadn’t been potatoes it would have been something else,’ said Tom philosophically. ‘Remember the Dreadful Dowager,’ for so the Dowager Lady Norton was known to most of the county. ‘She kept her tennis court that she never used and the army dumped about a million tons of corrugated