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From this week onwards, for logistical reasons, the deadline for entries will be midday on Wednesday.
Lucy walked through the park. This is it, she said to herself, and it felt right. She could smell fried onions from the cart that sold sausages, the ones Robert told her were made from cojones. When she reached the library she would look it up in a dictionary. She did not dare ask Robert because he smiled when he said it. She dragged her beige cardigan close around her. It was October and the sun had gone. This morning there was no heating in the mansion flat and her mother had shivered. Lucy knew she had to find a new flat, exactly like the old one. But her mother would be sad to move from Kensington. If Robert talked to her mother about this he would use an obscenity and then swig from his wineskin, and say the thing between a mother and her daughter is a big thing.
D.A. Prince (Anita Brookner/Ernest Hemingway)
A crisis will occasionally furnish one with a moment of almost pre-Raphaelite clarity. Burst firing my M4 assault rifle into the contingent of Iraqi insurgents in that supposedly abandoned Basra warehouse, I felt able simultaneously to appreciate multiple dimensions of each moment. I at once apprehended, for instance, both the redundancy of my repeatedly bellowed expletives and the absolute psychological necessity of giving them vent, a realisation which called to mind Dickie Umfraville’s exclamations during horse races. The insurgents, doubtless shocked that their lives should fail, in the abruptness of their ending, to conform to conventional narrative rhythms, died either wordlessly or with the sort of sub-literate utterances that become oddly ludicrous when transcribed. Then, from the corner of my eye, I caught a bulky figure attempting escape with just that combination of fastidiousness and incompetence that could belong to only one man. ‘Good Lord! Bin Widmerpool,’ I cried.
Adrian Fry (Andy McNab/Anthony Powell)
The air struck cold as the fellowship withdrew to my college rooms after the High-Elven Council. As senior fellow, Gandalf took the chair. His best work had been done several hundred years earlier, but he remained wise, magical, insufferably prolix. ‘Gentlemen,’ he began, observing immediately with the smug smile of the true scholar that that designation applied really only to himself, Boromir, Aragorn and me, Lewis Eliot, whose presence is compulsory at all meetings for plot reasons. ‘We need a candidate to oppose Sauron. With him in the lodge, foul orcs and undergraduates will overrun us. One of us must undertake a lone and perilous quest, perhaps lasting for three volumes.’ ‘To Mount Doom?’ asked Frodo, young, noble-minded, probably gay. ‘Not yet,’ replied Gandalf. ‘First, you must seek out the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon to find out what happens next.’ Frodo gasped. ‘You mean …Oxford?’
Brian Murdoch (The Masters of the Ring by C.P. Snow and J.R.R. Tolkien)
I’d always dreamed, don’t you know, of a country house weekend minus the usual cast, no Spode, Glossop, nor Bassett. Now, I was tootling the two-seater through the gates of Manderley. The long drive wound its serpentine way under a dark and silent canopy of huge beech trees and past impenetrable scarlet rhododendrons which from a distance must have appeared like a bloodstain on the landscape. The front door was opened by a ghastly-looking female, apparently dressed for a funeral, and a dead ringer for the housekeeper who gave Joan Fontaine the creeps in the famous picture, you must have seen it. Still, code of the Woosters, I’d accepted the invitation and couldn’t back out now. I whistled as I returned to the car to get my suitcase (Jeeves had gone to Broadstairs) and, would you believe it, a couple of herring gulls swooped down and knocked off my hat…
Derek Morgan (P.G. Wodehouse/Daphne du Maurier)
On his visits to the sweet shop, which were as regular and frequent as his duties to school and family allowed, William B noticed that there was no predicting with any certainty which sweets would be on sale there. Sometimes he arrived wishing to buy liquorice bootlaces or bull’s-eyes and only aniseed balls, fruit chews and lollipops would be available. Feeling that the shopkeeper might be affronted by a direct question, William did not enquire why. People spoke of wholesalers in a far-off city who controlled the supply, but no one knew. In any case, there was always something that he was content to buy. One day it was pale, heart-shaped cachous in pastel colours with little messages of affection printed on them, but they never appeared again. There was a rumour that they had been forbidden by the government, but the truth was impossible to ascertain.
G.M. Davis (Richmal Crompton/Franz Kafka)
No. 2607: Non-verbal communication
You are invited to submit a piece of verbless prose (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2607’ by midday on 29 July or email lucy@spectator.co.uk Please note the earlier than usual closing date.
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