Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition
In Competition No. 2704 you were invited to submit extracts from a less than happy literary collaboration between male and female contemporaries where the joints clearly show. D.A. Prince (Orwell/Wodehouse) and Bill Greenwell (D.H. Lawrence/Pam Ayres) impressed but strayed from the brief. The winners, in a strong field, are printed below and earn £25 each. Adrian Fry nabs £30.
Full dim of day, a barn, dimmer yet. Within, figures idle.
‘’S not my fault it’s such a bloomin’ miserable day,’ William told his Outlaws.
In the course of that interminable morning, they’d played at being cowboys, soldiers, gladiators and spies. Played at being, found it wanting, yet somehow still were. They had tried cards and marbles, but both had caused only quarrelsome disputation of the rules.
‘You don’t know what to play next, do you, William?’ said Violet-Elizabeth Bott, slyly.
‘Actually, I do,’ said a flustered William, feeling all Outlaw eyes upon him. ‘We’re goin’ to play a waitin’ game.’
Understanding dawned, faltered, failed.
‘Well,’ William improvised desperately. ‘You has to wait until somethin’ happens. When it does, you sort of shout out and you win that round.’
Douglas, unimpressed, asked ‘What if nothing happens?’
A stymied William paused, during which time nothing happened, twice.
‘Then,’ said Violet-Elizabeth, simultaneously humiliating and saving William, ‘I’ll thcream and thcream until I’m thick!’
Adrian Fry (Richmal Crompton/Samuel Beckett)
Some five and thirty years ago, before the writer was fairly into breeches, a young woman could be seen making her way along the lane to Netheredge Hall, humming as she went.
Yet her heart was heavy; plucked from her modest home to be housekeeper to her dissolute cousin Peregrine, she dwelt with foreboding on the unknown future.
Nonetheless, was there not a spark in her eye, a spring in her step? Was this not as much an adventure as a duty? For we may depend upon it, nothing lightens a young woman’s spirits so much as a libertine to be reformed.
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