HERMIT WANTED
Free meals and accommodation.
Situated on grand estate.
Would suit the quiet type.
When Giles and Ginny married ‘it was like a great clanging-together of bank vaults that rang out across the land’. Now Ginny demanded a savage. She had discovered an empty cave in the woods, and it needed to be occupied. The applicant to her ‘Situation Vacant’ notice in the local paper must not shave, cut his hair, trim his fingernails — do anything but look rough; in particular, he must not speak. Then she and her guests could ride out after supper to spy on him. At first, all went well with the successful unsavoury applicant, until they forgot to feed him. Then Hermit turned ignoble and pinched the baby.
I don’t know why Mick Jackson’s ten tales are sorry. They aren’t apologetic or pathetic or disgraceful, but an almost delightful mixture of … I’m not sure I know the answer to that either: of cautionary fable and fairytale and Panic allegory and E.
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