‘I could have told you that,’ said my husband, as if this were the general state of reality. Normally if I ask him any question about his native tongue, he says, ‘Don’t ask me, you’re the expert.’
The thing he could have told me was the meaning of ‘son of Attenborough’, about which I had asked in the issue of 21 September. The phrase occurs in a novel by Barry Pain (1864-1928), a humorous writer. I read some of his books ages ago, and they are all right. One of his characters is a ridiculous suburban clerk, and I feel he borrowed from George and Weedon Grossmith’s Charles Pooter, and managed the creation less well. Pain thrived in the days when the Cornhill magazine was going strong. He first wrote for Granta, which seems to have been founded by a relation by (later) marriage.
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