CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

DOWN UNDER

Pom on the run

Feminist fatale

OTHER SCENES

Vets’ conference

The jut set

This little pig went a-marketing

Brighton or bust

LEARNING THE HARD WAY

The cruel C.E.

Yally Hoojah

School crawl

FURTHER SCENES OF REVELRY

Charitably having a ball

Swallows and amazons

MEN, WOMEN AND OTHER CLOSE RELATIONS

Roasting Spare Rib

The day of the wimp

The last of the summer whine

Mind the step

Middle-aged wife’s tale

About the Author

Also by Jilly Cooper

Copyright

About the Book

More infectious humour and witty observations from Jilly Cooper, whose collection of articles, originally published in The Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday, includes a light-hearted and irreverent account of a visit to Australia, published for the first time in its entirety. Scenes nearer home, viewed with equal disrespect include the diverse worlds of a vet’s conference, fashionable charity balls, the London to Brighton run and Hen Night in Wandsworth. And, as always, Jilly Cooper is a devestating, hilarious and sometimes moving chronicler of the minutiae of family life, with some fascinating sidelights and side-swipes at the middle-class educational rat race along the way.

This set of writings will prove once again Jilly Cooper’s ability to provoke, fascinate and – above all – amuse!

JOLLY MARSUPIAL

Down under and other scenes

Jilly Cooper

To my father-in-law Leonard Cooper
with love and admiration

My thanks are due to the editors of The Sunday Times and of the Mail on Sunday in which most of these articles first appeared.

Foreword

In this new volume of collected pieces which have appeared in various newspapers and magazines during the past three years, I am particularly glad to have the opportunity to publish in full what I actually wrote about my visit to Australia in 1980. Of the original fifteen-thousand-word piece, The Sunday Times only used 8,000 words and edited it in a way, and provided it with a headline (‘Land of the Suntanned Snobs’) that seriously distorted what I wanted to say. Likewise various Australian newspapers either took umbrage at what they read in The Sunday Times or reprinted only the sections of the original piece that suited them: as often as not they had geographical reasons for this. The net result of all these extracts was a surge of angry letters from Australians all over the world, and a great many English people, who thought I had been not only unfair but offensive.

Now I have the opportunity to put the situation to rights and even if the piece in its entirety, as originally written, does offend some people, which I suppose it is bound to, at least it is as I intended it to be. I had a wonderful time in Australia; I loved the land, the people I met, and I hope I have conveyed the enthusiasm that I felt. I think I can honestly say that they were three of the most exciting weeks of my life. Not many people on their first trip have the opportunity to visit all the major cities of that vast continent in such a short time, and I must record my gratitude to my publishers, Methuen (and Methuen of Australia) for making the whole thing possible.

Newspapers are often forced to make cuts and apply the occasional fig leaf, for reasons of space and their readers’ blood pressure. At least here you read the unexpurgated version, warts, other appendages and all, of not only my Australian piece but also several other articles from the same period.

Among the other pieces included in this volume are the first two long articles on men I wrote for the new Mail on Sunday (here published together as ‘The day of the wimp’). After thirteen and a half years I decided to leave The Sunday Times and seek fresh pastures. I only hope that by the time this book appears, the grass will still be as green on the other side of the fence as it seems to be at the moment.

May 1982

Down under

Pom on the run

FEW PEOPLE CAN have set out for Australia with more trepidation than I did. A week before I left I saw a programme on television called Kerry Packer and the Poms, which gave me a taste of the rabidly anti-English sentiment I might expect. Then a very unsunny lady from the Melbourne Sun came to interview me in London and asked why the hell was I going there to promote a silly book on the English class system when Australia was a classless society anyway. Finally the itinerary for the tour arrived. In ten days it included a punishing total of sixty-eight interviews with press, television and radio, three launching parties, five speeches, and 36,000 miles of flying to eight different cities, including Singapore and Hong Kong.

Arriving in Sydney at seven o’clock in the morning, however, we were met not by a shower of tins, or by a snarling Dennis Lillee bowling bumpers, but by a couple of pot-bellied health inspectors who solemnly entered the plane and sprayed us with flit.

‘No wonder that fly got off at Singapore,’ said my husband.

Inside the airport there was a dearth of trolleys and a plethora of beautiful suntanned girls, their faces gleaming greeny-brown like poplar leaves in spring. A kind man helped us carry our cases. A kind woman showed me where the paper towels were hidden in the Ladies. On the loo wall, someone had scribbled: ‘Keep Australia Green – Have Sex with a Frog.’

Waiting like zombies in the cafeteria for our flight to Brisbane, we watched a man breakfast off chocolate milk shake and oysters. At the bar two men in blazers were drinking beer.

At Brisbane we were met by our tour organizer, a splendid Brunhilda with waist-length brown hair and a flawless skin called Elsa Petersen. True to her namesake, she behaved towards us throughout the tour like a kindly lioness with two very wayward cubs. When I grumbled that I’d never last the pace, she promptly presented me with some vitamin pills. According to the label, they were ‘for use in pregnancy, alcoholism and advanced liver complaints’. This seemed somewhat drastic, but once I got over the shock of drinking neat Tizer for breakfast every morning, they worked wonders. All Australians live on vitamin pills.

First impressions of Brisbane were hazy: trees with great grey trunks shaped like Indian clubs; women with parasols; brilliant dogs balancing on the top of moving cars and open lorries, who barked when the lights went green; houses perched on stilts, with steps up to the front door; and balconies fretted at the top and bottom like lace Victorian Christmas cards.

We drove past Breakfast Creek, where one of the first explorers had breakfast in the early 1800s, and headed for the nearest pub, where a large notice said ‘Shirts are requested to be worn during mealtimes’. Wherever you go in Australia, you are bombarded with sartorial instructions.

Later we passed umbrella trees, the Ithaca Ice Works, the Don Juan Waterbed Shop, and a poodle parlour (where you could have your dog ‘fluff dried’ for four dollars), but found nowhere open for lunch. It was the Saturday after ANZAC day.

Giving up, we returned to our hotel room, where we were greeted by a fridge full of miniatures, and a ringing telephone. It was two of my husband’s ex-warehousemen, now living in Brisbane, who came over for a drink. When they worked in England, they had always had to struggle to make ends meet. Now, doing the same job, they have their own houses with swimming pools, beautifully cut suits, children at private schools, and enough spare money to take their families out to restaurants whenever they want to. One of them brought his Australian wife. Immediately the sexes divided. My husband talked to his ex-warehousemen, while I talked to the wife, who admitted that any woman who tried to barge in on all-male conversation would be considered a tart.

Brisbane at dusk was magical. The huge river turned to mother-of-pearl under its Meccano bridge, a lemon-yellow sunset gilded the grey-green acacias and softed the rose-pink roofs and the trellis of pylons along the hills. Reeling from jet lag I collapsed into bed and embarked on the first of a series of interrupted nights, this one punctuated by Tarzan howls from a wedding party in the next door bedroom.

Sunday Brisbane: Woke feeling profoundly depressed at the thought of trying to promote a book on class in a classless society. Elsa arrived at midday to collect us. She had been staying with her mother, who had told her it was very vulgar to wear white shoes. Driving to lunch, we passed a beautiful hill dotted with large white houses each with its own rich ruff of trees.

‘That’s the toff area,’ explained Elsa. For a moment I thought she’d said ‘tough area’, but actually the two adjectives are often synonymous in Australia, which boasts a very high population of upper-middle-class criminals – or ‘crims’ as they are called. Very little stigma is attached to going inside, admittedly not very difficult in Brisbane, where anyone involved in an abortion gets fourteen years, and where it’s against the law to go on demonstrations.

We lunched on Filet Tiara with Peter Charlton of the Brisbane Telegraph and his wife Helen. Peter, who with his fair hair and reddish moustache looks like an officer in the Scots Guards, was very happy to explode the myth of a classless Australia. Doctors used to be the top of the social scale, he said, but they’d lost caste since the advent of Medibank (Australia’s equivalent of our Health Service). Now judges were regarded as the smartest profession (presumably they’re also the busiest putting all those ‘crims’ inside). He finally added that the Australians had hated Brearley because he was too upper class and couldn’t bat either.

Touring Brisbane later, we noticed the great number of trees to each house, and the way luscious plants jut out of the most uncompromising yellow rock. We passed the Albert Street Methodist Church, beloved of John Betjeman, with its brilliant terracotta brick, and the fountain which only runs at weekends to save money, of which you can buy plastic replicas for your garden in purple, pink, and blue.

According to Elsa, the river often overflows. Once the first two floors of her office were flooded, and they all rowed in to save the Telex machine. ‘When we got there, we all sat round the boardroom table, opened the fridge and drank what was in it.’

On to a rugger match – where a large sign told us that pensioners and schoolboys in uniform would only be charged 22 cents. The ground was pretty soft by Australian standards – at least there was grass on it, but every time anyone took a kick, two minions had to rush on with a bucket and build a sandcastle to hold the ball. The players were so lean and bronzed and fit – it looked more like a beach ball anyway. A man wandered past with ‘Save Water’ on the front of his T-shirt, and ‘Bath with a Friend’ on the back. A flock of ibises drifted across the cornflower-blue sky. Gradually it was sinking in that we were really in Australia.

Helen Charlton talked resignedly of the Australian male’s obsession with sport. When they were adopting their first baby, Peter rang up his rugger club to explain that he couldn’t make training that evening as they had to pick up the baby.

‘Why can’t you pick it up tomorrow?’ asked the captain in deepest indignation.

Helen had also given up making rugger teas. There was not much joy in making hundreds of sandwiches and cream cakes, if all the players did was hurl them at each other.

At half-time, a siren went, and everyone ate crumbled vealies, Dagwood red sausages and square pies. Australia is a land of harsh rules, which everyone breaks. Another large sign by the bar announced that liquor must not be consumed beyond this point, but was defied by a shingle of empty tins all round the boundary – a sort of Beer Canute.

Peter, a member of the TA, took us back to his officers’ mess after the game. Looking at the regimental silver, and the photographs of moustacheoed, double-barrelled DSOs round the walls, one realized how English some of Australia is, and understood, for the first time, the bitterness at our joining the Common Market.

‘It is very hard,’ said Peter, ‘for us whose fathers fought and died in the war to have to queue to get into England, while men from Germany walk straight through.’

We dined with Blair Edmunds, who runs the largest local radio station, and who looked like Hermann Prey. His friend, Ian, is a schoolmaster, with wonderful blackberry dark eyes. They have two Afghans, a beautiful house full of paintings, and a bright green loo seat. Other guests included a high-court judge who’d recently won a Father of the Year award, and his wife, a deliberately understated American academic, who promptly told us that, as a fine arts professor, she earned one of the highest salaries in Australia.

Dinner was wonderful, cooked by Blair and Ian, and consisting of palest green courgette soup, followed by mammoth prawns called Moreton Bay Bugs, duck in black cherry sauce, and home-made pistachio ice-cream – all to a background of the eight sides of Fidelio played fortissimo.

For a classless society, conversation was decidedly upmarket. Someone exquisitely described a socially ambitious neighbour as being ‘Not only self-made, but self-hyphenated as well’. The judge told me he came from a distinguished family. His wife described the size of her family vault, and the family silver given to her grandfather by the King of Morocco. Recently she’d met Prince Charles when he visited Australia, and regarded him as a considerable intellectual. They had sat together on a sofa, kicked off their shoes to relieve their aching feet, and discussed mezzo-sopranos.

‘Charles,’ she added emphatically, ‘knows his Grace Bunbury (sic) backwards.’

Talk moved on to the ostentation of the local millionaire, who on being awarded the OBE had it made up in diamonds as a single ear-ring. He also had the ‘J’ of his sheep brand made into diamond ear-rings for his wife. Lunching with him recently, guests had been slightly startled when a particularly handsome stallion kept flashing past the window like a windscreen wiper. Later they discovered the horse was being specially whipped back and forth by a couple of farm-hands.

Finally, the judge launched an attack on the appalling meanness of the English – particularly the upper classes. An aristocratic couple and their grown-up son had evidently recently descended on him for a fortnight without asking.

As his wife was away, the poor judge had had to cook for them three times a day. (On one occasion the son was going into town and he asked him to pick up a bottle of milk and was promptly asked for the money.) Finally, after a week, unable to bear it any longer the judge had fled to Sydney, whereupon they demanded housekeeping money for their remaining week.

Having experienced generous and riotous hospitality ourselves we slunk to bed at 1.30, feeling bitterly ashamed of our countrymen.

Monday Brisbane: Picked up at 8.30 for my first radio phone-in. Shakes were not entirely due to nerves. The interviewer had a beard, wore khaki shorts, glared at me fiercely, and gave me a far from easy ride on class distinction in England. Afterwards people rang in, English immigrants grumbling at how undisciplined Australian children were, Australians grumbling at how dictatorial and unimaginative English parents and nannies were. My interviewer looked even more disapproving and, while I was stumblingly answering a question on poverty in England, shoved a note across the table which divided us. On it he had written:

NUN (to Mother Superior): We have a case of VD.

MOTHER SUPERIOR (absent-mindedly): Oh, put it in the cellar, it will make a nice change from the usual Beaujolais.

With great self-control I managed not to scream with laughter, but my answer on poverty was not as lucid as it should have been.

Radio stations in Australia are amazingly smart, shag-pile on the wall, beautiful girls and forests of plants at every entrance. At the next station, I talked to Hayden, who was polite and elegant and an ex-minister; and at the next, to Alan, who had slanting fox’s eyes, said he was hungry, and that I sounded like an upper-class wanker when I called people ‘Darling’. I’d get on much better in Australia, he added sternly, if I addressed people as ‘Pal’ or ‘Chum’. Felt this was too reminiscent of dog food ads to carry real conviction in my case. As we left, the weather men who had predicted rain were peering anxiously out of the window at an untroubled sapphire-blue sky.

On to the University of Queensland, surrounded by vast yucca plants, the crevices of which everyone used as litter bins. Interviewed by bad-tempered girl with short hair and a large bottom, who told me truculently that their station accepted no advertising, or government support, and that all staff decided their own salary – and asked what England was going to do about poverty. Talked woollily about National Assistance and Legal Aid, and totally failed to insert the words ‘Pal’ or ‘Chum’.

Leaving the Too Wong Baptist Church, Oscar Wilde Street, and Chippendale Street, we climbed up a winding road through forests of eucalyptus trees to Channel 7. Very disappointed not to see koala bears, but Elsa said they would be asleep in the trees, probably zonked out on eucalyptus leaves.

On reaching Channel 7, we found the entire television station in a state of uproar because they’d been stealing all Channel 9’s celebrities and Channel 9 had been stealing all theirs. Elsa whispered that my navel was showing in my cream jump suit, and handed me a safety-pin. Interviewed by very beautiful girl in a beige dress called Donna who said she had been going to read my book, but she’d gone camping instead.

Collapsed into nearest bar, and drank two huge Bloody Marys. If every day was going to be as rigorous as this, I’d never stand the pace. Yet another notice warned us that the Management would refuse service to anyone not properly dressed. Perhaps Elsa’s safety-pin had been a good idea after all.

The bar overlooked a dusty track lined with palm trees, and white slatted houses backing on to mysterious dark-green mango groves. In the scorching sunlight, the influences seemed to come from New Orleans, the Wild West, and India all at the same time. But round the corner instead of Gary Cooper with a bootlace moustache, came the postman bicycling in shorts. Elsa said that when she was a child, the postman went on his rounds with two horses, one to ride, the other to carry the mail.

On to Channel 9, which was also in an uproar because the man who’d been going to interview me had been stolen that morning by Channel 7, and a new presenter had just taken over. The make-up people had been rather over generous with the Pan-stik, and he now had a bright yellow face like a large Jaffa orange. The telephone rang continually with journalists clamouring for interviews. He had been going to read my book, he said apologetically, but alas someone had stolen it. At least he hadn’t gone camping. ‘Did I feel Australia was a classless society?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s full of upper-middle-class crims.’

SYDNEY

Flew to Sydney feeling utterly knackered. One symbol of the Australian good life is the confetti of bright-blue swimming pools beside every house seen from the plane as you come into land. Everyone in Sydney seemed to be wearing Campari-pink track suits. On the way to our hotel, we passed another Don Juan Waterbed shop, and a man’s hairdresser called Stallion, which had a sign outside of a rearing horse with a luscious Carmen-rollered mane.

Tuesday Sydney: Spent absolutely punishing day whizzing from radio stations to television studios, being followed by beautiful lynx-eyed journalist called Gail Heathcote, and moustacheoed trendy photographer – a sort of Denim Lillee.

First interview with John Laws, who, I was warned beforehand, ‘has quite a good personality’ (whoever she might be). He turned out to be lean, craggy and has attractive as a Western Hero, and clad from his Seiko watch to his Gucci boots in status symbols. He is also very rich, having just sold his house for £1,000,000 to the Iraqis, and gave me the first flicker of an eye-meet I’d had since I’d landed in Australia. Felt as euphoric as a teenager, but before I had time to score, I was whipped on to next interview. Everyone kept harping on how classless Australia was, a supposition belied by some magazines I flipped through between programmes. One had a long feature on Australia’s twelve most eligible men; another ran a long feature in which a girl thanked her mother for scraping and saving to send her to private schools and later paying for elocution lessons to iron out her working-class accent.

Lunched in a marvellous restaurant called You and Me. Australian food is superb if you like solid slabs of protein. Steak, lamb, fish and shellfish are all wonderful, but vegetables tend to be very boring – you usually end up with the inevitable salad, thick layers of lettuce through which the dressing never penetrates. One found evidence of this attitude in the high streets, where incredibly tidy greengrocers’ windows look as untouched and protected as jewellers’. As if in protest people walk along the crowded pavements eating fruit salad and cream out of bowls.

After a frantic afternoon I was left with a quarter of an hour to change for a launching party, in an old wine cellar. Arrived miraculously on time to find it packed. Where there’s free drink, Australians always manage to be punctual. At parties there is a ‘launcher’, someone who organizes the party and makes a speech of welcome. Mine, on this occasion, was the ex-daughter-in-law of the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury (who no doubt once danced with the girl who danced with the man who danced with the Prince of Wales). She made an eloquent speech, as did my Australian publisher, who on a recent visit to the Garrick Club in London, was heard to make the immortal remark: ‘There’s nothing wrong with the place that couldn’t be improved by a few fruit machines.’

Spent entire party being interviewed upstairs by various local radio stations. Made fleeting appearance in party room, not unlike Banquo’s ghost. Overheard girl asking: ‘Is Jilly Cooper actually here in person?’

Left my husband to have a much deserved night off with an old school friend and his wife, and set off with Elsa for the John Singleton Show, which has one of the highest ratings in Australia. Fortunately I had no time to be nervous. John Singleton has straw-coloured hair, and that monochrome-brown complexion, without any tinge of pink or red, rather like peanut butter, that is so common in Australian men. He was dressed like a Union Jack: blue suit, red tie, blue and white striped shirt with a white collar. Despite managing to resemble a coastguard and a basking shark at the same time, he has an excellent sense of humour. Up to the first commercial break, we fooled about enjoying ourselves.

Alas, in the second half of the programme Eartha Kitt was one of the guests. Having worshipped her for years, I was about to ask for her autograph, when she turned on me like an alley kitt, saying the book (which she hadn’t even looked at) was junk, that I was junk, and all social distinction was junk. Fortunately, we were divided by the bolster of another guest, a massive wrestler, who cheerfully admitted his accent always got thicker as the evening wore on.

Miss Kitt then screwed up her otherwise pretty face like an old prune and asked John Singleton to pass her ‘that book’. John Singleton looked bewildered and picked up my book which was on the table. ‘No, not that junk,’ snarled Miss Kitt, but the real book under the table, which turned out, despite Mr Singleton’s amazement, to be written by himself, and which fell open at a marked place where several lines had been underlined. Miss Kitt then read out some sententious claptrap about the dignity of all men, and all men being equal and brother to one another. She then re-sharpened her claws on me, and asked what I was going to do with all the money I’d made. Replied rather nervously that I was going to pay my debts. Mercifully we were both obliterated by the commercial break.

Thinking things could only get better, Elsa and I went on to a very good party in the smart Sydney suburb of Wallhura. Talked first to handsome man who had made films as a tax loss, and whose name in Polish is evidently as smart as Windsor in England, then to beautiful woman, who was convinced her last lover was murdered: ‘We didn’t even have a row, he simply disappeared one day.’ She was also concerned about her dog, which she part-owned with a barrister down the road. Unfortunately the barrister had just gone inside for a couple of years, so her nanny had to spend hours every day chauffering the dog over to the barrister’s girlfriend who lived on the other side of Sydney. This story was capped by a lissom ex-model with kingfisher-blue eyes, who said she was going to publish a diary of everything she ate and excreted during her pregnancy. Her husband, who writes the script for the Paul Hogan Show, had evidently filmed and tape-recorded her during labour.

Slightly bemused, but easily the best-looking couple in the room, were a man of military bearing in his fifties and his wife who looked like Lady Longford. They turned out to be the parents of Sam Neill, the New Zealand born male star of My Brilliant Career. We then had an extremely enjoyable conversation discussing Sam’s beauty and talent, and Welsh cobs, which they bred in New Zealand. Discovering I was also staying at the Menzies Hotel, they gave me a lift back. Kept saying what a shame it was they hadn’t met my husband, as he was a military publisher and I knew how well they would have all got on.

As we drew up at the Menzies Hotel I saw my husband in reception being watched with very jaundiced eyes by the night staff. He and old school friend, and old school friend’s wife were all playing pig-in-the-middle with a large pink panti-girdle. In the lift down, my husband had evidently patted the wife on the bottom, and remarked that he detested roll-ons, whereupon she had promptly whipped hers off. They had already mislaid two keys to our bedroom, and were too chicken to ask the hotel staff for a third.

The wife now fortunately had the presence of mind to thrust her panti-girdle behind her back, and my husband and his old school friend more or less composed their features as I introduced them very hurriedly to Sam Neill’s parents. In recognition of their team spirit I was the one who had to wheedle a third key out of jaundiced night staff.

In bedroom we found two keys and finished off free champagne, thoughtfully but perhaps unnecessarily provided by management. Bed by four.

Wednesday Sydney: Woken at eight by breezy radio telephone interviewer. Too busy holding my head on with one hand, and the receiver with the other to be very coherent on English social structure. Was even less so when second telephone interviewer rang at 8.20. Elsa collected me at nine to go on the Caroline Jones Radio Show, which she stressed had huge ratings and was crucial to sales of book. On the way there, we passed the shark fin of the Opera House, and the Traditional Boomerang School. Felt mine had returned several times already.

Interviewed by Old Etonian with charming manners called Michael Morton Evans. Pale, anorexic lady, looking like one of Tennessee Williams’s sexually strung-up heroines, made an awful fuss about reading the weather beforehand. Thought reprovingly to myself that in England weather people knew their place and quietly moved cloud bricks around screens without bothering anyone else.

Interview went excellently until Michael asked me if I were a snob. Replied that if I am, my children frequently cut me down to size, and that my son was once overheard saying to a little friend in awed tones: ‘Mummy says “pardon” is a much worse word than “fuck”.’ Interview moved briskly on to another theme, and then ended somewhat abruptly.

‘Well that was nice,’ I said, only then noticing that the weather lady had turned pea green.

‘Do you realize,’ she said in a trembling voice, ‘that by using that dreadful word, you have probably lost me my job?’

Just wondering how anything I’d said could possibly affect the weather, when I realized that the pea-green lady was in fact Caroline Jones, and I had put up a monumental black by using a four-letter word. Michael Morton Evans, though ashen, took it very well, rather like the A. E. Housman soldier, who smiled and kissed his fingers to the enemy as he was being bayoneted. Would The Sunday Times give him a job, he said, if he were sacked. As I left, the switchboard was jammed with outraged callers. Felt extremely contrite, but also that Australian morality was slightly dislocated. On John Singleton’s programme the night before Barry Humphries had made a fleeting appearance, saying Edna Everage was going to England to replace the Queen, and he hoped everyone would give that little lady the Clap.

By early afternoon the four-letter word story had reached the evening papers. I slunk back to the Menzies hoping to catch a couple of hours’ sleep before flying to Canberra, to find our bedroom full of more of my husband’s ex-warehousemen, and him on the telephone saying: ‘Come over at once. Jilly’d adore to see some children, she’s missing our own two terribly.’

Both statements at that moment were totally untrue. My husband it turned out was speaking to an ex-nanny of ours who now lived in a church, and who arrived with two charming but extremely boisterous children, who proceeded to wreck the place. One disappeared into the bathroom for several minutes and was discovered cleaning its teeth with the lavatory brush. Felt slightly comforted that ex-nanny had as little control over her children, as she had accused me of having over mine when they were the same age.

Later we descended to the hotel bar to be confronted by a solid phalanx of males drinking as if their wives depended on it. ‘In England,’ said one of the warehousemen’s wives, ‘men go home after work and then take their wives out for a drink. Here they go straight to the pub, and their wives never know when to expect them home.’

cultivateCrim’s Fairy Tales