quotes_feb24_2013.htm

… he set me to make a pudden, for because our cook was hurted. I done my uttermost, but she all fetched adrift like in the bag, an’ the more I biled the bits of her, the less she favoured any fashion o’ pudden. Moon he chawed and chammed his piece, and Frankie chawed and chammed his’n, and—no words to it—he took me by the ear an’ walked me out over the bow-end, an’ him an’ Moon hove the pudden at me on the bowsprit gub by gub, something cruel hard!’ Simon rubbed his hairy cheek.

‘“Nex’ time you bring me anything,” says Frankie, “you bring me cannon-shot an’ I’ll know what I’m getting.”

This is from “Simple Simon” in Rewards and Fairies.

Simon Cheyneys, ship-builder of Rye, has been telling of his young days sailing with Francis Drake to rescue refugees from the Spaniards across the Narrow Seas. Years later, during the sea-fight against the Armada along the English Channel, Simon does indeed bring cannon-shot to Drake, to help the English destroy the Spanish fleet.

Beginning a little to the right of the spinal column, I cut a huge demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far under his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I dared. Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching between the splines, I sawed through the silk-faced front on the left-hand side of the coat till the two cuts joined.

This is from “My Sunday at Home” in The Day’s Work.

Thinking he has taken poison, a doctor has administered a powerful emetic to a gigantic navvy on a railway platform. The navvy has been violently sick, and has seized the doctor by his overcoat in an iron grasp, threatening to sue him. Still feeling strange, the navvy falls asleep, and here, at the cost of an expensive coat, the doctor is escaping.

We corked the whole of his face. We filled his hair with meringue-cream till it looked like a white wig. To protect everything till it dried, a man in the Ordnance Department, who understood the work, luted a big blue paper cap from a cracker, with meringue-cream, low down on Jevon’s forehead.

This is from “A Friend’s Friend” in Plain Tales from the Hills.

Jevon has got drunk and behaved extremely offensively at a Ball. Here a group of young men are administering punishment.