No. 517: The winners
Trevor Grove reports: Competitors were in- vited to compose a piece of prose around ten given words, amongst them such implausible demoticisms as 'bang-up' and 'slug-begotten,' both of which, predictably, proved hideous stumbling blocks for the unwary. In Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities, the rowdy volume from which the given words were chosen, Robert Surtees's `bang-up' is slipped in with rather more aplomb: 'Lives there, we would ask, a a:. thoroughbred, prime, bang-up, slap-dash, break- neck, out-and-out artist, etc,' hough Captain Rochester at least used 'rib' in an approxima- tion of Surtees's original sense; five guineas to the good Captain:
What? Alone? Forsaken? In this only then I'll not emulate my Saviour. I'll have no women snivelling at my interment. Spawn of Adam's rib! I shall no more caress their serpents' bodies, full bang-up with vanities and deceits. Nor, drab bard I must now become, shall I write pretty songs for them. 1'11 twirl no more petticoats across the dancing Boor. Indeed, I shall forsake the whole beardless. slug-begotten race of them.
Hark ye! She was in very truth a foolish creature, who thought pizzicatos was a naughty word. not mourn for her but shall leave lamentations for lucubration. 111 to my study.
Farther still from Jorrocks's Eastcheap, Brian Allgar discovers a hitherto unknown and cosy scene from Wind in the WilOvs; three guineas : It was snowing, and the gradual interment of the outside world seemed to increase the warmth and comfort within.
'I say, Mole,' said the Water-Rat amiably, nudging his companion's rib. 'what a bang-up time we're having. I feel a poem coming over me.' The hopeful bard sat down and produced his pencil with a twirl.
'The trees, once beardless, hang with snow,' he began. But it was so pleasant just sitting there that his attention wandered.
`I must say, old chap.' he murmured sleepily, 'I thought an underground hole would be a damp, dismal, slug-begotten sort of place, but it isn't a bit—why, it's as cosy a nook as a chap could wish for.'
The Mole made no reply, and so they sat gazing into the fire, with only the distant strain,
of 'Hare the herald angels sing' and the gentle pizzicatos of falling snow to disturb their 114C11- b rations.
A special prize of one guinea goes to Hilary Temple, who has not been a previous prize- winner. No one identified the source.
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