[John Whitworth]

Competition
SATURDAY, 16TH JULY 2011
Lucy Vickery presents this week's Competition

In Competition No. 2704 you were invited to submit extracts from a less than happy literary collaboration between male and female contemporaries where the joints clearly show. D.A. Prince (Orwell/Wodehouse) and Bill Greenwell (D.H. Lawrence/Pam Ayres) impressed but strayed from the brief. The winners, in a strong field, are printed below and earn £25 each. Adrian Fry nabs £30.

Full dim of day, a barn, dimmer yet. Within, figures idle.
‘’S not my fault it’s such a bloomin’ miserable day,’ William told his Outlaws.
In the course of that interminable morning, they’d played at being cowboys, soldiers, gladiators and spies. Played at being, found it wanting, yet somehow still were. They had tried cards and marbles, but both had caused only quarrelsome disputation of the rules.
‘You don’t know what to play next, do you, William?’ said Violet-Elizabeth Bott, slyly.
‘Actually, I do,’ said a flustered William, feeling all Outlaw eyes upon him. ‘We’re goin’ to play a waitin’ game.’
Understanding dawned, faltered, failed.
‘Well,’ William improvised desperately. ‘You has to wait until somethin’ happens. When it does, you sort of shout out and you win that round.’
Douglas, unimpressed, asked ‘What if nothing happens?’
A stymied William paused, during which time nothing happened, twice.
‘Then,’ said Violet-Elizabeth, simultaneously humiliating and saving William, ‘I’ll thcream and thcream until I’m thick!’
Adrian Fry (Richmal Crompton/Samuel Beckett)

Some five and thirty years ago, before the writer was fairly into breeches, a young woman could be seen making her way along the lane to Netheredge Hall, humming as she went.
Yet her heart was heavy; plucked from her modest home to be housekeeper to her dissolute cousin Peregrine, she dwelt with foreboding on the unknown future.
Nonetheless, was there not a spark in her eye, a spring in her step? Was this not as much an adventure as a duty? For we may depend upon it, nothing lightens a young woman’s spirits so much as a libertine to be reformed. And was she not already aware of the powers vouchsafed to her in a shapely bosom, a well-turned ankle?
She shuddered at the sinful thought and drew her cloak around the more tightly. For before here rose Netheredge Hall, forbidding as a huge outcrop of millstone grit.
Noel Petty (Thackeray/Charlotte Brontë)

‘And now to the question of the Ring,’ said Elrond, the Elven King, gazing around at the Fellowship — wizard, elf, dwarf, hobbits, the two tall men, and the little white-haired old lady sitting knitting. ‘Ah,’ coughed Boromir, ‘this is my Aunt Jane. She insisted on a weekend invitation.’ She looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the ring. You know, it reminds me of old Hetty Orcstrangler, back in St Mary Mirkwood. Convinced her lorgnette had been stolen, but it was tucked down her jumper.’ She stood up suddenly and pointed at Frodo. ‘Just like that hobbit fiddling with the string round his neck. I think you’ll find your ring there!’ Elrond bowed. ‘Great honour to the Ancient Beldames of Mirkwood,’ he declared. But then his regal, even professorial, patience faltered. ‘Only this time we already KNOW where the bloody thing is! The problem is how to get shot of it!
Brian Murdoch (J.R.R. Tolkien/Agatha Christie)

He said, ‘We will call the lecture “A Clean, Well-Lighted Room of One’s Own”.’ That is a good title. It is an honest title.’
‘So far as I am concerned’, she replied, ‘the question of what title we shall give to the lecture remains unresolved. Indeed, the issue of whether any lecture, or its title, can be entirely honest may be too perplexing to admit of resolution. When dealing with material that is controversial — and the material of this lecture assuredly is that — one can hope only to introduce the audience to the assumptions, the predispositions, the peculiarities that underlie the speaker’s thinking.’
His hand seized the doorknob and turned it. ‘I am going out for a drink’, he said. ‘It will be a good drink, an honest drink. I hope this room will be cleaner when I come back. And I hope the light will be better.’
Chris O’Carroll (Hemingway and Virginia Woolf)

We should say ‘welcome’ to the Spring,
With green leaves everywhere
And pretty flowers flourishing
And zephyrs in the air.

Yet underneath the warming ground
The putrid corpses grow;
A sterile harvest, they abound,
Incontinent as snow.

The world is once again alive,
And gives us cause to bless
Creation’s gifts that let us thrive
In love and happiness.

In vacant lots grimalkins creep
With hunger in their eyes,
While Sweeney dreams in swinish sleep
Of Grishkin’s naked thighs.
Basil Ransome-Davies (Patience Strong/T.S. Eliot)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee with obstreperous power. That’s one!
And here’s another: in that noble phrase
Of Plato’s ‘’Cause one must!’ (Who reads must run,
My love.) That’s two. I love thee with the passion
Of nuns who kneel before the living Lord.
Then, zooks! that’s three. And in my bookish fashion
I love thee, as a favourite tome that’s pored
On hour by hour t’extract its depth of meaning;
I love thee with a kind of mystic grace
Much like a ewe who o’er her lamb is keening;
I love thy verse, thy dog, thy gait, thy face.
I love thee deeply with no sense of fear.
The moon’s adaze! and I’ve lost count, my dear.
Gerard Benson (Elizabeth Barrett Browning/Robert Browning)