Notes on the stories
BY KATE MACDONALD
1 The Weakening Point (1916)
Georgian: of a temperament from the monarchs of the eighteenth century, a generation of so earlier.
mésalliance: a marriage between unequals, to an unsuitable person in terms of (lack of) wealth, class, or health.
Downs: the South Downs, a range of low hills in the south of England.
Park: not a public park but the private lands belonging to the estate, laid out for pleasure rather than agricultural production.
stud groom: one who works in the stables where racehorses are bred and trained.
hangers: slopes of beech or oak forests.
mullioned: old form of stone window-frames where the small glass panes are separated by stone uprights.
tunic days: before little Victorian boys were promoted to breeches or trousers, presumably before toilet-training had been achieved, they wore easier garments to clean, like a simple tunic and drawers.
bays: matched brown horses to draw the carriage.
one great day: 4 June is an annual celebration of Eton College, so if Bond had left school before then he would have three weeks to get past the dream.
Sandhurst: the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, a small town in the south of England, where the British Army’s officers are trained.
funked: was unable to complete a riding exercise due to a failure of nerve, a public humiliation.
briar: a Mediterranean and North African wood most commonly used to make tobacco pipes since it is highly resistant to fire.
Michaelmas term: the first term in the university year, beginning at Cambridge on or about 1 October.
pee-wits: lapwings or crested plovers, with distinctive black and white feathers that make dramatic flights low over the fields.
warehouse clerk: the fact that his best friend’s sister has taken this job accentuates most clearly the different class positions of Challice and Patterson, since the women in Challice’s class do not need to work.
high tea: another class indicator (also a regional one), since the middle and lower classes would have served high tea – a large meal of a hot cooked course followed by bread and butter and cakes – as their meal at the end of the day, whereas the English upper classes would have a formal dinner of several courses later in the evening.
baccy: slang for tobacco, for pipes or roll-up cigarettes. Men of Challice’s class would buy their cigarettes ready-made, and would be less likely to smoke a pipe.
first floor front: traditionally the largest and most expensive bedroom for hire in a boarding house, which may once have been a drawing-room when the house had been occupied by a single family.
morphia: now best-known as powerful pain relief, had been used also as a narcotic, similar in strength to heroin.
sent down: because Challice left Cambridge without permission, and gave no excuse, he was sent down, permanently ejected from his studies and privileges as a Member of the University.
Eternity is now: from the autobiography of the English nature writer Richard Jefferies, The Story of my Heart (1883).
Wherein one soul: from the Koran, Aya al-Baqarah (The Cow), 2.48.
contriving: the girls would have saved every penny they could to buy the right materials to make the right clothes so as not to shame their brother among the grand Challice family. And this would have taken money they would also have needed for winter clothes.
Nightmare Life in Death: a character in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), who wins the dice game with Death for the sailors’ souls.
tiny red marks: possibly marks made by repeated injections of drugs.
Childe Roland: the wandering knight from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ (1855).
chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof: from II Kings 2.12, the cry of wonder and sorrow from Elisha when the prophet Elijah is taken up to Heaven by a chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire.
a meet and hunt breakfast: the local gentry would meet to hunt foxes on horseback with hounds, starting at Challice Court, where they would have a celebratory breakfast taken on horseback with great hubbub and sociability.
2 The Country-Side (1917)
the two sons of Rizpah and the five sons of Michal: these men were killed by David to appease the Gibeonites, but Rizpah watched over their bodies for five months, keeping scavenging birds and animals away, until David relented and had the bodies buried with the bones of their father Saul. See 2 Samuel 21.
Tammuz or Adonis: Tammuz is an early form of the young male lover of the Babylonian mother goddess Ishtar, whom the Greeks transformed into Adonis.
won his blue: he had played rugby (rugby football is what his class would have played, rather than soccer) for his college at Oxford.
seignorial rights: usually this means the ‘right’ of the lord of the manor to sleep with any woman living on his land if he chose to; it also covers rights to a share of crops and other produce grown on the land. In this context, it suggests an unthinking expectation and sense of entitlement.
coverts: bushy areas where game birds can hide.
New Cut: a road that ran between Lambeth and Southwark in south London, two of the poorest slum districts.
to have gone wrong: to have got pregnant with no prospect of marriage.
Madeira: a fortified wine like a sweet sherry, with a much higher alcohol content than beer.
pepper-and-salt: a light speckled tweed, suitable for shooting in as it would be less visible.
St Paul: in 1 Timothy 5:23, St Paul writes ‘Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for your stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities.’
waxed whiter: grew whiter, in both senses of enlarging and increasing in intensity.
Honiton: thread lace handmade in the Devon village of Honiton, which was popularized after its lavish use on Queen Victoria’s wedding dress.
shambles: traditional name for a slaughterhouse.
uncovered: women habitually wore hats in public in this period, so for a woman to not be wearing a hat suggested an intimacy associated with the private rooms of a house, or a state of undress, or poverty.
Did she put her nose out of doors: If she put her nose out of doors.
slumikin’; slummocking, slang for women with lazy habits and no domestic training.
dursn’t: dares not.
’buses: the story is set in a period when the omnibus was being abbreviated to ’bus (and later bus).
Primrose League: an association to support the Conservative Party.
mesen: myself.
whose talk is of oxen: from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).
super: supernumary part, a part in a stage play with no lines, played by the least experienced actor.
got her mouth: she wasn’t secretly drinking an illicit share of the beer.
ulster: a long belted overcoat.
tally-hoing: shouting the fox-hunting call of ‘Tally-ho!’
3 The Vortex
horse-leech: from Proverbs 30.15.
domestic: servant.
4 Hodge
verger: a church officer in charge of the fabric of the church building.
waders: wading birds.
jangling keys: its seed-pods.
leaping-pole: a pole used for vaulting over streams or drainage ditches, essential for getting about a semi-flooded marshy area such as the Somerset Levels. A light person can travel as far and as quickly as a stronger but heavier person.
pent-house: a roof ridge with a downward slope in one direction.
Java: modern Indonesia. Bones from an individual later identified as Homo erectus were found there in 1892.
Heidelberg: the first bones from an individual of Homo heidelbergensis were found in Heidelberg in 1907.
Pitcairn thing: Hector may have been muddled with the names, as the Piltdown Man ‘discovery’ took place in 1912 (and was not revealed as a hoax until 1953, long after this story was published). There are no known ‘Pitcairn man’ discoveries.
frail: the basket.
Sir Ray Lankester: eminent British evolutionary biologist and Director of the Natural History Museum.
fugging: an unaired room has an atmosphere of ‘fug’.
lees: the bitter particles that remain at the bottom of a bottle of wine, the unusable remainder.
5 The Fountain
change their underwear: before central heating, it was customary to wear a set of neck-to-ankle undergarments in the cold months.
wood-anenome: one of the first spring flowers, with a single white or pink flower on a slender stem.
ilex: a species of holly, casting a deep shadow.
lifted out the trays: trunks contain stacking trays to store clothes efficiently with little creasing.
motor-bonnet: in the early days of cars which had no closed compartments and drove on largely unmade roads, women passengers needed to protect their hair and clothes from the dust with special all-enveloping bonnets and dustcoats.
a Saturday to Monday: a country-house visit over what would later be called the weekend.
Daphne: a naiad from Greek myth, pursued by Apollo, and is turned into a laurel tree to escape his unwanted attentions.
Peri: from Persian mythology, spirits who have been barred from entering Paradise until they have atoned for their wickedness.
people of her stamp: Mrs Brice is a servant, and would need encouragement to voice her opinions to the class that employs her.
stavanging: similar to the Scots ‘stravaiging’, to roam freely.
paddy: a fit of temper.
‘The Low-backed Car’: a nineteenth-century ballad by Samuel Lover.
6 ‘Luz’
thick yellow fog: London’s fogs were notorious, caused by particulates from burning coal, only disappearing after the passing of the Clean Air Act in 1956.
Parson’s Green: an area in the next borough, perhaps three miles away at most.
chevaux de frise: rows of sharp poles or spikes angled in the ground as a barrier to oncomers.
Hunter’s Grove: no longer in existence in central London, if it ever was.
Church St… Oakley St: they are walking south, down Old Church Street from the Brompton Road, towards the river and then onto the Albert Bridge.
Strophe and antistrophe: formal statement and response by the Chorus in classical Greek drama. The speaker is well educated.
farthing dip: the cheapest of candle stubs, made by dipping a wick into melted tallow.
panacea: a cure-all.
B –: a place in France where the narrator did her nursing, probably Béthune.
made sure: was sure.
7 The Landlady
The Paragon: this oval square may be based on The Paragon in Blackheath, now south-east London, which is half of an oval, and somewhere from which residents would have gone to London, rather than living in it. Also convenient for Woolwich, where Denis worked.
silk rep: a furnishing fabric with a ribbed surface for durability.
Woolwich: location of the Royal Military Academy, the Royal Artillery and the Royal Arsenal, although it doesn’t seem as if Denis is a serving military officer.
8 Four Wallpapers
the island: the story is set in Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic. It was colonised by the Spanish and has a hot, dry climate suitable for invalids.
polonaise: a women’s fashion adapted in the nineteenth century from an eighteenth-century mode, of a tailored overdress worn tucked and looped up over an elaborate underskirt.
charing: cleaning houses.
ciggara: Spanish, a cicada, large flying insect with a penetrating and incessant call.
ceindre: possibly a variant form of cendres, ashes, for an ash-blonde hair colour.
9 The Villa
Bay of Gravosa: a bay in the Adriatic outside Dubrovnik, Croatia, now called Gruž.
Dalmatia: historically one of the regions of Croatia, now part of the modern state of Croatia.
balancing her bustle: while the bustle stuck out behind her at the top of the skirt, Daisy’s profile would have been balanced with an elaborate piled and puffed hairstyle.
post-war days: the narrator is writing in the 1920s.
Dolly Varden hat: part of an 1870s women’s fashion for the modes of the 1770s, the hat was a flat oval of straw worn tipped over the eyes, trimmed with flowers to suggest country simplicity.
Leghorn hat: another eighteen-century fashion adapted by later nineteenth-century women. This is a flat straw hat with a shallow crown, with the brim slightly tilted, popularised by the self-portrait by Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun (1782).