Hutchinson Heineman, 2026, 364 p including 2 p Author’s Note.

“‘We see the world once only,’ she said. ‘In childhood. The rest is remembering.’” So says Mrs Graveney, the headteacher of Witchelm, the school in which Philip Deval, having recently left the army after service in the Second World War and in the dying days of the Palestine Mandate, is to take up teaching. Farewell to Eden is the novelistic expression of protagonist Deval’s life, which before the war was a kind of aimless drifting through University and a relationship with Alice Western which is to end in tragedy and leave him reticent to expose himself to further possible grief.

At Witchelm he strikes up a companionable friendship with music teacher Frances Darwood, a woman with haunted memories of her own from recent times. In their conversations they eventually come to tell each other about their previous lives. The main body of the book, though, is concerned with Deval’s experiences in Palestine and its ramifications for his later life.

During the exercise of his duties Deval comes upon the aftermath of the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun and Faulks does not flinch from describing its gruesome detail. There are episodes of cloak and dagger in a kind of colloquy with the militants and a pervading sense of imminent danger. One of Deval’s army colleagues habitually refers to the Jewish activists as Bagels. I suspect – and indeed Faulks makes reference to it in his Author’s Note – any such word used would have been much more offensive.

Deval’s encounters with Arab Palestinians portray them – despite the pre-war Arab revolt – as unprepared for the adversity which would shortly befall them.

In one of his conversations Deval’s company chaplain reflects on the Jewish origins of Christianity. “‘Life would have been easier, certainly,’ said Matthew. ‘If He had come from nowhere. If He’d been untouched by previous gods and tribal wars. If He’d been less … specific. But we can’t question it.’

‘Can’t we?’ said Philip.

‘No. It’s too late.’”

That last sentence may also be a comment on the present situation in those troubled lands. Faulks has here examined the turbulence amid which the state of Israel was founded; the genesis of what is an enduring tragedy.

Pedant’s corner:- “in Hebrew Gethsemane meant ‘oil press’.” (Well, no. It means ‘oil press’ in English. In Hebrew it means Gethsemane,) “the lowest point on the earth’s crust” (in the text this is the Dead Sea, but there are many lower points in the earth’s crust than that. The Dead Sea is merely the lowest point on a continental surface.)

Gollancz, 2020, 260 p.

This novel charts the distanced relationship between Shaw, a man recovering from “a rough patch” and whose tetchy mother is in a care home, and Victoria Nyman – or Norman, Shaw initially can’t remember which – who inherits her own mother’s home in another town.

Then again, everything in this book is distanced, starting with Shaw. We are never given his first name, a fact which detaches him from the narrative and puts a barrier between him and us as readers, as though, like us, he is merely an observer of proceedings. This is of course, a deliberate choice on Harrison’s part, a pointer to oddness. Throughout the novel Shaw’s interactions with others are reserved, emotionally unengaged. His mother may be partly to blame; she had had a succession of relationships with unsuitable men and is dismissive towards Shaw.

Not that Victoria is much less detached. The pair’s communications are sparse, almost ad hoc, their relationship more off than on, her experiences too tinged with oddity.

By chance Shaw meets Tim Swann, who goes on to give him a job which takes him round the country. Tim’s sister, Annie S Swann, is a medium whom Shaw consults. Her name is so close to that of all but forgotten Scottish writer Annie S Swan that it is unlikely to be a coincidence – a thought reinforced by one of the book’s chapters being titled The Swanns’ Way, an obvious reference to Proust.

Victoria becomes friendly with a waitress named Pearl, with whom she goes swimming in a pool near to Victoria’s inherited house and it is with her that the book’s oddness creeps in as she simply disappears (though not drowned) while swimming on her own.

This is a world which is apparently normal but in which strange things happen at its margins and in which none of the characters ever appears wholly part of it.

A paragraph which perhaps sums it up goes – “Poor Shaw! Compelled to believe he doesn’t believe in anything, in case he unearths from himself the one belief – the one deep consolation he daren’t relinquish; that he was always one of us. So much of his attention bound up in the work of denial that what happens to him can never really be experienced, only stored, and interpreted later as symbolic. So marginally conscious that the endless return of the repressed is all he has to work with.”

Harrison’s prose is always measured and lucid.

Pedant’s corner:- sometimes there was no question mark when a question had appeared in dialogue, acquifers (aquifers.)

In The Sea of Fertility, Penguin, 1987, 196 p. Translated from the Japanese 天人五衰 (Tennin gosui) by Edward G Seidensticker. First published 1971.

In this conclusion of Mishima’s tetralogy, not long after which he committed seppuku, once again we find ourselves following Shigekuni Honda’s obsession with the reincarnation of his boyhood friend Kiyaoki, this time in 1970. Tōru Yasunaga is a signalman notifying the imminent arrival of ships to Shimizu harbour. He is an orphan and has a female acquaintance, Kinué, who, in order to come to terms with her lack of attractiveness, has convinced herself that she is beautiful.

One day Honda and his platonic companion Keiko visit the signal station. Honda recognises on Tōru the three moles he believes signify the reincarnation and resolves to adopt Tōru to try to protect him from the early deaths the three previous incarnations had suffered.

Tōru will eventually work this situation to his own advantage but it only reveals his own selfishness.

The evolution of modern Japan is tangential to this final instalment of the tetralogy but its background nevertheless colours the novel. That Tōru is a kind of negative impression of Kiyaoki perhaps reflects Mishima’s own assessment of his work and life and the direction Japan took over his lifetime.

When a minor character refers to “people who commit suicide to establish themselves,” illustrating it with an elaborate analogy, it may be a prefiguration of the author’s own intentions.

Pedant’s corner:- “a crematory” (usually a crematorium,) “the hoi polloi” (‘hoi’ already means ‘the’; it’s just ‘hoi polloi’.)

Harper Perennial, 2003, 301 p.

Presented as a memoir (of sorts,) this tells of the relationship in the early 1960s between Christa (Kit) Malone, a nascent US poet, and Russian refugee poet Innokenti Isayevich Falin.

Kit’s life has been peripatetic as her father flits from job to job (or post to post: there are hints he works for the government in some sort of secret capacity.) As a result, she is very close to her brother Ben, so much so that when he leaves home to join the army she is all but devastated. This leads her to an unwise decision to lose her virginity. Her resulting pregnancy would have been bad enough at the time for any young woman but her family is Catholic. The child though, when born, is severely incapacitated and dies. Hence Kit is enabled to go to college where she meets Falin and enrols in his class. Their rapport through poetry soon builds. She learns Russian and they begin to collaborate on translations of his work. She later makes her name as a translator of Falin’s poetry.

Part of this story is told as a kind of retrospective when she travels to post-communist Russia to a celebration of the 75^th anniversary of Falin’s birth, and of his life and poetry, in St Petersburg, 1993, where her main interlocutor is Gavriil Viktorovic Semyonov. Through him she gleans even more of the conditions under which Falin had lived before his exile.

Living in the Soviet Union taught you to be invisible, not to bring attention to yourself. Falin had begun life (or at least his memories began) as one of the besprizornye – ragamuffins/urchins, lost or orphaned children – which throughout its history Russia has thrown up in profusion. Gavriil Viktorovich tells her, “We were all besprizornye. The whole society. We were all torn away from common bonds that we had been born into. All had to rely on others, on those we found around us, yet never trust them.” Not, then, examples of New Man as Soviet doctrine had it, but self-preserving individuals. “All against all.” Falin had said something similar to her.

Semyonov reflects on the post-Soviet era. “In her dark time Russia was kept alive by the poets. Perhaps now in the new time” of biznesmeny and konsultante “they will pass …. cease to be souls, or persons, and become only books.”

The campus scenes here reminded me of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and, because of the Russian and poetry connections, there were resemblances to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

The background to them is the Kennedy Presidency and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kit has a sort of friendship with Jackie Young of the People’s Socialist League. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee march with their Hands off Cuba banners and encounter discontent.

On an occasion when Falin is away and Kit is looking after his house a man called Milton Bluhdorn intrudes on it. Falin it seems is suspected of being a plant (they didn’t let Pasternak out so why him?) and Kit is invited to spy on him. Instead, she tells Falin of the approach.

But most of their talk is of poetry. Falin says of poems, “You cannot translate. You can only make other poems.” He also contends that countries have greater and lesser angels. The lesser angel is all that the greater angel isn’t but sometimes prevails. It is left open to the reader to decide whether or not Falin and Kit are lesser angels of their countries.

While leaning into the ramifications of the Kennedy assassination and its associated conspiracy theories, The Translator is a work about the moral responsibilities of the individual and the operations of the agents of the state. But most of all about the importance of poetry, words, and personal relationships.

Pedant’s corner:- occasionally questions in dialogue are not followed by a question mark, “the Ukraine, the Crimea” (nowadays just Ukraine, Crimea.) “Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov” (in British transliteration, Viktorovic.)

Penguin, 2024, 249 p. Translated from the Japanese お探し物は図書室まで (O-sagashi mono wa toshoshitsu made, literally “Please go to the library for what you are looking for,”) POPLAR Publishing Company, 2020, by Alison Watts. Illustrations by Rohan Easson.

This book’s title is surely designed to appeal to book lovers. Yet, in a sense, it must be preaching to the converted. Book lovers will all have used libraries and, crucially, already read books and thus need no encouragement to pick one up.

There are five stories within, all with a similar trajectory. Each of the lead characters has a reason to visit the Hatori Community House situated by a local school and gets drawn to its library where the librarian, Sayuri Komachi, recommends books to them and at the same time proffers a gift of a felted toy from the many she spends her time making.

The viewpoint characters are:-

Tomaka, a sales assistant in womenswear at Eden, a Department Store.

Ryo, who works in accounts for a furniture manufacturer but yearns to start an antiques business.

Natsumi, a former magazine editor moved sideways to a less fulfilling role on having had a child.

Hiroya, a thirty-year-old NEET who has neglected his talent for drawing.

Masao, recently retired and feeling a lack of direction.

Unfortunately, this all involves a lot of repetition of information as each character relates the details of their first visit to the Community House in very similar terms. There are also some instances of the relaying of characters’ internal thoughts or reactions which are rendered far too colloquially thus breaking readers’ suspension of disbelief.

There is discussion of the content of the borrowed books (in one case it’s not borrowed, since it’s too heavy to carry far, but rather consulted,) publishing details of which are appended in the Bibliography.

Special pleading for the utility of reading occurs when one of the narrators tells us “Books belong to everybody: the creators, the sellers and the readers.” Similarly, Ms Komachi says to another, “Readers make their own personal connections to words, irrespective of the writer’s intentions, and each reader gains something unique.”

It’s all very easy to read and undemanding but somehow feels inconsequential.

Pedant’s corner:- Uses British spellings but has the occasional USianism – sidewalk, sneakers, schoolyard, some schoolchildren are said to be in third or fourth grade. Otherwise; “inside in my stockings” (either ‘in my stockings’ or ‘inside my stockings’,) “I did use to talk with him” (did used to.)

Doubleday, 2026, 193 p. Translated from the Japanese 木曜日にはココアを (Mokuyōbi ni wa kokoa, literally Thursday Cocoa,) Takarijamasha Inc, Tokyo, 2017, by E Madison Shimoda.

This is not so much a novel as a series of linked short pieces (calling them stories is not quite accurate) each with some sort of connection to the Marble Café in Tokyo.

The server in the café, who one day simply asked the owner for a job, has a yen for the woman who comes in on Thursday and always has a hot chocolate. The owner is known as Maestro, has a mole in the centre of his forehead and another business selling/promoting art.

After the first, each chapter then proceeds with one of the characters from the previous one carrying on with their own story. Every chapter has its own title and a (different) colour designation.

The scenes range as far as Sydney in Australia, though. In one of these a character tastes Vegemite and reflects it “looks sweet but is actually salty – isn’t that what life is like?”

Another character thinks “We’re all intertwined in each other’s lives without even knowing it” which corresponds a bit too much to what the structure of Hot Chocolate on Thursday is like.

An unusual feature of the publication is that at the top right-hand corner of each odd-numbered page is an illustration of a cup and what looks like a teapot (but may be supposed to contain hot chocolate) at first poised to pour but, as the chapters progress, pouring liquid into the cup until it is full and giving off condensed vapour. (I refuse to call this steam. Steam, pure steam, is a colourless gas, not white.)

The book has an addendum titled Matcha on Monday (月曜日の抹茶カフェ, Getsuyōbi no matcha kafe, literally Monday Matcha Café) on which the café, normally closed on a Monday, is open – but only to sell matcha.

Aoyama’s writing is fine enough but overall Hot Chocolate on Thursday feels a little inconsequential.

Pedant’s corner:- octopi (the English plural is ‘octopuses’, the Greek ‘octopodes’.)

Vintage, 2003, 301 p. Translated from the Japanese 羊をめぐる冒険 (Hitsuji o meguru bōken, literally An Adventure Concerning Sheep,) Kodansha Ltd, Tokyo, 1982, by Alfred Birnbaum.

This is a strange concoction. It starts off as a kind of boy (okay man) meets girl (ie woman) story where our unnamed divorced narrator notices a model’s ears in a photograph his advertising agency has used and develops a penchant for them. When they meet he discovers she habitually keeps her ears hidden except when modelling (or having sex.)

Then it morphs into a quasi-noir type tale when the agency publishes a pamphlet for a life insurance company containing a photograph of grazing sheep against a mountain background which attracts the attention of a representative of “The Boss,” a power in Japan’s political and economic circles. Our narrator is tasked with withdrawing the publication and then finding a distinctive sheep shown in the photograph on pain of his business being dissolved. A turn to the unusual occurs when the chauffeur taking him to a meeting with the Boss says he has a telephone hotline to God given him by his employer.

Along with his now girlfriend, whose ears have a semi-supernatural sensitivity, our narrator travels to Hokkaido to try to find the sheep. Hence the book’s title in English.

All this is linked in with his acquaintance with a character called the Rat whose whereabouts are unknown but with whom the narrator has held an intermittent correspondence. (I note from Murakami’s Wiki page that A Wild Sheep Chase is in fact the third in a trilogy featuring the Rat. Unfortunately, I have not read the previous two books.)

The novel becomes a travelogue, a part history of the area of Hokkaido where the distinctive sheep is to be found, and a fantasy of possession whereby sheep take up residence inside a person. (This once happened to the Boss.)

Along the way the narrator muses, “Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”

A crucial encounter with a hotel owner’s father known as the Sheep Professor, who once also had the sheep inside him, leads them to an isolated house in a backwater beyond even remote, where the narrator assumes the Rat has been living. Then there is the Sheep Man dressed in a sheep costume (an illustration of whom appears on its own page) who may or may not be the Rat.

If all this sounds as if it might be confusing it actually isn’t when reading. On the page it all makes sense – of a sort.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian. Otherwise; “which may have been reason why” (been the reason why,) “the herringbone lay of the oak floorboards” (the herringbone lie of.) Chapters starting with dialogue are missing the opening quotation mark (this may be publishing convention but I hate it,) “why she treated me special” (‘why she treated me as special’,) snowslide(s) (x 4. Has the translator never heard the word ‘avalanche’? Is ‘snowslide’ a USian usage?) “if worse comes to worse” (if the worst comes to the worst,) “the lay of the grass” (the lie of the grass.) “‘It is special sheep’” (a special sheep.) “Only the the cicadas” (has one ‘the’ too many,) pull-ring (x 4. USian for ring-pull I assume,) “the overture to the The Magnificent Seven” (the overture to The Magnificent Seven.) “October laid heavy on the town” (October lay heavy,) buildiing (building,) “the lay of the land” (it was not a song: ‘the lie of the land’,) “the rotary” (I assume USian. To me ‘rotary’ is an adjective, not a noun. The appropriate word for this piece of road architecture is ‘roundabout’,) “corrogated iron” (corrugated,) “the rest the wine” (the rest of the wine,) “the lay of the house” (the lie,) “the word ‘free will’” (‘free will’ is two words; the one word would be ‘freewill’.) “The cords come out of four holes” (the rest of the passage is in past tense; ‘the cords came out of’.)

Penguin, 1996, 254 p.

This evocation of the late 1960s and early 1970s is narrated from the perspective of her later life by Carmel McBain and charts the relationships between herself, her childhood companion Karina, and later school and college friend Julia(nne) Lipcott over those years.

Every weekday Carmel accompanied to school her close neighbour Karina, the kind of good girl other mothers held up as an example, but whose parents had a tragic background in the then relatively recent Second World War in Europe. Karina may not be quite what they think, though, as Carmel observed her hanging round with rough boys at the bus station.

Carmel’s mother, prompted by a teacher at Carmel’s school, became fixated on her daughter gaining a place at the Holy Redeemer, a school no-one from her neighbourhood has yet attended. However, Karina also sits the entrance exam – and sails through.

Carmel’s Catholic background is always a nagging influence. At the Holy Redeemer she imbibes the thought that “bodies are encumbrance, a necessary evil.” Of Bonfire Night, she tells us, “If you’re a Catholic you don’t burn Guy Fawkes; the Pope says you mustn’t.”

Most of the story, however, is set at Tonbridge Hall, the college the three girls attend after leaving the Holy Redeemer, and an institution plagued with dire, unappetising food. This is an intense environment where the young women converse about who is engaged, who is on the pill, or pregnant, or thinks they might be pregnant, or has just discovered that she isn’t pregnant. This aspect of the novel did remind me of the May of Teck Club in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. The climax of An Experiment in Love also bears some comparison with that book. Mantel is a much more lucid writer than Spark, though.

However, being of their time, most of the students are preparing for life with a husband.

Partway through the novel Carmel says this is a story about appetite – “in its many aspects and dimensions” and that women carry the faculty for love into later life. “Men will never understand it until till they stop confusing love with sex, which will be never.” Carmel tells us she loves multiple women, but not in a sexual sense.

The whole is infused with a forthright feminism. “There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.”

“When men decided women could be educated, they educated them on the male plan” (schools with mottoes and school songs, muddy team games, collars, ties) but always inferior. “Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it…… Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.”

The Secretary of State for Education visits the college – and the food suddenly becomes palatable. The lady “leant forward and smiled, and her hair moved with her, as if it were not just hair but a hat made of hair,” a feature not uncommon among women politicians at the time. But, “She turned her head in my direction; she opened her lips to speak, and shards of glass fell out.” No need to mention the Secretary’s name.

Carmel’s reaction to a southerner’s comment is waspish. “I wasn’t used to Londoners then. I’m still not. They talk so much. I always want to smash their jaws shut; I realize the reaction may be excessive.”

Mantel’s literary skill, which was manifested so magnificently in her Wolf Hall trilogy, is in evidence here, fully formed.

Pedant’s corner:- “thorn in Jesus’ crown” (Jesus’s,) “was now sewed with a name-tape” (was now sewn,) sunk (x 2, sank,) swum (swam.)

Everyman’s Library, 1991, 150 p, plus 22p Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury, 2 p Select Bibliography and 9 p Chronology. First published 1925.

I had had this on my tbr pile for years without ever getting round to it. I might still not have had it not been on both the Guardian’s list of 100 Best Novels, where it was no 11, and also in the readers’ list (16 [equal]).

It’s a bit of an odd experience to read a book held in such regard: especially if you’ve seen a film made from it (in my case the one starring Robert Redford.) In this instance it was also dispiriting. Few, if any, of the characters have any redeeming features.

Gatsby, born Jimmy Gatz, is blinded to just about all else – especially caution – by his obsession with Daisy Buchanan, who is herself narcissistic, superficial and, strange as that may seem given his bootlegging activities, actually unworthy of him. Her diffidence makes her more of an absence in the book than an active participant. Even her crucial contribution to the story, the driving of the car whose fatal encounter precipitates the denouement, occurs outwith the direct narrative. Her husband Tom is nothing but a bully, a racist and white supremacist, subscriber to the great replacement theory (yes in the 1920s,) who sees racial intermarriage as the end of civilisation and treats his mistress Myrtle Wilson with casual violence. Myrtle’s husband George is merely a catspaw.

Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker, and our narrator Nick Carraway’s sometime girlfriend (a relationship always somewhat tenuous,) seems to be present only for purposes of information dumping.

Nothing much is revealed of Carraway himself, a very un-USian protagonist in that he affects little in the story and only reacts to what is around him. (That last is not a criticism, by the way; they also serve.)

There is a curious statement in, “Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”

I note that a door marked, ‘The Swastika Holding Company’ reads now a little differently than it would have done in 1925.

I wouldn’t rate this anywhere near my top 100 reads. It may be it is as much – perhaps more – to be noted for its highlighting of the vacuousness and indifference bordering on callousness of the monied during what was called the Jazz Age as for any literary merit. But then the monied are vacuous and indifferent in any age, you only have to witness our own, where callousness seems endemic.

Sensitivity note: ‘kike’, ‘three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl’, ‘a small flat-nosed Jew’, ‘a lovely Jewess’.

Pedant’s corner:- “‘you’d of thought,’ ‘he’d of got me’ and ‘appendicitus’” (spoken by Mrs Wilson or her sister, so possibly an attempt to render a lack of education: ‘you’d’ve thought,’ he’d’ve got me,’ ‘appendicitis’,) “had reached a crescendo” (a crescendo is the rise, not its peak,) caravansary (caravanserai.)

Vintage, 1992, 236 p.

I suspect that Carter actually enjoyed writing this book, which fizzes with energy and sly humour and at times tips into magical realism. Its title is based on the old saw that a wise child knows its father. Narrated by Dora, one of the twin sister dance act known as the Chance Girls. She and twin (Leo)Nora are daughters, on the wrong side of the blanket, of theatrical great Melchior Hazard, who unfortunately did not acknowledge them as his. That burden was taken on, though, by his nomadic brother Peregrine.

The convoluted nature of the family relationships here – the girls were brought up by the woman they know as Grandma (even though she wasn’t) and told their mother died shortly after their birth in Grandma’s house – is further complicated by the fact that living with them is the disabled former wife of Melchior, Lady (in her own right) Atalanta Hazard, known to the now 75 year-old twins as Wheelchair.

There is a measure of smoke and mirrors to proceedings, reflecting theatrical illusion. The novel is steeped in theatrical and stage lore, with Shakespearian references abounding. A trip to Hollywood illustrates the excess of the early film industry with a climactic scene perhaps owing a little something to slapstick comedy. The contrast between Melchior’s status as a grand old man of legitimate theatre and the lower brow nature of the sisters’ dance career highlights the disparity between their own legal status and that of their half-sisters,  acknowledged by Melchior, born in wedlock, though possibly not sired by him.

At its core, though, is Dora’s longing to belong, her search for a figure to fill in for the father who disowned her.

Dora’s vice may be irritating to some what with all the theatrical allusions, irreverent asides and references to lost cultural staples.

But along the way she has some more serious thoughts. “Let’s not call it a tragedy. A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy. And war.”

Much later we have this exchange with her sister.

“‘It’s every woman’s tragedy,’ said Nora, ‘that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.’”

‘What’s every man’s tragedy, then?’ I wanted to know.

‘That he doesn’t, Oscar,’ she said.”

She also tells us that, in story telling, “If you get little details right, people will believe anything,” (true in life as well perhaps?) and vouchsafes that, “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”

This was Carter’s last novel, written after her diagnosis of lung cancer. In the circumstances it is something to be wondered at that, while touching on seriousness, overall it has such a consistent lightness of tone.

Pedant’s corner:- “she’s showed her all” (intended I’ve no doubt – the book’s background is show business after all – but it ought to be ‘shown’,) “to whit” (it’s ‘to wit’,) forbad (forbade,) “Nora said, he was young enough” (that comma alters the sense,) “Epps’ cocoa” (was that a proprietary brand. Whatever it ought to be ‘Epps’s’,) a musical revue called What You Will, later rendered variously as “What? You Will?”, “What! You Will?”, “What! You Will!” and “What You Will!”, “than sang” (then sang,) “oblivious of” (it’s oblivious to,) “legs akimbo” (how you can put your feet on your hips is beyond me,) slax (slacks, spelled so to indicate lack of care or attention,) “never forgave a grudge” (a malapropism for forgot?) “Peter Jones’ store” (Jones’s.) “Nora sunk in thought” (sank.)