Meg has to go and help her sister Isabel who is on holiday in a seaside resort. Indeed, their half-sister Mildred is in a puff. She has rented a cottage that is the one where her husband, Uncle Paul, was arrested for the murder of his previous wife… and Mildred is sure he is back for revenge. Meg tries to stay calm between Mildred and Isabel, but the paranoia catches everyone, including Meg who sees everywhere clues that Uncle Paul is back. A nightmare holiday told in a very British way, full of humour and self-depreciation. A fantastic little novel.
“Rubbish !”, she snapped. “A woman can discipline a boy just as well as a man can. In my day, widows were doing it by the thousand, and with most creditable results. And with no help from the Welfare State, either. Whenever I hear that a child is going to the bad because he hasn’t got a father, I always ask the same question: Why hasn’t he got a father? In nine cases out of ten, it’s not that the father is dead, it’s that he’s gone off somewhere. Gone off because his wife doesn’t know how to hold him. It stands to reason that the kind of woman who doesn’t know how to keep a man contented and under control won’t know how to keep a child contented and under control either. To say that a broken home causes a child to go astray is like saying that a broken teapot causes a broken plate. Really it’s just that the same housemaid has dropped both of them.”
Listened to as an audiobook