Crack in the Teacup by Michael Gilbert

I mentioned in a previous blog that this book is a rip snorter. It was published in 1966 and we see the influence of how the nastiness of society can be discussed in the 1960s in a way that would never fly in the 1930s: not only do we have a homosexual teacher (deeply closeted) being overly friendly with young men (I think around 16 and 17 years old) but the young men are so savvy to this that they (it is hinted at) tolerate sex acts so they can blackmail the men for "dosh". These boys think the whole situation is very funny and enjoy watching the men squirm as they realize how much they have to lose if their predilections become public. Very nasty. The basic theme in the story is that a very old and small seaside town is being squeezed dry by developers who want to attract London money. It seems that Londoners no longer feel obligated to live where they work and like the idea of moving their nuclear families to this town which they assume is crime free--so long as the town is interesting enough to keep them amused all the time (hence the need for clubs with bars and racketball courts and movie theaters, restaurants, a "Pleasure Dome" (which sounds horrible and seems to be a place where little kids hang out and spend loads of money on bumper cars, pinball machines and junk food during the day, then teens cluster in dark corners to make out and push some envelopes in the eveing, and then after 10 pm, the older and seedier crowd arrive for betting and drug dealing) all downtown, and loads and loads of new houses that are eating up farm land) while the fathers spend all their non-working hours traveling to and from The Big City. The paradox, of course, is that with all that new money comes all sorts of opportunities for crime, from teens stealing and smashing stuff to beating old people up, to the local council working in cahoots with corrupt developers who falsely assign low rates of value to coastel land and farmland that they own through shell corporations that have no public names attached so they can then sell that same land to developers at inflated prices who turn around and sell the land again to home buyers once shoddy homes have been built on them!  A nice deal for everyone all round except those with tenancy on the land (and now I know what that means) and those that own land on the other side of the railroad tracks that want to make deals with their land with a different set of developers. And into all this we have our hero, Anthony, who is a young lawyer who just moved here to help take over his father's law partnership because his father just had an "attack". Anthony tells his friends who are still plugging away in London (but only until they have children and then they'll move to some other idealic small town on some other seaside), that he is going to help out until either his father is back on his feet or until he can find someone else to take over, and then he'll get back to London where he can do REAL lawyering. Yeah, sure.

Next thing he knows, Anthony is seeing evidence of corruption all over the place, making enemies everywhere he turns, being beaten up on trains, and--worse of all--bullied by his (extremely attractive he suddenly notices) secretary, Ann, who has no qualms with asking her secretary pals to steal their bosses secret files so she and Anthony can take a gander to find out exactly who owns what and who.  Ann wants to burn the whole place to the ground, rooting out the corruption roto and branch.  Anthony, who just wants a quiet anonymous lifem finds his ethical standards slowly weakening once he realizes that perhaps Ann is correct and the right does outweigh the good.  I won't get into the details of this land grab story as it's all too familiar and depressing, but this novel has everything in it to make it an excellent read: a cast of interesting and varied characters who are all portrayed very well (with with humor or nastiness) and danger and, of course, romance.  

Garden Update

 Out of nowhere appeared this sunflower.  I had purchased a very large bag of sunflower seed and tossed them about in March to help the birds make it through a surprise cold snap (after a ridiculous heat wave in February) and, among a million-odd seeds this is the only one that turned into anything.  There is a bumble bee fast asleep in the flower.  This was about 6 pm and I was doing my usual evening rounds, checking on things, trying to find all the damage one ground hog can do, and that bee was there, not moving, the whole time I was outside.  I had read something about bees eating so much they get too fat and dozy to fly home at the end of a day's work.  I didn't believe it at the time but it seems that that is what happened here.

Here is another extremely active bee, flitting about on the bee balms which is just about done. So not all bees get dozy:

Film review: Laughter in Paradise (1951)

This would make a fine triple-bill of sillier Sim performances with The Happiest Days of Your Life and The Green Man.  While it's probably the weakest of the three, and Sim is a little miscast, it's still very solid entertainment, with a well-constructed plot, stylish direction and great performances.

The basic plot is very simple: infamous practical joker (we see him on his deathbed setting his nurse's newspaper on fire before the lighter falls from his lifeless fingers) Henry Russell divides his fortune in four pieces of  £50,000 each (in 1951 money!) to four relatives, conditional on them (a) not contesting the will, and (b) performing certain tasks that each of them (with one exception) will find uniquely unpleasant.  Sim plays mild-mannered ex-Colonel Deniston Russell, who is engaged to the always-reliable Joyce Grenfell (who is still in the armed forces, and whose father is a judge who disapproves of Deniston), but hides a secret that he is a best-selling author of numerous pot-boilers under various pseudonyms.  His adoring secretary (played by Eleanor Summerfield, 

who is very winning but doesn't seem to have done much of note other than this film (and its panned re-make)) thinks they're (and he is) wonderful, but he is ashamed enough that he won't reveal his secret to his fiancee, and on hearing of his cousin's death, believes that now he will have the money to devote his life to serious writing.  This snobbery and fear of what people will think is targeted in the will, where his task is to get arrested and serve no fewer than 28 days in prison.  (This will mean postponing the wedding again, when the engagement has already been going on for ten years, and to make matters worse, he is forbidden from talking about the will until the task is complete.)

The next biggest part, and the most unexpectedly moving performance, is Henry's sister Agnes, played by Fay Compton.  She is a bitter spinster (we find out why later) who is cruel to her one young maid, 

so of course her task is to become a maid for a "middle class" family and not get fired for 28 days.  The family that hires her consists of a lovely young woman and her hypochondriac Scrooge-like father, played by the wonderful John Laurie, in whom Agnes certainly meets her match.  On the first night she is cooking him steak for dinner, and while he calls her up the stairs for the umpteenth time, the family dog scarfs the food, causing John Laurie to fire her.  She begs him not to and even offers $1,000 if he doesn't, which both alarms him and piques his interest enough so that he hires a detective to follow her around.  What he doesn't plan on is the handsome young detective and his daughter falling in love.

Next we have George Cole as Herbert, 

who on this performance seems to have been the model for Michael Crawford's Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em role, as he, a humble bank clerk, is severely lacking in, as his cousin says, "push."  His task is to burst into his manager's office with a mask and a toy gun and hold him up.  As he is completely petrified of said manager, who regards him as an utter fool, this requires some girding of loins.  (Deniston offers him one of his books about a bank job to give him pointers.)

Finally, there is the Terry-Thomas-like (alas, not the actual Terry-Thomas, but Guy Middleton) utter cad, predictably named Simon.  His task is to marry the very first woman he meets, as he is a perpetually broke playboy who never maintains relationships.  He thinks he's got the best task of the lot, and has no compunction at breaking the rules (the first person he talks to is a cigarette girl whom he has no intention of marrying, played by Audrey Hepburn, in presumably her first role), 

waiting to find a woman who looks wealthy enough to make it worthwhile.  He runs into one such while on the way to spend some time on his boat, because news of his good fortune has leaked out and he is being besieged by gold-diggers.  She has broken down on the way to visit her brother at Eton, and trying to avoid the man her rich uncle wants to set her up with.

We cut between the various stories, and there are twists and turns each one of which you will be able to see coming, 

but none-the-less, you are carried along very pleasantly, especially by Deniston's story.  Everyone learns a lesson, and just about everyone is better off for it.  And Fay Compton is a revelation in a role that could very easily have been trite or maudlin in the hands of a lessor actor.