The Summer of Sir Lancelot

the Beaulieu‘s Bespoke, ‘you‘d like me to take you down to London for a week or two? Just to see a few shops and shows and have a little fun? You must find it quite as dull here as Cinderella in that beastly kitchen. And I‘m afraid you won‘t have much time for gadding about once you start at St Swithin‘s.‘
    ‘But I don‘t find it dull here at all, Auntie.‘ Euphemia opened her big blue eyes a couple more stops. ‘Honestly, I don‘t. I sometimes wish I could stay with you for ever.‘
    You may be surprised to find a delicate blossom like Euphemia sprouting on such rugged ancestral timber. The daughter of Sir Lancelot‘s younger brother Jasper, who‘d settled out East and opened some of the most influential stomachs ever to be filled in Raffles Hotel, Singapore, she was a little blonde with a figure as slim as a bottle of hock, a laugh as gay as the splash of a fountain, and a smile which would have melted an abominable snowman. It had, in fact, managed to achieve a certain liquefaction of Sir Lancelot.
    ‘What the devil does that cadger Jasper think I am?‘ he‘d demanded, slamming down a letter on that same breakfast table three months before. ‘A cross between Little Nell‘s grandfather and the YWCA?‘
    ‘I expect Effie will be extremely nice,‘ Lady Spratt countered briskly. ‘She certainly looks it in our photograph.‘
    ‘Might I suggest that certain hormonal changes have possibly taken place since the age of five?‘
    Sir Lancelot glared at the letter. It appeared that Euphemia had suddenly declared in Singapore she wanted to uphold family tradition by training as a nurse at St Swithin‘s Hospital, and Mr Jasper Spratt, FRCS, had agreed only on condition that she solemnly promised to put herself in the strict moral guardianship of Uncle Lancelot. After all, Jasper had once been a student in the place himself. Much to the surprise of her family
    Euphemia had accepted the plan with enthusiasm, which was more than could be said for Uncle.
    ‘I know exactly what she‘ll be like. The same as all those other ghastly lank-haired adolescents hanging round coffee bars, doting on weedy young men in atrocious trousers playing the banjo, or whatever it is, and staying out till all hours. No wonder the Registrar-General‘s annual report these days reads like Lolita. Anyway she‘s bound to pinch all the bathwater,‘ Sir Lancelot ended briefly. ‘The whole project‘s out of the question.‘
    ‘We‘ll see,‘ said Lady Spratt.
    But that May morning, a month alter meeting Euphemia with his Rolls at London Airport, Sir Lancelot had to confess himself impressed with the child‘s qualities - her quietness, her serious-mindedness, her love of the country, her appetite for surgical reminiscence and gluttony for fishing stories. Odd, he felt, a bounder like Jasper should have produced such a daughter. The feller must have married into a decent set of genes. He bestowed on his niece across the breakfast table a look of approval wobbling on affection.
    ‘The early dew was sparkling on the lawn so,‘ Euphemia continued, reaching for the toast, ‘I wanted to take off my shoes and sing and dance.‘
    ‘You mustn‘t do that, my dear, you might get a chill,‘ advised Sir Lancelot, furling The Times and pushing back his chair. ‘Do you suppose that demobilized druid we have in the kitchen has prepared my sandwiches?‘ He dabbed the last speck of Beaulieu‘s Bespoke from his beard with a yellow silk handkerchief. ‘I shall be out on the river till dinner.‘
    ‘Lancelot! You know perfectly well the Vicar is coming to lunch.‘
    ‘Although it is extremely unlikely the Vicar will go to hell,‘ remarked Sir Lancelot affably, making for the door, ‘I will simply record that I should have no objection.‘
    An old-fashioned Englishman out for a day‘s fishing needs a good deal of equipment. Apart from such essentials as rods, lines, nets, and all those pretty flies, he requires chicken sandwiches, Stilton and Bath Olivers, a slice or two of fruit cake, bottled beer, Thermos of tea, the morning paper, pipe and tobacco, shooting-stick, anti-midge lotion, sunglasses, raincoat, hip-flask, and The Angling Letters of G E M Skues. All these supplies swung from various parts of Sir Lancelot as he majestically descended the front steps to a garden set for the opening of summer, with roses bursting at the seams, gladioli impatiently awaiting their cue, and the laburnum in the corner dripping on to the