By Kingsley Amis
In his send-up of the educational global, the writer poked enjoyable on the British lifestyle, and gave post-war fiction a brand new and enduring determine to chuckle at.
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All that C20 trash. ’ Almost pedantically, she added: ‘They’re not really bombs - they’re acoustic provocations. Like the thunderflashes your friends let off at Olympia. Though once I did make a real bomb. Years ago . ’ ‘It killed someone. ’ ‘For the Ministry of Defence? SAS? ’ ‘Defence, in a way. I was defending my father. After my mother died he met this awful woman. He hated her, but he was under her thumb. A real alcoholic, who wanted me to just fade away. ’ ‘Using household ingredients, off the supermarket shelves, and my father went to the pub on Sunday lunchtimes; s he’d come back thick with drink, huge bladder ready to burst.
Kay’s locked the manager in his office. ’ An anxious male face peered through the glass door. He was clearly appalled by the hostile women jeering at him, a fearsome sight that struck at all the certainties of estate management. Kay produced a set of keys, which she waved at him and then dangled in front of the policemen. When they moved in, threatening to arrest her, she flung the keys over their heads. Hands on hips, she laughed good-naturedly as they were snatched from the air and tossed around the crowd.
You’ll be the David Attenborough of the suburbs Pleased that she remembered me, I walked along the King’s Road and turned left into a small riot. A police car was drawn up by the gatehouse, light flashing and radio squawking to itself. A crowd of more than a hundred residents were packed around the estate office. Most were women in weekend wear, freed from the tailored suits they wore in their surgeries and executive corridors. Their children were with them, faces lit by the sight of their mothers angry with someone other than themselves.