The Cheeky Recruit (on See ya in Orstralya)
Ray Doughty, Sheffield
Right. So the lad walks into New Zealand House, gets looked up and down, gets told sheep farming is not for the likes of him, and rather than argue the toss he simply turns round and walks back out into the street. Then he slides ten quid across a desk at Australia House like a man ordering a pint and strolls off to the rest of his life. No agonising. No long dark night of the soul. Just a shrug and a signature.
What I want to know is whether he really was that unbothered at the time. Because I have a suspicion that twenty year old Peter was every bit as terrified as the rest of us would have been, and sixty year old Peter is the one telling it with his hands in his pockets. Either version is fine by me. If it is bravado, it is very good bravado. If it is true, then he had more nerve at twenty than I have managed in a lifetime of thinking things over.
Whichever it is, that is a superb opening move. Rejected by one country before breakfast and emigrating to another by teatime.
The Deadpan Cabbie Fan (on The Knowledge)
Terry Pointon, Dagenham
Never bought the moped. That is the detail that finished me off.
Fifty-six days to get eight hundred and forty square miles of London into his head, and the man is sat there with a map and a general air of optimism, like someone revising for an exam by staring calmly at the syllabus. No moped. No runs. Just vibes and a very good memory.
Speaking as somebody who once lost twenty minutes finding a multi storey car park he was already standing next to, I felt that in my soul. I did want to ask, though, and I ask it with great affection: did he actually pass first time? Because there is usually a failed it twice story, and if there is one here I think we have been robbed of it. If he genuinely walked it on the first attempt then I retract everything and would like to apologise to the man personally.
The Wide Eyed Traveller (on Bangkok and Pattaya)
Gemma Ellerby, Leeds
I was not prepared for this chapter and I do not think anybody could be.
One minute they are sitting down to dinner like a pair of choirboys, serviettes tucked in, best behaviour, table manners on full display. Roughly ninety seconds later the whole thing has come apart at the seams and Berni is bellowing Nah then across a restaurant with his shirt halfway off. There is no transition. There is no warning. There is only before and after.
It reads like a fever dream and I mean that as the highest possible praise. I had to put the book down and have a little sit.
My only question is whether Berni is a real man walking about somewhere with a completely different account of that evening. Because if he is, I would pay actual money for his version, and I suspect it would be shorter, ruder and would place the blame elsewhere entirely.
The One Who Went Quiet (on The Candle Lit Wedding)
Maureen Casey, Kilkenny
This one crept up on me, and I want to be honest about how it did it.
For most of the chapter it is exactly what you expect. Snow, incense, candles, and the groom quite definitely asleep through his own wedding. Very funny. Very him. I was reading it out loud to my husband.
And then at the bottom of the page there is a footnote. Twenty-two years. Together until he died. Six or seven words tucked underneath the joke, doing all the heavy lifting, and I sat there with a lump in my throat over a footnote of all things.
It made me wonder something. Would Cintia ever consider adding a paragraph here in her own voice? Not a foreword, not an afterword, just a few lines in this chapter where she is standing in it rather than being referred to. She is present throughout the book but she is never quite allowed to speak, and this feels like the one page that was always going to be half hers.
The Nosy Detective (on Meeting Madam Charlie)
Nina Fairweather, Bristol
Hang on. HANG ON. Who on earth is Edith Cutlacks, and why does everybody in this scene appear to know her except me?
Charlie crosses a nightclub floor in Adelaide, of all the places on this earth, walks straight up to him and uses his name before he has said a word. And that is it. That is the hinge. A whole marriage comes off its runners in the space of two paragraphs and we are not given so much as a hint of an explanation, we are simply expected to keep up.
I have read a great many I met someone and everything changed scenes, and most of them take a chapter and a half to do less than this one does in half a page. My compliments to whoever decided not to explain it. Although I would like it noted, formally and for the record, that I am still thinking about Edith.
