CHAPTER 14
Fine Goings-OnIn the normal way Tonker slept late. Even in these, his late middle years, he was able to lie unmolested in an amiable torpor from midnight till noon. But on the morning of his party he awoke like a bird at a quarter to six and went down in his dressing-gown to open every outside door in the house. Then he put a record on the gramophone and went out to run up the Union Jack on the flagpole at the north end of the barn.
Five minutes later, Minnie, aroused by a gale which sent the curtains of the painted bed flapping about her, the Soldier’s Chorus, and a sense of fury, rose also, and with her Mother-Hubbard over her nightgown strode down to rescue the record, to shut the doors, and to run up the Stars and Stripes at the southern end of the same building.
An hour
