The Dead Man's Penny by V E H Masters

 Writing books can be quite a lonely business. In the past few years, post COVID, I've occasionally taken a table at Fairs, along with fellow historical fiction author Margaret Skea, to sell my books and chat to readers, or potential readers – and to other stall holders.

 Recently I found myself at an Antiques Fair – my books are historical fiction so I thought it was roughly a fit to sell them there – and grew curious about some of the memorabilia the neighbouring stall holder was selling.

One particular display drew my attention. 'It's a Dead Man's Penny,' said Neil Watson, the stall holder,  and went on to explain the sad story associated with it.

The official name for the Dead Man's Penny, also known as the Widow's Penny, was the Memorial Plaque. Cast from bronze it was sent to the next of kin of everyone who died serving overseas with the British Empire forces in WWI, along with a scroll and a message from the king. 

This plaque came into being as a way to give the family something tangible in memory of their loved ones. A competition was set up in 1917 and the winning design, by Edward Carter Preston, was chosen from more than 800 entries. Almost inevitably it includes Britannia and a lion although the significance of the dolphins is lost on me and as for the olive branch, which Britannia is extending… perhaps that is a prayer for the future.

In all 1.33 million were sent out, of which 600 were in memory of women who died in service during WW1.

The Dead Man's Penny which I saw was particularly poignant since it came with pictures, medals and the letter notifying his mother of the lad's death. His name was William Towers, which was inscribed on the plaque. None of the pennies had the rank included since it was considered that no life lost was more or less important than another. (The cynic in me also wondered if it saved on the costs to limit engraving.)

William, a soldier in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, was only eighteen years old when he died in April 1918. He had been at the front for four months. The collection associated with William's Dead Man's Penny is for sale because his family line has died out – which likely would not have happened had he survived.

I'm always drawn to war memorials. Here's the one in the very small village where I used to live. There are two things of significance for me about it. Firstly the far greater numbers who died in WW1 as opposed to WW2 and secondly the numbers sharing a surname – which likely meant brothers, father and son, or cousins gone from the same family. I cannot even begin to imagine the grief.

Proportionately Scotland lost more men in WW1 than any other country fighting as part of the British Empire. I've always been curious why.

Field Marshall Douglas Haig, who was in command on the Western Front from 1915 onwards, believed the bravado and tenacity of his Scottish regiments could win the war for him. A Scot himself from Edinburgh, whose family owned the successful whisky distillers, he had little patience for trench warfare and wanted to push through. In the frequent assaults it was often his 'favoured' Scottish regiments that were sent out first. Lauded as a hero at the end of the war this perspective changed in the 1960s when his war record was re-examined and he was given the epithet Butcher Haig.

My grandfather fought on the Western Front from 1915 onwards. On the single occasion as a child when I persuaded him to speak of his war experiences, he told me that he heard a bullet whistle past his ear at the battle of the Somme. Miraculously he survived three years of war uninjured – else I wouldn't be here!

References:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/first-world-war-next-of-kin-plaque

https://www.thenational.scot/news/17218645.ww1-victory-came-heavy-cost-scotland

V E H Masters is the author of four historical fiction novels following the adventures of the Seton Family as they navigate their way through the perils of 16th century Europe. She is the winner of the Barbara Hammond Trophy and her books are regularly on the Amazon Bestseller lists. She lives in the Scottish Borders.

You can find out more at https://vehmasters.com/

Book Links:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B096SG372X

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B096SG372X

The Ten Best Witch Historical Fiction Novels – by Anna Mazzola

Witches are, in the perhaps unfortunate words of Grazia magazine, ‘hot right now’, both on screen and in books. Stacey Halls’ The Familiars is spending its third week in The Times bestselling fiction list, Laura Bates’ YA debut, The Burning, is making waves, and A Discovery of Witches is now an international bestseller and a TV series.

Several other recent novels feature witchcraft including Caroline Lea’s superb The Glass Girl (set against the backdrop of the 17th-century Icelandic witch trials) and E.C. Fremantle’s brilliant thriller The Poison Bed. “‘Witch,” says one of her characters. “That’s what happens to women who don’t do as they’re told.”  Each novel uses witchcraft to highlight the misogyny and fear of women’s sexuality that remain relevant today, together with the terrible power of false accusations. As Willow Winsham says in her fascinating book Accused: British Witches Throughout History, ‘if anyone could be a witch, then literally everyone was suspect.’

A coven of other witch books are due out in the coming months including Katie Lowe’s haunting debut, The Furies, Carla by Laura Legge, Her Kind by Niamh Boyce, Remember Tomorrow by Amanda Saint and Witchery by Juliet Diaz, which will explain ‘how to connect with the power of your inner witch’. There is, it seems, something potent in the air.

Here, in no particular order, I list ten of my favourite witch-based historical novels, followed by several others that have been strongly recommended.

1. Corrag, Susan Fletcher 

It is 1692 and Corrag, a wild young girl from the mountains of Scotland, has been condemned to death for her role in the Glencoe Masscare, accused of witchcraft and murder. In her filthy cell she is visited by Charles Leslie, a young Irishman with his own motives for questioning her.

As Corrag begins to tell her story, an unlikely friendship develops between them that will change both their lives. Compelling, atmospheric and exquisitely written.

2. The Witchfinder's Sister, Beth Underdown

Beth Underdown’s clever debut is a historical thriller based on the life of the 1640’s witchfinder Matthew Hopkins. Alice, Matthew’s fictional sister, is forced to return to her childhood town of Manningtree where she becomes entangled in her brother’s crazed pursuit of what he believes to be justice. Underdown brilliantly weaves fact with fiction to illustrate the disturbing paranoia and obsession behind the Essex witch hunts.

3. The King's Witch, Tracy Borman 

Historian Tracy Borman’s debut novel tells the fascinating story of Frances Gorges, a healer who is dragged to the court of James I, a man who has already condemned many for treason and witchcraft. There she becomes enmeshed in a world of intrigue and betrayal - and at great risk from the twisted machinations of Lord Cecil, the King's first minister.

The follow-up, The Devil’s Slave, is out June.

4. The Vanishing Witch, Karen Maitland

In Lincoln during the reign of Richard II, Caitlin, a dark-haired widow arrives in John of Gaunt's city with her two beautiful children. At first, Caitlin is considered a godsend, helping merchant Robert of Bassingham care for his sick wife. But when Robert's wife, and then others, die seemingly unnatural deaths, the accusations of witchcraft commence. Masterful storytelling.

5. The Familiars – Stacey Halls

17-year-old Fleetwood Shuttleworth, desperate to survive her latest pregnancy, crosses paths with Alice Gray, a mysterious young woman who agrees to become her midwife. When Alice is accused as part of the Lancashire witch trials, Fleetwood takes huge risks to try to save her – and her own unborn baby. But is Alice all that she seems?

Fast-faced, twisty and immense fun.

6. The Witch of Blackbird Pond – Elizabeth George Speare 

In 1687 orphan Kit Tyler arrives as a stranger in colonial Connecticut and feels entirely out of place. When she forms a friendship with a Quaker woman called Hannah Tupper, believed by the colonists to be a witch, Kit is forced to choose between love and a sense of duty. Old, but gold.

7. Circe, Madeline Miller 

In this epic and magnificently written novel, Miller retells the story of the mythological witch Circe. Increasingly isolated by her immortal family, Circe turns to humans for friendship, leading her to discover a power forbidden to the gods: witchcraft.

We follow Circe from the halls of Helios to exile on the remote island of Aiaia, where she learns to harness her power.

8. Witch Child, Celia Rees

In 1659, after 14-year-old Mary sees her healer grandmother hanged for witchcraft, she escapes to Massachusetts Bay Colony with the help of an unknown woman. Through Mary's journal, we learn of how, though Mary hopes to make a new life among the pilgrims, she, like her grandmother, quickly finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice, and once more she faces important choices to ensure her survival. A powerful read for all ages.

9. The Glass Girl, Caroline Lea

The Glass Girl is an atmospheric and beautifully written debut set against the backdrop of the 17th-century Icelandic witch trials and sagas. Rósa is sent to join her new husband in the remote village of Stykkishólmur, where the villagers are deeply wary of outsiders.

As she grows increasingly isolated, Rósa's suspicions grow. Her husband buried his first wife alone in the dead of night. Is her own life in danger?

10. The Poison Bed, E.C. Fremantle

In 1615 Lady Frances Carr, considered by many to be a witch, is accused of murder and imprisoned, together with her newborn baby and a wet-nurse. As Frances tells the story of her life with her first husband and manipulative uncle, and of a society full of superstition and lies, a picture begins to form. But her husband Robert Carr has his own story. Which one will save its teller? A twisty, perfectly paced thriller.

Witchy 'To be Read' Pile 

A host of other witch and witchcraft-related books have been recommended to me and I set out here a few of those which are going on my towering ‘to be read’ pile:

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. In 1666 villagers turn to sorcery, herb lore, and witch-hunting.

The Daylight Gate, in which Jeanette Winterson creates another view of the Pendle Witch Trials.

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s first novel about a young woman who believes she has sold her soul to the devil in return for freedom from her tiresome family (fair enough).

Widdershins by Helen Steadman, based on events from the Newcastle Witch Trials of 1650.

The Magpie Tree by Katherine Stansfield, exploring the relationship between witchcraft and foreigners in 1840s Cornwall.

Witches Trinity by Erika Mailman, set in Germany in 1507 when a visiting friar suggests that witchcraft is to blame for the failing crops and famine.

The Witches of Eileanan by Kate Forsyth, a historical fantasy trilogy in which the young Isabeau leads a horde of persecuted witches.

The Witches of New York by Ami McKay, a mystery set in Manhattan in 1880.

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, set in Salem in 1692.

The Boy Who Drew The Future, by Rhian Ivory. Set in present day and 1863, when the last witch in the UK was swum in Sible Hedingham, Essex. You can read more about it here.


_____________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime and Gothic fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, is a tale of superstition, dark folklore and missing girls on the Isle of Skye.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

THE GATE OF ANGELS by PENELOPE FITZGERALD: Review by Penny Dolan.

“The Library was connected with the public wash-house by the municipal fumigation rooms, where books could be disinfected after an outbreak of disease and old clothes could be boiled for redistribution to the needy.”

This brisk description immediately captured a time when Public Libraries – as opposed to Subscription Libraries - were seen as slightly dangerous places and when books, borrowed by the great unknown public, were once objects of suspicion and possible infection in themselves and not just a worrying way of spreading ideas to the poorer classes. I recall a time when children’s hands and nails were inspected before they were allowed a ticket to borrow books from the library, though that continued much later than the setting of this book.

The description above comes from a delight of a novel and a treat of a novelist. THE GATE OF ANGELS, set in 1912, is a work of historical fiction. The author, as I’m sure many of you will know, is Penelope Fitzgerald, and the novel published in 1990. My weak excuse for not having reading her work before is that we share the same first name, which is hardly evidence of a sound critical judgement on my part. In mitigation, Penelope, with all its weight of marital fidelity, is a terrible imposition on a child.

Fortunately, THE GATE OF ANGELS surfaced from a pile of dusty paperbacks at about the same moment the title was praised somewhere else. Thank you, revered reader! So I set the battered second-hand copy (“brought to me by Woman’s Journal”) by my bedside. That night I opened the pages and read myself into an unimaginably violent gale, bringing havoc to Cambridge: colleges, townsfolk and landscape alike.

What a wonderfully brisk and compact piece of writing it is, sharp as the East Anglian wind. The tightly witty prose carries a strong sense of the author’s voice and a world-sharpened understanding. 

She does not offer history as a sentimental or stirring recreation but writes with an observant, lively bustle, choosing a moment when all manner of social relationships, newly proposed scientific theories and religious beliefs were there to be questioned.

The characters, young and old, feel the drive of the new era that is underway, welcome or unwelcome: there are aged academics within the College of St Angelus and elsewhere keen to preserve ancient, pointless traditions and idle young men caught by curious rulings of the Disobligers Society and forced to argue for subjects they do not believe. Indeed, the whole novel seems filled with questioning people, Fitzgerald delights, too, in pointing out the small absurdities and trials of human living:

“The fire was banked up like a furnace, dividing the room into dismaying areas of heat and cold. . . .The college had never been thoroughly dried out since its foundation, but Fred, who had been brought up in a rectory, saw no reason to complain.” I do so enjoy that use of  “dismaying.”

The plot is about a romance that strikes Fred Fairly, a brilliant young physicist and Fellow of the all-male St Angelicus College in the middle of his anxieties about the great debates about science, mathematical certainty and philosophy of that time. Fred’s life is clearly one of upper-middle class privilege, although his sisters nicely conspire to keep him in his place. There is a wonderful scene near the start where Fred returns home to his father Rectory, only to be greeted by a roomful of women – his mother, siblings and the housekeeper – too busy to pay him any attention because they are all sewing suffragette banners for a next march.

Fitzgerald may have inherited a sense of that time as she was born in 1916 and grew up in the Archbishop’s Palace in Lincoln. Her mother, an Archbishop’s daughter, was one of the first women students at Oxford and her father was editor of Punch. The famous Knox brothers: the theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox, the cryptographer Dilwyn Knox and the biblical scholar Wilfrid Knox – were her uncles and also the subject of one of her biographies.

At the start of THE GATE OF ANGELS, the amiable Fred has lost his Christian faith; he is also rather lonely while knowing that, by the terms of his Fellowship, he is forbidden from marrying, particularly women of an unsuitable nature. Quiet moments of humour illuminate his bleak bachelor life. Fitzgerald reminds us that, being brought up in a Rectory, Fred can withstand the lack of heating within the dank, damp Saint Angelus. Fred endures.

 
However, as he cycles up a country road, a horse and cart charge out from a farm drive and two – or was it three? – cyclists collide with the vehicle. 

Due to a misunderstanding, the unconscious Fred Fairly and the bold and practical heroine, Daisy Saunders – also unconscious - are lain down close together in the same room. Waking so physically close to this warmly attractive young woman, Fred is overcome with love and tenderness: how can he not dream of marrying her? 

A courtship of a kind begins, with Daisy very much a forthright thinker:

“Fred, quite honestly, did you never take a girl out before?” said Daisy.

He seemed to find this difficult but only for a few moments. “I’ve never taken a girl out I’ve wanted to marry before.”

“She mayn’t have known that though,”said Daisy.

Alongside, the reader hears the story of Daisy’s life and her hand-to-mouth childhood, flitting with her ailing mother through the mean terraces of South London. She is definitely not of Fred’s social class. Orphaned at sixteen, Daisy has tried to find and keep clerical jobs, despite horrid yet understated male harassment. Despite all this, Daisy’s energy and confidence are bracing; one is cheered by her practical, pragmatic and rational self and feels for her when, having reached the status of a nursing student, things go awry.

In Fitzgerald’s world, I suspect things often go awry. Although the couple enjoy a short relationship, that third cyclist’s disappearance leads to local rumours, to donnish tales of ghostly haunting, and on to word of a concealed murder and finally a full-scale investigation of witnesses and an uncovering of a very awkward truth for Daisy and poor Fred.

Even so, just as all seems collapsed into catastrophe, Fitzgerald ends the novel with a moment of hope: just a glimpse of brightness rather than any confirmation, a small optimism that breaks out despite all one expects, and typical of the mix of dark and light that made this novel so very different and such an unexpected surprise.

THE GATE OF ANGELS is the third of what are considered Fitzgerald’s four history novels. I have looked at descriptions of the other three novels. The first, INNOCENCE, is set in Florence in 1950, is a romance between an impoverished aristocrat’s daughter and a doctor from a communist family and introduces the Italian Marxist Grammaci. The second, THE BEGINNING OF SPRING, is set in 1913 and describes the world just before the Russian revolution through the struggles of a British businessman and his family living in Moscow. Her fourth and final historical novel, THE BLUE FLOWER, was published in 1955, and is about Novalis, an 18C German poet and his love for an odd child; the poet Goethe and philosopher Schlegel also appear in the novel.

         

Now I cannot say that the content, as described above, would have made me hurry to take these novels off the shelf – especially with my afore-mentioned name phobia -  but if the pages have anything of the skill, flavour and bright, quiet wit of Penelope Fitzgerald’s THE GATE OF ANGELS, I am sure these novels will be a delight too.

Moreover, as much of Fitzgerald's work has been newly published by Fourth Estate, it will be quite possible to find out.

Penny Dolan. 

Note: Fitzgerald’s earlier books were inspired on her own experiences: THE BOOKSHOP reflects her knowledge of helping to run a bookshop in Southwold; OFFSHORE draws on life among the houseboat community in Battersea; HUMAN VOICES comes from her war-time life at the BBC while AT FREDDIE’S depicts life at a drama school. Then, feeling she had written out her own life, Fitzgerald began writing about other places and other times. She said she enjoyed the research more than the writing. She died in 2000.

Making History by Susan Price

I'm reading a book on my kindle and enjoying it.

     No surprises there. A complaint I've heard all my life and still hear often (especially from my partner) is that I'm 'always reading,' always 'got my nose in a book.'

     It's hard to put your nose in a kindle, though, and  I've found that when you read in bed and doze, the falling Kindle strikes your nose a far more destructive blow than a paper book. This hasn't stopped me. The book I'm reading and thoroughly enjoying at the moment (despite the risk to my nose) is The Town House by Norah Lofts. I've just finished her similar Bless This House.

Bless This House was first published in 1954, before I was born. The Town House, first published in 1959, is the start of a trilogy, being followed by The House at Old Vine (1961) and The House at Sunset (1962).

Bless This House by Norah Lofts

     Bless This House is almost like a test-run for the trilogy, though it is a very good read in its own right (write?) It tells of the building of a house during Elizabeth I's reign and then, in a series of linked short stories, follows the people who owned it through the centuries for four hundred years.

     The reader has an understanding that the characters lack. For instance, a girl living in the house in the 19th Century finds that she experiences debilitating despair whenever she goes near a window-seat in the Great Hall during daylight and an overwhelming terror if she enters the room at night. She doesn't understand it, but the reader knows who it was in an earlier century who first experienced that despair and left its mark on the house.

      The Town House and its sequels take the same idea, of a house and the passing centuries, and extend it. The first book begins in 1391 and follows the building of 'the house at Old Vine' and then the people who lived in it and the times they lived in. The final book tells of the house, still standing, in the 1950s which was, when Norah Lofts wrote it, close to her present.

Born in 1904, in Norfolk, Norah Lofts came from a farming family - she said that all of her male relatives, for living memory, had been farmers and an understanding of farming and the seasons is a strong element in her writing. Her other great strength is a tolerant understanding of people. Not all her characters are likeable but their motivations are readily recognisable. She takes the opportunity to show us her people from different viewpoints. We will be with one character in their youth or middle-age, as they tell us their own story - and then, in the next story, we will see that character from the view-point of someone from another generation. We see how time has changed them and how they are judged by those around them. We, the readers, who know far more about them, may consider that judgement too harsh or too kind.

      Norah Lofts also understood that no matter how hard some people work, no matter how much they hope or love or pray, the indifferent world goes on turning, the seasons go on changing and are not influenced by hard work, hope, prayer or love. What happens, happens - and if things turn out well for us, we think that it's our optimism or prayer or effort that made things fall that way. But it was simply luck; and for many other people, no better or worse than us, things went badly.

The Town House by Norah Lofts

I first read these books when I was a teenager and loved them. As always, when you return to books you enjoyed when so much younger, I feared that I would be disappointed. Instead, I've been impressed all over again.

But here I was, reading them on a nose-bruising kindle. When I first read them, let alone when Norah Lofts wrote them, I don't think anything like an e-reader was being dreamed of even in Science Fiction. It was a time when people who actually worked in the computer industry predicted that there might be a world market for about twenty computers. This, of course, was when even the most excitingly modern computers were the size of a room. My partner, in the 60s, when he was just starting out as a local government accountant, was introduced to one such. Local big-wigs, he says, came to visit it and it used to sing songs for them. They were thrilled. His boss wanted him to become a servant of the computer since he was young and bright. (It probably terrified the boss, looming there in its room with its valves and wires.) But Davy couldn't see the point of the thing and ran away to sea instead. Now he mildly regrets this. But not a lot.

Today, I carry my little hand-held computer about with me from room to room, as I always used to carry a book - except that the kindle holds a library. Reading on it has become as ordinary to me as switching on the light or filling my kettle at the tap - ordinary things which are also quite astonishing and trail a long history behind them.

I also self-publish on the kindle and that has become an ordinary part of my life even though I only began five years ago. How quickly miraculous things become mundane. When I began self-publishing, I was working in a university as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. I remember students becoming excited when they spotted my kindle. "Is that one of those electric reading thingies?"

I remember reading my kindle in a pub as I waited for my agent. It was a rather posh pub on the outskirts of Oxford and a retired general type stage-whispered to his wife: "That lady has one of those e-book gadgets." And when I read it in a cafe, the waitress quizzed me about it: Was it easy to get books for it? Was it easy to download them? She wanted to encourage her sons to read and she thought they would read an ebook more readily than a paper one.

These days, who would notice an ebook - except perhaps to sneer at it for not being the latest smart phone?

My point? Only this - time is always moving on through the centuries and we, my computer-savvy, self-publishing, blogging, vlogging friends, just by reading our favourite books on our favourite gadget, by self-publishing, by writing for this blog, we are making history.

We thank Susan Price for this guest post. Leslie Wilson will return in September.

 Susan Price's historical trilogy The Sterkarm Handshake, A Sterkarm Kiss and Sterkarm Tryst, can be found here.

'Help! What am I?' by Karen Maitland

 Recently I tried to move some savings to an account with a fractionally higher rate of interest than my existing one. Although the amount involved would not have kept an international money-launderer in champagne for a day, I found myself having to answer a catalogue of questions. Tedious, but fine until we came to the question – What’s your occupation?

‘Writer,’ I answered.

‘Sorry that’s not coming up on the computer,’ the young man said. ‘It’s suggesting underwriter.’

 ‘A slightly different occupation,’ I told him. ‘Try author or novelist.’

 ‘Sorry the computer doesn’t recognise either of those as occupations.’

 ‘It’s obviously been talking to some of my relatives,’ I said.

 ‘What about journalist?’ he suggested.

 I considered the label. I do delve into the scandals, crimes, murders and wars in the past, if not the present, so you could call my work investigative journalism. But then I remembered a friend who was turned down for travel insurance because he’d given his occupation as journalist. Presumably they were afraid that if they ever refused his claim for a broken ankle on the grounds he’d failed to declare that in 1978 he was treated for a verruca, he might write a damning article about them in the nationals. Better not to use journalist then.

 ‘What sort of novels do you write?’ my interrogator asked.

 ‘Historical thrillers.’

‘We could put you down as an historian.’

 We could, but last year I attended a talk given to a local history group by a guide working in one of the stately homes. I fell into conversation with the lady sitting next to me, who was raving ecstatically about her favourite historical crime novelist, saying how thoroughly he researched the books, what detailed knowledge he had about local history and how she’d learnt more history from his novels than from any non-fiction book. Later that evening, she mentioned the group needed more speakers.

‘Why don’t you invite that novelist,’ I asked. ‘He’s an excellent speaker.’

She looked scandalised. ‘But this is a serious history group. We don’t invite novelists to speak.

I know that most History Groups don't take that view. I have given talks at a number of different history groups round the country and am booked to give more in 2014. And many history festivals now include a mixture of fiction and non-fiction writers, but sadly that lady's view of historical fiction writers is still prevalent among some readers - if history is presented in the form of fiction, it can't be 'serious'.

 Having gained a doctorate in a different subject, I can say from experience that most historical fiction writers, have carried out enough original historical research for their novels to have more than earned a PhD in history. Of course, I know that writing medical romances doesn’t qualify the author to be a nurse and writing crime novels doesn’t make the author a forensic scientist. And I also know that academic historians do far more than simply research facts. But I am fascinated that while many people say they read historical fiction to learn about history, if that same information is presented in a non-fiction book, the author is regarded as an historian, whereas the fiction writer isn’t. The exception is those authors who write novels based on the lives of royalty or the famous. Why is that?

 'Better not put historian,’ I said glumly.

 ‘So what do you actually do when you’re writing?’ my interrogator asked.

 ‘I sit in an office at home – actually it’s a large cupboard – and type on a laptop.’

 ‘Ah,’ the young man said with relief, ‘then we can put you down as clerical. The computer likes that one.’

 I was sorely tempted to ask if I was now clerical, should I be wearing a dogcollar, but I had a horrible feeling that would then set that wretched computer off on another round of questions about whether I was a bloodhound or a sheepdog. So I quietly I slunk back to my cupboard and started typing again. I know my place.

Next time I'll just keep the money in a piggybank.