Jennie takes her boyfriend Peter to meet her family, the self-described ‘crazy crowd’, and subjects him to the full glare of their idiolect, eccentric habits and sheer bad manners. “It was impossible to sit down, for the chairs and sofas were filled books, sewing, workboxes, unfolded newspapers and in one case a tabby cat and two pairs of pliers. […] It was clear that the chairs and sofas were each the favourite of some member of the family, had indeed been overlong lived in.” Later, Peter finds that his reward for politely feigning an interest in Jennie’s father’s research into the impact of the Black Death on the locality is for him to be presented with offprints of the father’s articles as bedtime reading. But typically for Wilson, it’s not all played for laughs; Jennie’s discomfortingly close relationship with her “fascist” brother Hamish isn’t the least of it.
First published in The Wrong Set, Martin Secker and Warburg, 1949. Collected in The Collected Stories, Penguin, 1980
