A Day's Pleasure and Other Tales

By Nigel Heseltine and Daniel Hughes

'A restless shape-shifter from the mysterious Welsh Marches, Heseltine was as elusive in his idiosyncratic writing as in his extraordinary globetrotting life. It is good to have his work briefly pinned down in this groundbreaking collection for closer inspection.' – Professor M.Wynn Thomas
Cariad County: a place of anarchy and farce, of the grotesque and the slapstick, of tragedy and violent comedy, where the local hunt is disrupted by a camel-riding hero, where the town hall burns down as the town cheers, a place haunted by grotesque revenants from the First World War. This is the world of Nigel Heseltine's short stories, fantastic fictions which lampoon and lament the slow decline of the once-powerful squires and landowners of mid-Wales, the very Montgomeryshire of which Heseltine (1916-1995) formed a part.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parthian Books
• Release date: May 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913640330

Nigel Heseltine

Nigel Heseltine is a long-neglected member of Wales’s ‘Golden Generation’ of English-language short story writers which included Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies and Glyn Jones. His stories appeared alongside theirs in major magazines such as English Story and Penguin New Writing in the 1930s and 1940s. This volume re-prints for the first time since their initial publication the stories published in Heseltine’s Tales of the Squirearchy (1946), alongside a substantial number of stories never previously collected. Ranging from the starkly surreal to the subtly moving, these tales reveal Nigel Heseltine as a singularly talented writer, the equal of his better-known contemporaries.

Book preview

A Day’s Pleasure

Tempers cooled suddenly, but rose again and burst like the pomegranates on the wallpaper, scattering the seeds of dispute about the house. We were going on a day’s pleasure, the house was too full, my mother was bilious, the car would not start for my father but roared for a moment in the yard, then spluttered and stopped.

There were already in the house, my uncle by marriage, ex-Governor of Bintang, and all his family who had returned from that island to find houses were not to be got for the mere clapping of hands and calling boy. Yet still letters came in at every breakfast from those others who wanted to come to our house. Uncle Percy wanted to come, being home from Burma, to do some fishing, and Uncle Brit. Therefore, when the cousins were down late to breakfast in our cold climate, the letters were handed round and my mother said:

Percy can’t come, Watkin, and certainly not Brit!

The old fellow wants to see about his fishing at Glanavon, my father said.

He can stay at the public there! Though we were miles from Glanavon.

A camp bed had been put where there was never a camp bed before, in an attic full of chests of drawers, burst screens and a knitting-machine, for the nurse, who, I was told in the kitchen, did not like her room at all.

I knew from the closeness of my mother’s eyes together (they had moved a good half-inch in the night) that she had a bilious attack, but she ran harder than ever up and down the stairs, clattering her keys and calling out to the maids to see that they were running too. As my father would often tell us, she never spared herself.

Oh bother! I heard her say as she turned a corner. My two cousins and I were stationed in the hall, having been got ready well before anyone else, since my mother had said we would start on our pleasure at eleven sharp and it was now half-past.

From the front hall you could hear the uproar of us all getting ready to enjoy ourselves; feet galloped on the landing, angry voices cried out, and some shot suddenly into the lavatory to take a last chance before we started. I organized my cousins and we went up and down with very long strides saying all together: Oh bother! Oh bother! Nobody was pleased. The maid came through a door carrying three rugs and a lunch-basket out of which a thermos was falling. The nurse caught it while we ran round the pillars in the inner hall, shouting loudly: "Oh