Tony Walker

Allen kept a second home at Potterham, exactly where the story set.

for sailing on the Norfolk Broads.

So he knew this area really well.

Also we should say the East of England is much colder and snowier than the West because the weather blows in from the North European plain and ultimately Siberia.

So it can be cold and it's dry in the summer and cold and snowy in the winter.

Okay, other things to explain.

If you were renting or hiring or whatever the word would be, renting a cottage, a holiday cottage, they would say if it came with plate and linen.

So the bungalow in this case comes with cutlery, crockery, this is the plate, and bed linen, towels and tablecloths so you don't have to bring your own.

So it signals a reasonably well-appointed let rather than a bare shelf.

so this is um so the the old lady come in and oblige me so i just wondered oh dear we're gonna have any titters at that um what it means is charring a charwoman or domestic service done as a favor rather than as a formal employment so she's coming in he pays her for it but it's that phrase a black to oblige me is to to to clean up

and do the domestic work.

So Mrs. Selston isn't a servant.

She's a local woman who comes in to help.

So she's not a hired servant.

And of course, in the 20s and 30s, after the First World War, the English middle class were losing the ability to pay for servants.

So the whole thing of domestic service, which is a big deal in all times, up to Victorian and dying out in Edwardian times, dies out.

pretty much for everyone apart from the top aristocrats and and the nouveau riche um in the 30s and so until it's completely gone when i was born i was born in 1961 so completely gone although my great grandmother was in service um okay

So yeah, Potterham is a real place.

It's still a centre for the broads boating holidays.

So the waterfowl, he says, the waterfowl had taken the night off.