Seven by Five

First Published in 1963 by Michael Joseph Ltd.

'Every morning Mrs Eglantine sat at the round bamboo bar of the New Pacific Hotel and drank her breakfast...'

'"We are surrounded by the most ghastly people," the captain said. All across miles of unbroken pasture there was not another house...'

'Twice a month, going back to the tea garden in the north, the took Darjeeling night mail out of the heat of Calcutta...'

'I first met him on a black wet night towards the end of the war, in one of those station buffets where the solitary spoon used to be tied to the counter by a piece of string...'

Worlds apart - but the same world. Subtle, passionate, tantalizing and direct, these stories, written from the mid twenties to the early thirties, confirm H.E. Bates in his role as a master of the English short story.

Author's Note:

The earliest of these stories, The Flame, was first published in 1926, having been written a year earlier, when I was twenty; the latest appeared in 1961. The intervening thirty-five years, together with the thirty-five stories I have chosen from that period, therefore give the collection its title, Seven by Five. My aim has been to make the book as widely representative of my work as a short-story writer as possible, but I have nevertheless refrained from including any of the war-time stories I wrote under the pseudnym of Flying Officer X, any of the stories of Uncle Silas and novellas, since these all belong, in my view, to quite separate categories.

The Flame
A Flower Piece
The Mower
Time
The Mill
The Station
The Kimono
Breeze Anstey
The Ox
Colonel Julian
The Lighthouse
The Flag
The Frontier
A Christmas Song
The Major of Hussars
Elaine
The Daffodil Sky
The Good Corn
Country Society
Acrosss The Bay
Chaff in the Wind
The Evolution of Saxby
Go, Lovely Rose
The Maker of Coffins
Love in a Wych Elm
Let's Play Soldiers
The Watercress Girl
The Cowslip Field
Great Uncle Crow
The Enchantress
Now Sleeps The Crimson Petal
Where The Cloud Breaks
Lost Ball
Thelma
Mrs Eglantine

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