Jane

“Blowsily, frowsily, comfortably, toothlessly, Mrs Candleton was sleeping away the afternoon in her hair-curlers and her pinnafore.”
― H.E. Bates, Seven by Five

“And here, it seems to me, is much of the secret of the charm of woods in England. A wood should never be vast. The best woods are small, a few acres in extent, not much more than copses. The word forest creates in the mind a feeling of grandeur, of something primeval.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“Every morning Mrs Eglantine sat at the round bamboo bar of the New Pacific Hotel and drank her breakfast. This consisted of two quick large brandies, followed by several slower ones. By noon breakfast had become lunch and by two o'clock the pouches under and above Mrs Eglantine's bleared blue eyes began to look like large puffed pink prawns.”
― H.E. Bates, Seven by Five

“It is one of the oddest and sometimes one of the most charming characteristics of English weather that at times one season borrows complete days from another, spring from summer, winter from spring. And it may be that these milky days of winter, which seem borrowed from April, are automatically filled with the sadness of things out of their time.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods