The Sailor

by V.S. Pritchett

A

 gramophone was playing when I walked by. Whenever I passed, the Colonel’s daughter was either playing the gramophone or digging in the garden. She was a small girl in her late twenties, with a big knowledgeable-looking head under tobacco-brown curls, and the garden fork was nearly as big as herself. Her gardening never lasted long. It consisted usually of digging up a piece of the matted lawn in order to bury tins; but she went at it intensely, drawing back the fork until her hair fell over her face and the sweat stood on her brow. She always had a cigarette in her mouth, and every now and then the carnation skin of her face, with its warm, dark blue eyes, would be distorted and turned crimson by violent bronchial coughing. When this stopped she would straighten up, the delicacy came back to her skin and she would say, “Oh, Christ. Oh, bloody hell,” and you noticed at the end of every speech the fine right eyebrow would rise a little and the lid of the eye below it would quiver. This wink, the limpid wink of the Colonel’s daughter, you noticed at once. You wondered what it meant and planned to find out. It was as startling and enticing as a fish rising, and you discovered when you went after it that the Colonel’s daughter was the hardest drinking and most blasphemous piece of apparent childish innocence you had ever seen. Old men in pubs gripped their sticks, went scarlet and said someone ought to take her drawers down and give her a tanning. I got a sort of fame from being a neighbour of the Colonel’s daughter. “Who’s that piece we saw down the road?” people asked.

                “Her father’s in the Army.”

                “Not,” two or three of them said, for this kind of wit spreads like measles, “the Salvation Army.” They said I was a dirty dog. But I hardly knew the Colonel’s daughter.

NOTES AND EXERCISES:

1.     The digraph “ph” occurs in words of Greek origin. Memorize the spelling of the following words: gramophone, photograph, graphic, blaspheme, physics, phrase, blasphemous, phase.

2.     Pronounce the following words and learn how to spell them: slough, laugh, draught, tough, rough, clough, enough, trough, hough, hiccough.

3.     Read the following words paying attention to the pronunciation of the digraph “ch”:

þ    bronchial         character         epoch              archaic                        melancholy

þ    school              chasm              stomach          archives          strychnine

þ    scholar                        choir                monarch          architect          lachrymose

þ    scheme                        chemist           monarchy        architecture     hierarchy

þ    scherzo            chemistry        Bucharest        archaeology    psychology

þ    schooner         echo                headache        bronchitis        psychic

þ      lichen              chaos               anchor             technique        schism

4.     The following words are spelt with a double “n”:

þ    innocent          cannery           cannon                        funnel              granny

þ    innocence        announce        channel           innovator        runner

þ    annoy              annunciation   connect           innocuous       winner

þ    annoyance      announcement            connection      penny              sinner

þ    annual             anniversary     connoisseur     tunnel              banner

þ      annul               annihilate        flannel             winnow                        manner

5.     Differentiate between the meaning of the following words: carnation, crimson, scarlet.

6.     Word study:

limpid                                                        clear, transparent (used of liquids, the atmosphere, the eyes)

to entice                                                    to tempt or persuade: to entice a young girl away from home, to entice somebody into doing something wrong/to do something wrong, to entice a man from his duty

blasphemous                                            using blasphemy (of persons), containing blasphemy (of language); blasphemy (n.)—contemptuous or irreverent talk about God and sacred things

The Salvation Army                              religious and missionary Christian organization on a semi-military model

to give somebody a tanning                 to tan somebody’s hide, to give him a good beating