HMS PINAFORE
THE YEOMEN OF THE GUARD
‘You needn’t sneer, Richard.’
Our neighbour, a real-life Hyacinth Bucket, was standing in the hallway, regaling my mother with tales of a Gilbert-and-Sullivan evening at the local operatic society.
I was nonplussed. That very morning, I’d been playing an LP of G&S overtures – conducting them, in fact: a habit that had already led my father to suspect that I was ‘ripe for the madhouse’, as Weber said of Beethoven.
Hyacinth, it seems,
