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    The Song of the Wren
    The Song of the Wren
    The Song of the Wren
    Ebook170 pages2 hours

    The Song of the Wren

    By H.E. Bates

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    About this ebook

    Published in 1972, The Song of the Wren contains some light entertainments in the style of the Uncle Silas tales, alongside some more serious stories concerning thwarted love, love triangles, and, in two of the cases, the violence that comes out of psyches twisted by love.

    'The Song of the Wren' features the intriguing Miss Shuttleworth as she spars with a young sociologist conducting a survey on various issues, leaving him dumfounded by her apparently mad behaviour and no more appreciative of nature than when he started.

    She appears again in 'Oh! Sweeter Than the Berry' where she proves herself more than a match for a visiting minister. Convincing him to try one homemade potion after another, she engages the tipsy Reverend in a theological debate until, stunned, he wobbles away and falls to his knees to pray for her.

    Taking a darker, more abstract turn 'The Man Who Loved Squirrels' is a tale of a woodsman who works alone and lives with his mother, finding company only in the forest's squirrels. A chance meeting with a traveling London woman disrupts his life and ends in tragedy.

    'The Tiger Moth' depicts an affair between an airman and a schoolteacher, whose husband is missing in action. The tale hearkens back to Bates's war-time Flying Officer X stories in style, flight accounts, and pilot jargon.

    The bonus story 'Music for Christmas', first published in 1951, is a comic portrayal of provincial rivalries, involving a musical snob with London tastes, a north Midlands woman favouring local talent, and, relaying gossip and innuendo between the two, a grocery deliveryman.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateNov 10, 2016
    ISBN9781448215300
    The Song of the Wren
    Author

    H.E. Bates

    H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse. Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside. His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed. During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym 'Flying Officer X'. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954). His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success. Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed. H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.

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      The Song of the Wren - H.E. Bates

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