Monica Dickens

"... I took the ashes out to the , leaving a little trail of cinders from a broken corner of the box. The trouble about housework is that whatever you do seems to lead to another job to do or a mess to clear up."

"With the suit, Christine wore a grey felt beret which had been sold to her cheaply by Mrs Arnold in Millinery, because it had a mark on the back and no customer would buy it. Women were absurdly fussy when they had money to spend. When they were walking along they were just ordinary women, quite meek and obeying the policeman at the crossing; but as soon as Goldwyn's commissionaire, who bought his medals at the Surplus Supply stores in the , had pushed open the swing doors for them, they became customers, and that made them arrogant. Christine had easily removed the mark on the hat with some lighter fluid. Any woman could have done the same; but to have noticed the mark with a shrewd mouth, to have refused to buy the polluted hat made them feel recherché."

"The road from Boston to Cape Cod is long and straight and ruthless. Two black slashes cutting through the sandy country of pine and scrub oak which never grow to any size before a motorist throws out a cigarette on to the dry grass and levels everything neatly down again. In winter, the cars carry Boston businessmen in hats worn straight and true, and women with plastic statues of the Sacred Heart suctioned to the dashboard. In summer, the cars are full of families, and trail boats and little houses behind them. When the road was made, for the locust families to redouble their assault on Cape Cod, hills were leveled, hollows filled, the landscape brought to order. The bare scrub land is empty since everyone has gone top-heavily to the coast, like passengers crowding to the ship's rail."

"In the Refusal Race, you had to trot up to a jump, stop the horse and sail over the jump by yourself on to Anna's spare-room mattress."

"If Monica Dickens means nothing more to you than horsey books and no-nonsense memoirs of nursing and service, then this eloquent novel about the genteel poverty of a widow shunted between her three egotistical daughters is a fine corrective."