The Rehearsal Supper

Nineteen of us ate in the Old Granary on the Friday night at two trestle tables end to end, under a hundred feet of Wilf Chalmers’ bunting, which is not bunting at all but forty-year-old signal flags, and which nobody could read, and which therefore said something unknown and possibly obscene down the whole length of the room.

The rain had come in hard by then. You could hear it on the pantiles three storeys up, and under it the wind doing the thing it does round that building, a low note in the loading-door frame that goes on and on and that I have not been able to hear since without my stomach going over.

Bea did pies. Rekha Sundaram had brought a pan of something from Leicester in the boot of a car and reheated it in Bea’s kitchen over a two-hour negotiation that both women appeared to…