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Uncle Boots would have trouble coming out on top.
    What a stunner. Pity about her haughty nose.

Chapter Four
    In a handsome house on Red Post Hill, off Denmark Hill in south-east London, Mr Edwin Finch addressed his wife, known to her extensive family as Chinese Lady. The reasons for this went back a long way, to her years of struggle, when she often had her Monday washing collected and done by Mr Wong Fu of the local Chinese laundry. Further, she had an almond tint to her brown eyes.
    ‘Maisie,’ said Mr Finch, ‘would you like a daily to help with the housework?’
    ‘D’you mean a servant?’ asked Chinese Lady. She was seventy-two, and still upright, but her dark brown hair was liberally streaked with grey.
    ‘Yes, I do mean a servant,’ said Mr Finch, seventy-five and silver-haired. His distinguished looks hadn’t yet departed, however. ‘The house, my dear, is large and you aren’t getting any younger.’
    ‘Well, I’m still not old,’ said Chinese Lady. ‘At least, I don’t feel I am, and we’re not going to move, not while the family still visits. We wouldn’t know where to put everybody if we bought some poky place.’
    Mr Finch smiled. That was her chief reason for living, her family. There seemed to be members by the dozen, beginning with her three sons, Boots, Tommy and Sammy, her daughter Lizzy, and their spouses. There were innumerable grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And she always seemed to know what any of them were up to at any given moment, even Alice, Tommy and Vi’s daughter, and Bess, Sammy and Susie’s eldest daughter. Alice, having graduated from Bristol University, was now secretary to the bursar, and Bess was an undergraduate there.
    Much to Maisie’s pleasure, her favourite granddaughter Rosie, with her husband Matthew and children Giles and Emily, had moved from Dorset to run a large chicken farm in Surrey. In partnership with Rosie and Matthew were Lizzy’s younger daughter Emma and Emma’s husband, Sussex-born Jonathan. In these post-war years of austerity, the farm was prospering in its sales of eggs and laying hens. Everyone wanted eggs after a war that had reduced the supply to about one per person per week. And many people wanted to keep chickens that would lay daily for them. One didn’t feel austerity was knocking holes in the stomach if one could tuck into fried or scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast every morning. Also, a nice soft-boiled egg with Sunday tea was a traditional treat for many people.
    ‘Very well, Maisie, only if the housework should begin to be a little too much for you will we think about a daily help,’ said Mr Finch, knowing thatBoots and Polly employed a daily, and so did Sammy and Susie.
    Chinese Lady gave him one of her rare smiles. Edwin was a good man, a gentleman, and a comforting, providing husband. Retired from his job with the Government, he enjoyed a generous pension and what she called a respectable bank balance, which was something she had only read about during her years of penury in Walworth. She was comfortable with a respectable balance, because it meant she and Edwin weren’t vulgarly rich, like war profiteers were. She had a warm, enduring affection for her man, and whenever she was out and about with him she could rightly be proud of his distinguished appearance. Boots took a whimsical view of such outings, since he was pretty sure his indomitable Victorian mother liked to let people see she wasn’t married to someone who could be rated insignificant.
    ‘Well, all right, Edwin,’ she said, ‘I’ll think about a daily if the housework gets too much for me. Mind, as we live on the ground floor, I don’t have to worry about most of the upstairs rooms unless some of the family come to stay for a night or two.’
    ‘But you do a fair amount of dusting all over,’ said Mr Finch, whose own daily labours were mainly devoted to keeping the garden in order. The front doorbell rang at that moment. ‘I think that’s