“That old-man has, no-shame,” Géza Rózsavölgyi, another refugee (and violently anti-Soviet, which creates a certain strain with ARF) flicking his hands up Brigadier Puddingward in gay despair, the lilting Hungarian gypsy-whisper bashing like tambourines all around the room, provoking, in one way or another, everyone here except for the aged Brigadier himself, who just goes rambling on from the pulpit of what was a private chapel once, back there on the maniac side of the 18th century, and is now a launching platform for “The Weekly Briefings,” a most amazing volley of senile observations, office paranoia, gossip about the War which might or might not include violations of security, reminiscences of Flanders… the coal boxes in the sky coming straight down on you with a roar… the drumfire so milky and luminous on his birthday night… the wet surfaces in the shell craters for miles giving back one bleak autumn sky… what Haig, in the richness of his wit, once said at mess about Lieutenant Sassoon’s refusal to fight… the gunners in springtime, in their flowing green robes… roadsides of poor rotting horses just before apricot sunrise… the twelve spokes of a stranded artillery piece—a mud clock, a mud zodiac, clogged and crusted as it stood in the sun its many shades of brown. The mud of Flanders gathered into the curd-clumped, mildly jellied textures of human shit, piled, duckboarded, trenched and shell-pocked leagues of shit in all directions, not even the poor blackened stump of a tree—and the old blithering gab-artist tries to shake the cherrywood pulpit here, as if that had been the worst part of the whole Passchendaele horror, that absence of vertical interest… . On he goes, gabbing, gabbing, recipes for preparing beets in a hundred tasty ways, or such cucurbitaceous improbabilities as Ernest Pudding’s Gourd Surprise—yes, there is something sadistic about recipes with “Surprise” in the title, chap who’s hungry wants to just eat you know, not be Surprised really, just wants to bite into the (sigh) the old potato, and be reasonably sure there’s nothing inside but potato you see, certainly not some clever nutmeg “Surprise!”, some mashed pulp all magenta with pomegranates or something… well but this is just the doubtful sort of joke that Brigadier Pudding loves to play: how he’s chuckled, as unsuspecting dinner-guests go knifing into his notorious Toad-in-the-Hole, through the honest Yorkshire batter into—ugh! what is it? a beet rissolé? a stuffed beet rissolé? or perhaps today some lovely pureed samphire, reeking of the sea (which he obtains once a week from the same fat fishmonger’s son wheeling his bicycle, puffing, up the chalkwhite cliff)—none of these odd, odd vegetable rissoles do resemble any ordinary “Toad,” but rather the depraved, half-sentient creatures that Young Chaps from Kings Road have Affairs With in limericks—Pudding has thousands of these recipes and no shame about sharing any of them with the lot at PISCES, along with, later in the weekly soliloquy, a line or two, eight bars, from “Would You Rather Be a Colonel with an Eagle on Your Shoulder, or a Private with a Chicken on Your Knee?” then perhaps a lengthy recitation of all his funding difficulties, all, dating back to long before the emergence of even the Electra House group… letter-feuds he has carried on in the Times with critics of Haig… .