‘Oh, — the farms! I wish I’d never ’eard of a — ’op! I wasn’t brought up to this – ’iking and skippering like you was. I’m fed up; that’s what I am — fed up.’
‘If this is bloody ’opping,’ Flo would chime in, ‘I’ve ’ad my bloody bellyful of it already.’
Nobby gave Dorothy his private opinion that Flo and Charlie would probably ‘jack off’ if they got the chance of a lift back to London. But as for Nobby, nothing disheartened him or ruffled his good temper, not even when the nail in his boot was at its worst and his filthy remnant of a sock was dark with blood. By the third day the nail had worn a permanent hole in his foot, and Nobby had to halt once in a mile to hammer it down.
‘’Scuse me, kid,’ he would say; ‘got to attend to my bloody hoof again. This nail’s a mulligatawny.’
He would
