The Year of the Short Corn and Other Stories (The Fred Urquhart Collection)

The Year of the Short Corn was first published in 1949 and the war or its immediate aftermath forms a presence in most of the stories. It can be a civilian family gathered together with scattered serving children for a precious Christmas leave or a son or daughter returning from one of the services; it can illustrate clothes rationing and the avid fervour with which civilian women greet silk stockings; it can be a townser who thinks too much of himself who becomes snowbound on a North East farm or the rage and humiliation of a young castrated ox. It can even be an Edinburgh boarding-house with a kenspeckle crew of lodgers (and an oversexed bulldog) under the eyes of a bewildered refugee girl from Vienna. Fred Urquhart was praised by George Orwell for the striking variety of his subject matter and by others for his splendid dialogue and his portraits of characters especially women. None of these critics was wrong but there is more here to praise!