Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

At week-ends they would swoop down from Oxford or London in merry hordes, to be greeted with solid disapproval by my mother and furious glares by my father.
Boud, Debo and I were on the whole carefully insulated from Nancy's friends, as my mother considered them a totally bad influence. "What a set!" she always said when some of their more outrageous ideas were expounded by Nancy. They talked in the jargon of their day: "Darling, too too divine, too utterly sickmaking, how shamemaking!" Fascinated I would hang around in the drawing-room as much as I dared, until my presence was noticed and I was chased back up to the schoolroom...
A high point in my life came when Evelyn Waugh, a writer feller and one of the main Swinbrook sewers, promised me that he would immortalize Miranda by substituting the word "sheepish" for the standard "divine" in his forthcoming book Vile Bodies.