“Fun” was synonymous with noise, and the most brilliant repartee known to any Senthoven was Bob’s favourite form of squashing such “nonsense” as a comment on the blueness of the sky: “Well, you didn’t expect to see it red, did you?”
Bob, a hobble-de-hoy of seventeen, short and thick-set, was his mother’s idol. But there was “no nonsense” allowed from poor Aunt Evelyn by her terrible daughters.
“The mater’s so mushy,” they shouted disgustedly, when she made excuse, on the morning after Lydia’s arrival, for Bob’s very tardy appearance.
Lydia looked round the breakfast-table. She was quite well again now, and breakfast upstairs would have been unheard of. Beatrice was a still larger, taller, more athletic, and, if possible, noisier edition of Olive. She had just left school, and her dark hair, very thick and heavy, was piled into untidy heaps at the back of her head.
“No nonsense about my hair, I can tell you. Half the time I don’t even look in the glass to see how I’ve done it,” Beatrice would declare proudly.
The girls wore flannel shirts, with collars and ties, and short skirts that invariably contrived to be rather longer at the back than they were in the front.
They strenuously refused to make any change of toilette in the evenings, only substituting heelless strapped black shoes for their large and sturdy boots, over their thick-ribbed stockings.
Those evenings were the noisiest that Lydia had ever known.
Only Uncle Robert, small, and sallow, and spectacled, was silent.
He sat at the foot of the table, said a brief, muttered grace, and dispensed the soup.