An example of Mr Booth's humour may be seen in his description of the installation of the harmonium in the chapel:
"There were two grand services ... and the cobbler from Sproutgreen walked all the way over to Whivvle in a parson's hat and a white tie, to tell folk what a sinful life he had led in his younger days and how, but for the Living Word, he might probably have been wearing a grey coat and coloured kerchief to this day, and been even as the other sinners whom he had met this morning bicycling along the road to Hell. And Bless Allcot's eyes were as wet as cut lemons ... and at both services he prayed in the key of G flat minor for absent Brethren."
Fondie's father, who in old days had scraped his fiddle-strings so frenziedly in that chapel that he had to give the fiddle a rest for one verse in three, "to cool her bearings and prevent her from firing," naturally hated the innovation, but went to the chapel to shame the others ... "he went, casting the chapel into such a hush as if he had been his own corpse, so that the praying went as dry as a duck-pond in August ... and Bless Allcot's daughter let the wind out of the harmonium time after time and lost all her faculty for counting how many verses there were in each hymn" ... and Fondie's father returns home triumphant:
"'Aye. It's been a judgment on 'em. Lord's visited 'em.'"
Fondie, like the Spawer in The Cliff-End, "could bide music as long as a sow could bide scratching," and Blanche made him play the organ for her in church, but because he wouldn't kiss her, altered the figures in the hymns, making threes into eights and ones into sevens so that he would play his worst, which he did.
"If he had been half a man—for there was nobody in the workshop at the time, except the two of them, amid the seductive warm scent of fresh pine-shavings—Fondie would have thrown both arms round Blanche's neck and held on. Blanche would only have whispered, 'Shut up, Fondie! Fondie, you silly fool!' and Fondie would have whispered, 'Who's a silly fool?' between the kisses, and Blanche would have answered, 'You, you fool!' struggling with just sufficient discretion to give his kisses the requisite raptorial flavour ... and who knows how differently Whivvle history might have had to be written.... For that one kiss, or the lack of it, is altering lives the whole world over."
So Fondie is left to experience all the pitfalls of the double chant and odd verse as the village church organist and the awful feeling that accompanies the falling into it, as if one had slipped off the belfry ladder in the dark.
The family to which Blanche belonged was a big one, but most of them were abroad: there was, however, Harold, in an accountant's office in Hunmouth, who went to music halls twice a week and wore cuffs, and a younger brother, who went to the village school and wore corduroys, but Blanche was the only one that mattered—Blanche with her profligate golden hair and blue eyes, Blanche of the cheap Birmingham jewellery, Blanche, who inspired respect from no one except Fondie, who addressed her as "Miss," or "Miss Blanche" in all circumstances, "as naturally as he would take up his gravy on the knife-blade, without, for a moment, contemplating any other way."
We are shown Blanche in all her nakedness, from her earliest days, when "I wish I had a sovereign for every time that Blanche rode in the hat-rack in defiance of the notice that this was provided for light luggage only," until the day when the verdict on her body goes forth, "Found Drowned." She would have assignations in the belfry while Harold folded cigarettes during the Litany and pared his nails for the coming week and read The Confessions of a Lady's Maid and Secrets of Matrimony with his head down, as if he had had a stroke, whilst his father preached from Samuel and Kings.
"The Creator that conceived and executed Blanche, and equipped her with that amphitheatre of teeth and those scintillating eyes, must have been a tyro at his trade if he really expected sobriety and worship of them; or else a jocund God of Mirth, who loved laughter and human happiness."