Free Stiff Upper Lip by Lawrence Durrell

the Ritz to watch Toby get progged. Shall we?” Antrobus’ face lit up with a fitful and hesitant smile. “Could we do it without being seen?”
    â€œOf course. I wouldn’t miss this for worlds. Come on.”
    He was still somewhat reluctant but I dragged him to a taxi and we set off. It was all just as he had said it would be. “Such joy is seldom granted us,” muttered Antrobus as we crouched on the floor of the taxi, hats over our faces, drinking in the beautiful scene which was being enacted outside the Ritz. Such a crowd, too. There was Toby perspiring and swearing and fanning himself with his boater. There was the mother-of-pearl Rolls kneeling down like a camel. There was a large, a deliciously large policeman, obviously in perfect health, making notes in a book and repeating with an air of disbelief the fatal words: “O you was was you?” leaving little doubt that this time the smircher had been well and truly smirched.
    â€œSo scrumptious, such bliss,” said Antrobus. He closed his eyes and his lips moved in silent thanksgiving for a moment. It was indeed a sigh to hearten one. We both felt the better for it, indeed positively inspired. Involuntarily we started singing (but very softly, lest the cabman hear us) the opening verses of the Foreign Service Anthem whose words are by the immortal Harry Graham.
    We were playing golf
    The Day the Germans landed.
    All our troops had run away,
    All our ships were stranded,
    And the thought of England’s shame
    Nearly put us off our game.

A Biography of Lawrence Durrell
    Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet, his acclaimed series of four novels set before and during World War II in Alexandria, Egypt. Durrell’s work was widely praised, with his Quartet winning the greatest accolades for its rich style and bold use of multiple perspectives. Upon the Quartet’s completion, Life called it “the most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time.”
    Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Durrell was an avid and dedicated writer from an early age. He studied in Darjeeling before his parents sent him to England at the age of eleven for his formal education. When he failed to pass his entrance examinations at Cambridge University, Durrell committed himself to becoming an established writer. He published his first book of poetry in 1931 when he was just nineteen years old, and later worked as a jazz pianist to help fund his passion for writing.
    Determined to escape England, which he found dreary, Durrell convinced his widowed mother, siblings, and first wife, Nancy Isobel Myers, to move to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. The island lifestyle reminded him of the India of his childhood. That same year, Durrell published his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. He also read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and, impressed by the notorious novel, he wrote an admiring letter to Miller. Miller responded in kind, and their correspondence and friendship would continue for forty-five years. Miller’s advice and work heavily influenced Durrell’s provocative third novel, The Black Book (1938), which was published in Paris. Though it was Durrell’s first book of note, The Black Book was considered mildly pornographic and thus didn’t appear in print in Britain until 1973.
    In 1940, Durrell and his wife had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. The following year, as World War II escalated and Greece fell to the Nazis, Durrell and his family left Corfu for work in Athens, Kalamata (also in Greece), then Alexandria, Egypt. His relationship with Nancy was strained by the time they reached Egypt, and they separated in 1942. During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassy. He also wrote Prospero’s Cell, a guide to Corfu, while living in Egypt in 1945.
    Durrell met Yvette