Rude Mechanicals

A dry look at the idyllic life of a picturesque English village.

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'It wasn't his fault that he couldn't say no to his wife. The truth was his manners were so perfect they threatened his direct impulses with total extinction' Peter Skeffington is a polite man approaching middle age by means of a growing communications gap with his wife. The silent rift centres upon Peter's desire for, and Lucy's resistance to, the adoption of Danny, inmate of a local home for young offenders. Pendbury is hardly a stock village; picturesque consolation lies thin on the ground. The vicar's crookback companion obsesses over animals right, whispering mantra-like his favourite word ''utensil, utensil'' to steel his nerve for attack. The garage owner is a religious maniac who insists on family names being drawn from the Bible and is rewarded for his piety by a pair of granddaughters, Jezebel and Salome, who live up to their names. Nothing is as simple as it seems in Peter's life, or in the thatch-roofed Arcadia that is the English village of Pendbury.