Plot
Frederick Altamont Cornwalis Twistleton, fifth Earl of Ickenham, known to all as Uncle Fred, is on the loose once again (Lady Ickenham having decamped for a wedding in Trinidad), and Reginald ("Pongo") Twistleton, his long-suffering nephew (and Drones Club member) has every right to be petrified.
Uncle Fred has just arrived at Ashenden Manor, home of Sir Aylmer Bostock, Pongo's future father-in-law. Pongo is already in residence and has committed two rank floaters: accidentally smashing a whatnot from Sir Aylmer's collection of African curios, and (in the course of demonstrating how Brazilian natives kill birds with rude slings) smashing a coveted bust of his host.
Pongo's solution is to replace the busted bust with another one, abstracted from Ickenham hall. But unknown to him, the replacement bust was fashioned by his former fiancée Sally Painter, and conceals valuable jewellery that a friend of hers was planning to smuggle through New York Customs.
Sally tries to replace the bust with another of Sir Aylmer she sculpted (but had had returned to her, after an unfortunate incident relating to her brother Otis' publication of Sir Aylmer's memoirs), but this comes to naught, and both busts end up in Sir Aylmer's collection room.
Uncle Fred sees these not as reverses, but as opportunities to show his stuff. Having met Bill Oakshott (the nominal owner of Ashenden Manor, but under the thumb of his uncle Sir Aylmer) on the train, he contrives to get invited to the house—under the name of Major Brabazon-Plank. Unfortunately, the local Constable, Harold Potter, happens to have grown up with Major Plank (and also happens to remember arresting Uncle Fred and Pongo at the dog races under the names of Edwin Smith of Nasturtium Road, East Dulwich). Potter, intimately tied to the household through his fiancée, the housemaid Elsie Bean, becomes suspicious, and watches the house.
Uncle Fred's tasks before him are to snatch the bust for Sally Painter; get Sir Aylmer to drop his suit against Otis, so Sally will not lose the money she invested in his firm; convince Pongo to turn down Hermione Bostock and marry Sally instead; restore Bill Oakshott to his place as head of his family home; and convince Constable Potter not only to not arrest him, but indeed to quit the force so he and Elsie Bean may live happily ever after. The only obstacles in his way are the real Major Brabazon-Plank and the irresistible opportunity to judge the Bonnie Babies competition at the Ashenden Oakshott Fête.
Bill Oakshott finds inspiration in the dominant hero of Ethel M. Dell's 'The Way of an Eagle'. This real-life female novelist was a model for another of Wodehouse's characters, Rosie M. Banks.
The story has also been adapted as a serial in six half-hour episodes for BBC Radio 4, starring Richard Briers as Uncle Fred and Hugh Grant as Pongo, with narration by Paul Eddington.
Uncle Fred and Pongo would return in Cocktail Time (1958) and Service With a Smile (1961).
Read more about this topic: Uncle Dynamite
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)