Rummins
Rummins is one of the local farmers that populate the stories in this collection, appearing in a few and even giving his name as the title of one. He is introduced in the title story which opens the collection as a man Claud Cubbage claims would be world famous if people knew his secrets to bovine mating. His physical description arrives metaphorically in the form of a comparison by simile:
“He was a short man, built squat and broad like a frog. He had a wide frog mouth and broken teeth and shifty eyes”
The Greyhound Racing Aficionados
“Mr. Feasey” is a story in which the scheme at the center by which Claud Cubbage is hoping to finally make a big score is fixing a greyhound race. The first-person narrator engages a particularly vicious tone of metaphor when describing those drawn to the event. In fact, they are made to sound like an army of Rummins.
“Sharp-nosed men and women with dirty faces and bad teeth and quick shifty eyes. The dregs of the big town. Oozing out like sewage from a cracked pipe and trickling along the road through the gate and making a smelly little pond of sewage at the top end of the field.”
Claud the Crusader
“The Champion of the World” situates Claud’s scheme within the rural tradition of poaching pheasants with the no-so-traditional mechanism of drugging them with raisins spiked with Seconal. The narrator recognizes a change in Claud; he has become quite focused on the activity like never before and begins to muse metaphorically:
“He was more purposeful about it now, more tight-lipped and intense than before, and I had the impress that this was not so much a game any longer as a crusade, a sort of private war that Claud was waging single-handed against an invisible and hated enemy.
But who?"
Mr. Feasey
Feasey runs the greyhound track and as a result he is an expert. The story which shares his name is the one in which Claud’s scheme of the day involves fixing a race and that fixing requires Feasey giving Claud’s dog a professional inspection. The description of Feasey conducting that inspection gives a very strong sense of just how professional it is:
“His face was pink and fleshy, the mouth small and tight as though it couldn’t stretch enough to make a smile, and the eyes were like two little cameras focused sharply on the dog.”
Conservative Heaven
Cyril Boggis makes his fortune by doing whatever it takes to buy belongings for the price of junk and then sell them for cost of antiques. One of his most successful cons involves disguising himself as a hardcore right-wing parson collecting for “The Society for the Preservation of Rare Furniture.” Rural folk are easy: convince them you’re against the Socialist Party and they are yours for the taking. For this reason, Boggis always packs a go-to power tool for winning the affection of country people he plans to cheat mercilessly:
“As a clincher, he made particular reference to the Bill…introduced for the abolition of blood sports in the country, and when on to inform his listener of his idea of heaven…a place one could hunt the fox, the stag, and the hare with large packs of tireless hounds from morn till night every day of the week, including Sundays.”
