Laughing their hods off

The caretakers are in tumult. They spent all morning tooling round libraries picking up boxes of books that hadn't sold locally in sales. They've just shifted ninety-two boxes of books and sundry trestle tables into the side room for Helminthdale's big booksale. Now T. Aldous tells them that the room's got to be cleared on Friday morning for a meeting. And then three hours later the books and trestle tables have to be replaced. The air is ripe with Anglo-Saxon invective.