A Bluestocking Knits

Booking Through Thursday‘s questions for today are similar to last week’s, but with a bit of a spin:

Go get a book that is in the most inconvenient place in your home.

1. What corner of your house did you dig this book out of?   Actually, I went out to the garage and moved a bundle of newspapers to get to a stack of boxes filled with the books we’d stored so that we could ship a bookcase with us to Hong Kong last February.  The book I chose today was not really the hardest one to get to, but after heaving four rather heavy boxes around, I decided to not even open the fifth.  (I skipped the most "inconvenient" book that was actually in the house, "Patterns of Fashion 2 : Englishwomen’s dresses and their construction c. 1860-1940" by Janet Arnold, because it has only 88 pages!)
2. What are the book’s title and author? "Fathom Five" by Robert Westall.
3. Turn to page 127. Locate the third paragraph, first sentence. Type that sentence here: "The woman’s pinny had flowers on it."
4. Does the sentence make sense out of context? I think it’s a bit too simple to make much sense out of context.
5. Seeing it sitting here by itself, out of the book, is it funny? Sad? Strange? Does it make you want to explore its source? I didn’t recall many of the details in this story, just a memory of being utterly absorbed by it.  To me, the sentence has a rather chilling poignance, but then I remember the rest of Westall’s stories, too (which are mostly for teens, with one adult non-fiction that I know of).  I first read this book after watching the fascinating  "Danger UXB" on PBS, when anything on Britain during WWII caught my eye.  When I finished "Fathom Five," I searched out "The Machine Gunners", the first book featuring Chas McGill of "Fathom Five," and in fact as many of Westall’s books as I could find.  I still have all that I did — he’s a fabulous writer, with a deceptively easy style.  Sometimes his books are realistic, sometimes with a supernatural twist, always engrossing.  I remember reading one of his books, "The Watch House," I think, sitting in the living room of the family home — I can picture the moment still — feeling the hairs on the back of my neck standing up (something I’d only heard about before, never felt).  I was almost afraid to put my feet on the floor, the story was so creepy.  Wonderful stuff!
6. Are you currently reading this book? Why? I was going to say, "No, see number 1," but I just found myself reading the rest of page 127, about the woman in the flowered apron, sitting in her cold, cold house, waiting to hear the footsteps of her Bill coming home from work, even though he’d been killed on the Russian convoys eight months earlier….