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Excerpt
from The Scourging of Poor Little Maggie
Tessa and
her daughter, Maggie were on the Trans Siberian Railway, in a
cramped carriage, travelling through the flat steppelands.
"God,
this is an ugly country!" shouted Tessa. Maggie flushed to
the roots of her hair and ignored her.
"Oh,
this is such an ugly country!" repeated Tessa, in an even
more challenging tone.
"But
it's so pure and radiant," insisted her daughter.
"I'll
give you a pure and radiant clip on the ear, if you don't watch
it. Just look at it! Can you beat it?"
"Beat
what?"
"The
sheer phenomenal ugliness of this country!"
"Well,
I will concede this, Mummy. Russian poets are always banging on
about it, but after seeing too much of it, it starts to look as
flat as a rent boy's tits."
"Language,
my girl, language!" replied the mother.
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