The Golden Dust-Bin by Adrian Coates
Author: Adrian Coates
Publisher: Not known
Source book: High Rising by Angela Thirkell
Adrian Coates is more usually known as a publisher, but when he was young he thought himself a poet and had rashly flown into print with The Golden Dust-Bin when he was still at Oxford. He is not only ashamed of his poems, but has never attempted to write any more.
Miss Gray, the overbearing, and very Irish, secretary of George Knox, is rather taken with Adrian’s poems; she thinks them lovely; she has seen a photograph of him in a newspaper article and thinks he is wonderful. When she tells Adrian he is embarrassed at his youthful rubbish and tells her it was the work of his twin brother Alfred who was clever and rather peculiar, with the face of a young god, but died young.
Adrian meets Miss Gray at a dinner party and, embarrassed at her enthusiasm for his dreadful youthful poetry, he invents a twin brother (deceased). I actually invented a fictional twin sister to avoid an overly friendly Turkish student who wanted me to come and stay with his mother in Istanbul. It’s a bit shaming, but I pretended he had met my sister (who often borrowed my coat).
Anyway, when Miss Gray mentions The Golden Dust-Bin to Laura Morland, she of course says Adrian never had a brother, he was just so ashamed of his very bad poetry.
Miss Gray was not best pleased.
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