Winifred’s Bloomers

English novelist Winifred Ashton had a disastrous gift for inadvertent double entendre. From Cole Lesley’s biography of Noël Coward:

The first I can remember was when poor Gladys was made by Noël to explain to Winifred that she simply could not say in her latest novel, ‘He stretched out and grasped the other’s gnarled, stumpy tool.’ The Bloomers poured innocently from her like an ever-rolling stream: ‘Olwen’s got crabs!’ she cried as you arrived for dinner, or ‘We’re having roast cock tonight!’ At the Old Vic, in the crowded foyer, she argued in ringing tones, ‘But Joyce, it’s well known that Shakespeare sucked Bacon dry.’ It was Joyce too who anxiously inquired after some goldfish last seen in a pool in the blazing sun and was reassured, ‘Oh, they’re all right now! They’ve got a vast erection covered with everlasting pea!’ ‘Oh the pleasure of waking up to see a row of tits outside your window,’ she said to Binkie during a weekend at Knott’s Fosse. Schoolgirl slang sometimes came into it, for she was in fact the original from whom Noël created Madame Arcati: ‘Do you remember the night we all had Dick on toast?’ she inquired in front of the Governor of Jamaica and Lady Foot. Then there was her ghost story : ‘Night after night for weeks she tried to make him come …’

“Why could she not have used the word ‘materialise’?” wrote Lesley, who was Coward’s secretary. “But then if she had we should never have had the fun.” See Shocking!