Billy Liar (1963)

An Education (2009)

From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell (Ballantine Books 1964)

"About your boyfriends, Mrs. Missal?" As soon as the words were out Wexford knew he had been obtuse.

"Oh, no," she said sharply. "You've got it wrong. Not then, not in the garden. It was a wilderness, an old pond, bushes, a seat. We used to talk about . . . well, about our dreams, what we wanted to do, what we were going to make of our lives." She stopped and Wexford could see in a sudden flash of vision a wild green place, the girls with their books, and hear with his mind's ear the laughter, the gasp of dizzy ambition. Then he almost jumped at the change in her voice. She whispered savagely, as if she had forgotten he was there: "I wanted to act! They wouldn't let me, my father and mother. They made me stay at home and it all went. It sort of dissolved into nothing." She shook back her hair and smoothed with the tips of two fingers the creases that had appeared between her eyebrows. "I met Pete," she said, "and we got married." Her nose wrinkled. "The story of my life."

"You can't have everything," Wexford said.

"No," she said, "I wasn't the only one . . . ."

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark (Penguin Books 1960)

'In feeding the line!' Dougal said

'In feeding the line,' Mr Druce said. 'As I say, this expert came from Cambridge. But we felt that a Cambridge man in Personnel wouldn't do. What we feel about you is you'll be in touch with the workers, or rather, as we prefer to say, our staff; you'll be in the know, we feel. Of course you'll find the world of Industry a tough one.'

Dougal turned sideways in his chair and gazed out of the window at the railway bridge; he was now a man of vision with a deformed shoulder. 'The world of Industry,' said Dougal, 'throbs with human life. It will be my job to take the pulse of the people and plumb the industrial depths of Peckham.'

Mr Druce said: 'Exactly. You have to bridge the gap and hold out a helping hand. Our absenteeism,' he said, 'is a problem.'

'They must be bored with their jobs,' said Dougal in a split second of absent-mindedness.

'I wouldn't say bored, ' said Mr Druce. 'Not bored. Meadows Meade are building up a sound reputation with regard to their worker-staff. We have a training scheme, a recreation scheme and a bonus scheme. We haven't yet got a pension scheme, or a marriage scheme, or a burial scheme, but these will come. Comparatively speaking we are a small concern, I admit, but we are expanding.'