H.E. Bates Companion

The title is the phrase used by the narrator to promise secrecy as his Uncle Silas tells a very tall tale of an adventure with a woman, hiding in the cellar when her husband arrives, being forgotten by her for a week, and subsisting on stewed nails. A television adaptation starring Albert Finney was aired in 2003. In John O'London's Weekly (October 9, 1936), Story (January 1937), The Best Short Stories of 1937 (London: Cape, 1937), Something Short and Sweet (1937), My Uncle Silas (1939), Argosy (March 1942). Reprinted in Laughter in a Damp Climate (1963).