Here’s a transcript for Armistead’s introduction before the reading: Today I’m going to read to you from one of my favorite books. It was when I was a boy—or a teenager, rather—and it still is. I love it very much, and I think you can see the ways in which it influenced my writing of Mona of the Manor.

It’s by Dodie Smith, who was a twentieth-century—well, her life spanned the twentieth century—English playwright. I was always rather sorry in the ’80s that, when I heard she was living in England, I didn’t get out to see her, because I would have had lots of adoration for her. But I didn’t.

I did have a connection with her in that she and her husband, Alec Beesley—he was a conscientious objector, and they thought they’d have a better chance of that happening in America than in England. That’s how much things have changed.

So they settled in Malibu and several places in California, and at the time met my friend Christopher Isherwood. Chris remembered them running on the beach with their dogs. Their dogs were Pongo and Perdita, which—if you know 101 Dalmatians, one of Dodie Smith’s most famous novels—you know are the names of the dogs.

Of course, I was friends with Christopher Isherwood, but sadly I never had the opportunity to get an introduction to Dodie Smith. I’m sure I could have gotten one. She died in 1990, and she was herself ninety-something, I think.

At any rate, she was a famous English playwright, among other things. At one point she had three comedies in production in the West End at the same time. And her most famous books, because of the movies made from them, were 101 Dalmatians and—less so, because I didn’t like the adaptation—I Capture the Castle. It didn’t seem to capture the essence of the book to me, but I think that was about ten or fifteen years ago that that happened.

So anyway—without further ado—I’m going to read to you a good part of the first chapter of I Capture the Castle, so you can get something of a flavor.

I Capture the Castle is supposedly a series of notebooks that Cassandra Mortmain, the heroine, keeps herself. So it’s a kind of diary. This first one is called “The Sixpenny Book,” because she wrote it in a cheap notebook, I think.

It has a first paragraph that is one of the more memorable in literature and one of the reasons I love this book…Here’s the opening paragraph:

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring – I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.”

You can hear Armistead reading more of the first chapter in the video.

“I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith was first published in 1948.

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