Spectator competition winners: Lady Chatterley’s Over and other novel titles with a letter removed

In Competition No. 3301, you were invited to delete one letter in the title of a well-known novel and provide an extract from the new work.

This one pulled in the punters. Highlights included Russell Chamberlain’s All the Pretty Hoses and Ralph Bateman’s Bleak Hose:‘Water everywhere. Water up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; water down the river, where it rolls defiled by untreated sewage. It was the wettest of times, it was the driest of times, it was a time of floods, it was a time of drought, it was the age of incompetence…’. There were also entertaining twists on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which saw Winston Smith transported back to the Roman Empire.

But in another fiercely contested week, these excellent offerings were elbowed out of the winning line-up by the entries printed below, which earn their authors £30 each.

To Stank, a Wiltshire hamlet, to officiate at a Tribunal Witchfinder Praisegood hath convened in pursuance of a coven thereabouts. ’Tis customary witches be of dry and spinsterly aspect, yet these women, long if unenthusiastically espoused, proved garrulous and of an unsettling fleshy demeanour. Witchfinder Praisegood bade them bare their swollen bellies, declaring them parodic of motherly gravidity. Further, the Tribunal heard them gurgling in what Witchfinder Praisegood did inform us was a wordless, almost masculine Satanic tongue productive, at every utterance, of a foul gas. Before Praisegood could proceed to humiliating himself further by raising such matters as the excessive physical clumsiness and licentious sensuality of these women, I did intercede, observing they were merely drunk, an allegation they denied with incriminating slurs. The brewing of beer proved their sole alchemical achievement, its gluttonous consumption their only sin. I freed them, sentencing that pious fool Praisegood to seven pints.

Adrian Fry/‘The Old Wives Ale’