He was an extremely stout individual with a large pink face and a Panama hat with a pink ribbon. A perfect stranger to me, and I wondered what he was doing here. He didn't look the sort of crony Aunt Dahlia would have invited to stay, and still less Uncle Tom, who is so allergic to guests that when warned of their approach he generally makes a bolt for it and disappears, leaving not a wrack behind as I have heard Jeeves put it. However, as I was saying, you never know what aunts will be up to next and no doubt the ancestor had had some good reason for asking the chap to come and mix, so I beamed civilly and opened the conversation with a genial 'Hullo there'.

'Nice day,' I said, continuing to beam civilly. 'Or, rather, not so frightfully nice. Looks as if we were in for a thunderstorm.'

Something seemed to have annoyed him. The pink of his face had deepened to about the colour of his Panama hat ribbon, and both his chins trembled slightly.

'Damn thunderstorms!' he responded – curtly, I suppose, would be the word – and I said I didn't like them myself. It was the lightning, I added, that I chiefly objected to.

'They say it never strikes twice in the same place, but then it hasn't got to.'

'Damn the lightning! What are you doing with my camera?'

This naturally opened up a new line of thought.

'Oh, is this your camera?'

'Yes, it is.'

'I was taking it to the house.'

'You were, were you?'

'I didn't want it to get wet.'

'Oh? And who are you?'

I was glad he had asked me that. His whole manner had made it plain to a keen mind like mine that he was under the impression that he had caught me in the act of absconding with his property, and I was glad to have the opportunity of presenting my credentials. I could see that if we were ever to have a good laugh together over this amusing misunderstanding, there would have to be a certain amount of preliminary spadework.

'Wooster is the name,' I said. 'I'm my aunt's nephew. I mean,' I went on, for those last words seemed to me not to have rung quite right, 'Mrs Travers is my aunt.'

'You are staying in the house?'

'Yes. Just arrived.'

'Oh?' he said again, but this time in what you might call a less hostile tone.

'Yes,' I said, rubbing it in.

There followed a silence, presumably occupied by him in turning things over in his mind in the light of my statement and examining them in depth and then he said 'Oh?' once more and stumped off.

I made no move to accompany him. What little I had had of his society had been ample. As we were staying in the same house, we would no doubt meet occasionally, but not, I resolved, if I saw him first. The whole episode reminded me of my first encounter with Sir Watkyn Bassett and the misunderstanding about his umbrella. That had left me shaken, and so had this. I was glad to have a rustic bench handy, so that I could sit and try to bring my nervous system back into shape. The sky had become more and more inky I suppose is the word I want and the odds on a thunderstorm shorter than ever, but I still lingered. It was only when there came from above a noise like fifty-seven trucks going over a wooden bridge that I felt that an immediate move would be judicious. I rose and soon gathered speed, and I had reached the French window of the drawing– room and was on the point of popping through, when from within there came the sound of a human voice. On second thoughts delete the word 'human', for it was the voice of my recent acquaintance with whom I had chatted about cameras.

I halted. There was a song I used to sing in my bath at one time, the refrain or burthen of which began with the words 'I stopped and I looked and I listened', and this was what I did now, except for the looking. It wasn't raining, nor was there any repetition of the trucks-going-over-a-wooden-bridge noise. It was as though Nature had said to itself 'Oh to hell with it' and decided that it was too much trouble to have a thunderstorm after all. So I wasn't getting struck by lightning or even wet, which enabled me to remain in status quo.

The camera bloke was speaking to some unseen companion, and what he said was;

'Wooster, his name is. Says he's Mrs Travers's nephew.'

It was plain that I had arrived in the middle of a conversation. The words must have been preceded by a query, possibly 'Oh, by the way, do you happen to know who a tall, slender, good-looking – I might almost say fascinating – young man I was talking to outside there would be?', though of course possibly not. That, at any rate, must have been the gist, and I suppose the party of the second part had replied 'No, sorry, I can't place him', or words to that effect. Whereupon the camera chap had spoken as above. And as he spoke as above a snort rang through the quiet room; a voice, speaking with every evidence of horror and disgust, exclaimed 'Wooster!'; and I quivered from hair– do to shoe sole. I may even have gasped, but fortunately not loud enough to be audible beyond the French window.

For it was the voice of Lord Sidcup – or, as I shall always think of him, no matter how many titles he may have inherited, Spode. Spode, mark you, whom I had thought and hoped I had seen the last of after dusting the dust of Totleigh Towers from the Wooster feet; Spode, who went about seeking whom he might devour and from early boyhood had been a hissing and a by-word to all right– thinking men. Little wonder that for a moment everything seemed to go black and I had to clutch at a passing rose bush to keep from falling.

This Spode, I must explain for the benefit of the newcomers who have not read the earlier chapters of my memoirs, was a character whose path had crossed mine many a time and oft, as the expression is, and always with the most disturbing results. I have spoken of the improbability of a beautiful friendship ever getting under way between me and the camera chap, but the likelihood of any such fusion of souls, as I have heard Jeeves call it, between me and Spode was even more remote. Our views on each other were definite. His was that what England needed if it was to become a land fit for heroes to live in was fewer and better Woosters, while I had always felt that there was nothing wrong with England that a ton of bricks falling from a height on Spode's head wouldn't cure.

'You know him?' said the camera chap.

'I'm sorry to say I do,' said Spode, speaking like Sherlock Holmes asked if he knew Professor Moriarty. 'How did you happen to meet him?'

'I found him making off with my camera.'

'Ha!'

'Naturally I thought he was stealing it. But if he's really Mrs Travers's nephew, I suppose I was mistaken.'

Spode would have none of this reasoning, though it seemed pretty sound to me. He snorted again with even more follow-through than the first time.

'Being Mrs Travers's nephew means nothing. If he was the nephew of an archbishop he would behave in a precisely similar manner. Wooster would steal anything that was not nailed down, provided he could do it unobserved. He couldn't have known you were there?'

'No. I was behind a bush.'

'And your camera looks a good one.'

'Cost me a lot of money.'

'Then of course he was intending to steal it. He must have thought he had dropped into a bit of good luck. Let me tell you about Wooster. The first time I met him was in an antique shop. I had gone there with Sir Watkyn Bassett, my future father-in-law. He collects old silver. And Sir Watkyn had propped his umbrella up against a piece of furniture. Wooster was there, but lurking, so we didn't see him.'

'In a dark corner, perhaps?'

'Or behind something. The first we saw of him, he was sneaking off with Sir Watkyn's umbrella.'

'Pretty cool.'

'Oh, he's cool all right. These fellows have to be.'

'I suppose so. Must take a nerve of ice.'