Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe - Wild Youth

Wild Youth

While Emsworth's brother Gally is preparing his reminiscences in Summer Lightning, he reveals quite a lot about the Baronet's black past. Although the first twenty years or so of his life were relatively blameless, he went off the rails to a considerable degree, and was considered a dangerous type by his contemporaries.

When Galahad first met him, Parsloe was walking around a supper-table at Romano's, wearing a soup-tureen on his head and holding a stick of celery, claiming he was a sentry outside Buckingham Palace. He is remembered as the only man ever to have been thrown out of the Cafe de l'Europe for trying to raise the price of a bottle of champagne by raffling his trousers at the bar.

Notoriously sneaky, he once tricked Gally into parting with over ten pounds, using a fixed spinning top, and at one point, Gally asserts, doped Gally's dog Towser with steak and onions just before a rat-catching competition in the back room of the Black Footman in Gossiter Street, allowing Parsloe's dog Banjo to win the day.

While living down the river at Shepperton, where his father was Dean, he wangled free dinners by getting his dog to do tricks for parties of day-trippers, thus getting into conversation with them; he would then blithely follow them into dinner and tuck in to their champagne and cigars.

Sometime in the late 'nineties (the exact year is uncertain), he stole Lord Burper's false teeth and pawned them at a shop on the Edgware Road; he was also involved in a mysterious incident revolving around the shellfish known as prawns, of which little is known, save that it took place at Ascot, "the year Martingale won the Gold Cup".

At some point in his impecunious youth, he became engaged to one Maudie Montrose, barmaid at the old Criterion, but their wedding was a wash-out thanks to some confusion over dates (although at the time both thought the other had stood them up)