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> Aunt Maud, a middle-class lady who, in letters, keeps her nephew in the army informed on Home Front conditions, particularly the feud between the Whist Club Committee and the Impoverished Gentlewoman's True Blue Conservative Associaation; Uncle Fred and the ironmonger—the local Home Guard unit is too small to hold them both; Aunt Maud's gardener, who persistently reads Karl Marx and who says "It is no use planting anything this spring as we shall have the revolution before the onions come up."
> The Sparrow, a human sort of bird who is forever quarreling with Mrs. Sparrow over trivial war annoyances. Each week, after a tiff, he flies off in a fret to his club or the Other Sparrow while a tear trickles down Mrs. Sparrow's beak.
> Margaret's father, a man who loves drink and statistics of Nazi casualties.
Cockney. Nathaniel Gubbins says of himself: "I am an English Cockney." He got his first job in the Daily Express library, filing clippings. After World War I he was rehired as a reporter, but later was laid off. He tried short-story writing, then caught on as a reporter for the London Daily Mirror. There he acquired no reputation, but did acquire a wife: Mirror Reporter Phillida Hughes. They were once assigned to cover a pomp-&-pageantry affair. Since both suffered from ochlophobia (fear of crowds), they covered it from a tea shop. Gubbins wrote a glowing account of the occasion sight unseen and had time left to persuade Phillida to marry him.
After a stint on the Sunday Dispatch he joined the Sunday Express, in November 1930, began writing "Sitting On The Fence" for Express readers, who immediately began to lob indignant letters into the Express office. Nat Gubbins kept at it, slowly acquired his present tremendous following.
He lives in a suburban town 20 miles from London with redheaded, cheerful Mrs. Gubbins, Daughters Felicity. 19, and Stephanie, 17, with a cat which actually has had 109 kittens. Gubbins goes to London Thursdays only. The rest of the week he invites his sensitive soul and ear, especially in pubs, picks up many a slow-spoken Briticism:
"If only Gandhi would fast at our house we could have his ration book."
"British coffee is the chief reason why Americans won't visit British homes."
Gubbins' ability to reduce wartime annoyances to absurdity and make Britons chuckle at themselves and their annoyers is the peg on which hangs his success. Last week, counting an average of three readers for each copy of the Sunday Express sold, lugubrious Nathaniel Gubbins had an audience of almost 5,000,000.