" Corrugated iron? " he says to himself, as if tasting the word, like someone who's just woken up and is intensely trying to remember what he's been dreaming.
As one does when faced with the undeniable fact that a bit of corrugated iron is the sort of thing that all normal, right-thinking people keep lying about in their sheds, just in case there's call for it.
As one does when facing the indisputable fact that there's nothing odd about a normal man without a metal roof getting through his corrugated iron at such a rate that it runs out.
Leila had learned to dance at boarding school. Every Saturday afternoon the boarders were hurried off to a little corrugated iron mission hall where Miss Eccles (of London) held her " select" classes.
It is terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western flood flinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulous foam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless architectural form.
Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
And to help her mother, who had tried so hard to keep her in school by selling her only assets, a stack of corrugated iron sheets she had been saving in the hope of building a better home for her children.