Smut: Two Unseemly Stories: 'The Greening of Mrs Donaldson' & 'The Shielding of Mrs Forbes'
Alan Bennett Audio Book

Alan Bennett is arguably most famous for his Talking Heads monologues, and in this collection of two stories we see why Bennett is widely regarded as one of the 20^th Century’s finest writers and a bestselling author. This CD audiobook (also available as an MP3 download) features two of Bennett’s wonderfully imaginative stories: The Greening of Mrs Donaldson and The Shielding.

In The Greening of Mrs Donaldson, we meet a middle class woman by the name of Mrs Donaldson - a rather conservative character who has lead an equally mundane life. We enter the story as she goes through the transition from being in a marriage that began happy, fell into the satisfactory category and then finally became a boring and tedious unification. Now she is alone and the grieving widow. However, when she makes the uncharacteristically bold decision to take in two lodgers to help to pay her rent, her dull life is turned upside down in the best way imaginable.

The second story is The Shielding during which Graham Forbes comes to the realisation that he is nothing more than a disappointment to his mother, after marrying a woman whom she thinks is far from acceptable. In true Bennett style, we soon find that the bedroom shenanigans of Graham and his wife and indeed his mother and her husband play a poignant role in the storyline.