Lord Uffenham, sixth earl, is pear-shaped, with huge feet and a tendency to go on about his gallant youth, Boat Race Nights revelry and being thrown out of Victorian music halls. He has rented his ancestral Shipley Hall to rich, big-game-huntress widow Mrs Cork, and she is running it as a vegetarian, teetotal health farm. Lord Uffenham stays on in the guise of butler, Cakebread. He has hidden some diamonds away and cannot remember where. He worries because they are all he can give his niece Anne as dowry. If he can't find the diamonds, he will have to make the supreme sacrifice for Anne's sake, and marry Mrs Cork for her money. It turns out that the diamonds, which have given the book its treasure-hunting, with Chimp Twist, Dolly and Soapy Molloy at it again, are in the bank at the other side of the pond.

Jeff Miller, like Romeo, and so many Wodehouse heroes, is engaged to the wrong girl at the start. Anne Benedick, heroine, is likewise engaged, to handsome, silky-moustached, feet-of-clay Lionel Green, interior decorator. Anne, at the end, says 'I ever want to see another beautiful man as long as I live.'

Wodehouse wrote this novel while interned by the Germans. Probably all-male camps account for the use of words such as 'fanny', 'bloody awful', 'too bloody much' and 'lavatory inspector'. Such modernisms must be balanced against Wodehouse's dreamy return to an England where telephones hardly exist. At one stage in this story Jeff goes up to London from the hall to send a message to Chimp at Halsey Court, Mayfair, by district messenger. The Cork Health Farm, filled with clients longing for square meals, may have got an impetus from internment camps.

Here Jeff Miller is a buzzer. Not the first, but it's the first time Wodehouse has used the word for the type. Chimp says here that he wishes he had thought of starting a health farm, forgetting that in the earlier Money for Nothing he had been running one.

Source: Richard Usborne. Plum Sauce. A P G Wodehouse Companion.