Ellen Pitblado is a widow who lives in recluse in 1930s Gloucestershire. When her scummy journalist nephew, Douglas, tries to force her to give him her money, she calls her mysterious lookalike gentlemen friends to her aid.
Charthurst Green, Kent, 1966. Pauline Cox accompanies Mike Robins to a village cricket match in which he is playing, but becomes bored and wanders away. She fetches up at the local railway station, where she is first entertained to tea by the garrulous, hunchbacked station master, then upset by the intrusion of the latter's assistant Ewen, who proceeds to kill a rabbit in her presence. Making her way back to the match, Pauline is waylaid by the simple-minded Ewen as she crosses an apple orchard; when his advances become violent, she tries to fight him off and he strangles her. The station master helps in covering up the murder, burying the corpse in the orchard.
The waters surrounding an island become contaminated by chemical dumping, and people who eat fish caught in those waters become deformed and violent.
Dulcima, treated as a drudge by her family, becomes a housekeeper to Parker, a curmudgeonly widower living in drunken disarray on a neighbouring farm. When she sees the amount of money he has stashed around the place, Dulcima is happy enough to indulge his growing desire for her, and a strange, yet mutually beneficial, relationship develops. But a handsome young gamekeeper, newly arrived on a nearby estate, also catches Dulcima's eye...
Dreamlike satire about a young man who resists getting a job at the lone employing conglomerate in his dreary industrial town, but changes his mind when he discovers the plant's boiler room has the perfect climate to assist him with his pet horticultural (fungal) project.