Example sentences of "had been [adv] for [noun pl] " in BNC.

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1 But if she came and found Tina up she could pretend to herself that Tina had been up for hours , and was a normal person and a proper mother .
2 He had been up for hours , out on the farm , before eating .
3 They were in the middle of a meeting and he was irritated that Stevens ' mind — often his entire presence — had been elsewhere for weeks .
4 If no one had been here for years , why did she fancy she could smell cigarette smoke ?
5 Second , it was based in and expressed a paradox : that the educational reform had been primarily for men ; women were still relatively excluded .
6 After his visits to London his wife was waiting to welcome him as if he had been away for weeks , and she was always dutiful in bed .
7 Nevertheless they smiled and waved at him as he came in and Deuce , at the tape recorder , came over , arms open , as if he had been away for weeks .
8 When they first moved far enough into the courtyard to glimpse Gabriel sitting on his cloud , the morning sunshine dazzled eyes that had been indoors for days on end .
9 And I saw a dear little shed that someone had made into a craft shop , and the woman said no one had been in for ages , and was n't she pleased to see me … ’
10 ‘ It had been there for years — I played there myself as a child — but it was situated in the worst possible place .
11 Her new life at Usher started appropriately on January 1st One day in the office , and she understood the situation better than some of the staff who had been there for years .
12 I 'd been sexually abused and all of a sudden the poison that had been there for years started boiling to the surface .
13 There was no sign that anyone had been there for months .
14 Diamonds and rare jewels were strewn across the floor as if they had been there for millennia .
15 Some refugees in the embassy gardens said they had been there for days , but had not boarded the sealed refugee trains travelling through East Germany to Bavaria .
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