2. THE BOY FROM THE BIG HOUSE

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

Ursula leaves school and goes to work in the village shop.

When Ursula reached the dizzy age of 14 she was expected to leave school. After all, she was a girl and hardly anyone could see much point in educating girls beyond infancy, and fourteen was a long way beyond that. As long as she could add tuppence for this to threepence for that together and subtract the total from a shilling she was educated enough.

She was just about to take herself off and tap humbly at the back door of Snooty Manor in search of domestic employment when a bombshell was dropped by the ringing of a fire bell and via the gift of powerful gossip. Not a literal bombshell, but one that forced her to put all her more devious plans on hold.

There was a fire at Snooty Manor. Spookily, that fire occurred in early November, but it was more related to the combustible nightdress worn by Lady Patience Snootnose when she was feeling the cold in her gnarled old bones and huddling as close as she could get to a blazing fire whilst shivering quite violently in the withdrawing room than it was in celebration of a failed seventeenth century attempt at killing a king.

Fortunately, she escaped with most of her life (her hair, she was assured, would grow back and be more luxuriant than ever) because she hastily removed the blazing garment as she ran for her life.

The blazing garment, though, had been discarded onto the luxurious sofa, a special uncomfortable piece of fancy furniture that had been in the family since the year dot, and that was before there were any flame-proofing regulations in place, so nobody had thought of flame-proofing it. Consequently, it burst into a cascade of brilliant sheets of sparking fire and spread rapidly, via an Turkish carpet, to the curtains, which were tinder dry and waiting for it.

The Brumpton Fire Brigade turned up in time to rescue most of the house, but Squire Snootnose declared that the building would never be the same again and moved out to his London quarters, taking most of his family and servants with him.

Most, that is, except Charles, his youngest son.

He was to remain in Snooty Manor, in the undamaged South Wing which was nowhere near as grand as it sounded, but his father was quite adamant on one thing.

“You won’t be having any servants,” he threatened him, “you’ll have to do the skivvying yourself. I wouldn’t trust your trousers near any fragrant skivvy.”

“But why?” whined Charles, who had a private scheme involving a harem of skivvies.

“Because you’re damned devious!” replied his father, and that had to be that. “I’ve heard the rumours. I know what you get up to, but then you’re only a lad with overactive loins, a bit like your father...”

“Yes, father,” he replied pointedly, and started modifying his plans.

But he still had the south wing of his nice big house, and there are, he told himself, several ways of skinning a rabbit �" not that he’d ever skinned one or had intimate knowledge of even one of the ways such a cruelty might be achieved.

He had, though, noticed the Spandex girl and learned via the gift of devious enquiry in the village that she was fourteen and ripe for the plucking, not that he was quite sure what plucking was and even if it was the right word. He had particularly noticed that she had several unmistakable qualities, all of which affected him in the trouser region. And he wasn’t the only person to be aware of those qualities.

Farmer Bismuth had.

Farmer Bismuth had been a widower for above half a century, every since his wife Murial had passed away giving birth to a still born son, which had struck him as the height of carelessness on her part. By now he was getting on in years and had started wondering where on Earth the better part of his life had gone to, and even been seen shedding the odd tear on the subject when he was in a more or less morose mood. And one day when his labourer was called on in the potato field by his lass Ursula, he took one look at the girl and knew exactly what his life might have been and the kind of person it could have been with. It might have been, he fantasised, in a cosy cuddle with Ursula. But he did nothing about it because there was no way he could chase the girl, not with her being nimble and him needing the use of a zimmer frame.

But let us return to Ursula. There was no chance of a job in service at Snooty Manor. So she found herself alternative employment in the village shop run by Old Aunty Emmett. It was honest work, the hours were long, and that last fact kept her out of mischief. Until, that is, Charles Snootnose learned where she worked.

Any lonely youth in search of a lass in his life will confirm that meeting one who happens to work in the village shop is easy peasy. One only has to go in and buy something.

Anything.

“A tin a beans please,” he asked as gazed into her eyes for that first time.

She looked at him and something melted. Something inside her. It felt like strawberry ripple. Or a small rodent doing handstands against her innards.

This was the young man she’d seen out and about on his horse when she was equally out and about, but gathering things like blackberries and dandelion flowers for mum Spandex to make wine out of, and who she’d taken a worrying fancy to because, in truth, most girls considered him to be as ugly as a pot dog, what with his binocular squint and receding chin and a few other imperfections donated to him by a selfishly restricting gene pool. The Snootnoses, for generations, had only bred with variations on the Snootnose theme and thus, by pure breeding, had produced this nincompoop in trousers. But what is a nincompoop to some is an angel to others, or something like that.

Anyway, Ursula, despite her high intelligence and excellent breasts, quite fancied the young man, and suddenly, as if she’d rubbed Aladdin’s lamp, here he was buying beans.

“Anything else?” she asked, placing a tin of beans in front of him.

He didn’t need anything else, but, “a loaf of bread please,” he mumbled.

“White?” she asked.

He thought all bread was white if he thought of its colour at all.

“Of course,” he said. “Yum yum,” he added, without knowing why.

“Anything else?” she asked, emphasising what she knew was a spectacularly tidy bosom by encouraging it towards him.

But that was too much.

“Whaaa...” he screamed when his imagination revealed the magnificence of that bosom, and without beans or bread he found himself running out of the shop. That imagination, though, had been educated by a cheapish book he’d acquired secretly, a publication in which young ladies were posed naked, and printed in black and white. Fortunately someone during the manufacturing process had airbrushed vital body parts out or the law might have had something to say about the kind of person to own such works of deviant art. But, in truth, it left his education incomplete.

I mean, he sometimes thought, I’ve got little n*****s, so why haven’t ladies got any at all?

Such was his innocence. And it was that innocence that, on the very verge of him discovering reality, sent him racing into the street instead. And where he was knocked down by a passing cyclist and left lying for dead in the gutter. Or if not for dead, for very slightly bruised.

“That lad’s a moron,” growled Farmer Bismuth who’d popped in for his half ounce of strong shag.

But the poor lad’s quite lovely, thought Ursula to herself as she reached for the tobacco jar and smiled like the innocent she was.

TO BE CONTINUED...