QUILPS SPEAKS OUT

Quilps would love to see the return of Victorin morality.

If Indigo Quilps was anything at all, he was faithful: but not to any other person, in actual fact he was driven to be faithful to himself alone. He’d learned that in his childhood when there had been competition in the orphanage; competition for attention, competition for affection and even competition for the nineteenth century works of Charles Dickens. After all, only one chid at the time could sit on Mollie Daybright’s lap and pore over images in illustrated books, images that made him vibrate with joy..

Now he was in the oddest of odd positions and he needed to both understand his restricted world, and love it. And that world involved two bedrooms, one with his pretty wife when she deigned to be at home at night, and one in the joyous company of his old matron or teacher who, besides recounting favourite stories to him, tales that he listened to attentively as if they were new to him which they hardly ever were. But repetition didn’t really matter. Repetitions re-enforced them, gave them a reality beyond the pages they’d been printed on. And that repetition was accompanied by affection, or what he thought must be affection.

Mollie Daybright might have been middle-aged by then, but she tried to explain to him that she had needs. And if she faltered in the telling of one of her old stories he tried to help her along. The fact that her needs tended to be physical didn’t really trouble him because he couldn’t really see much wrong with the odd little tickle between adults. And that’s really all it was: a man tickling a woman because that’s what the woman wanted. She giggled when his fingers twitched under her armpits and she gasped when he stroked the back of her neck.

And in between stories she would praise him.

“I love you in that top hat of yours,” she would say with a mouth-watering sigh, and she said it because it was true.

On other occasions she would mention such Victorian monstrosities as the workhouse as if such places were the height of human achievement because it’s where the poor and undernourished went for sustenance and, if they were lucky, a fresh chance in life with punishment thrown in as a bonus.

So time passed, days merged into weeks, and Mr Quilps was as happy as a sandboy if sandboys are happy. Most nights he spent tickling his old matron, until his wife came home and he slept with her, a deep sleep because Mollie had wearied him and he was ready for a night’s sleep. Mollie would wearily bid him goodnight, her fingers draped on him as he pulled away and went to Marie, who nine times out of ten was already asleep as her head hit the pillow.

And with a strange life like that the day for the bye-election in which he was still conservative candidate for the Brumpton constituency drew near and there were hustings to be enjoyed. Whether his strange life-style did anything to change his opinions I’ll leave it for the reader to judge. But he did the rounds of doorsteps, and enjoyed them all. He knocked on door after door and engaged in often brief conversations with the men and women of Brumpton.

“I’d like to discuss the conservative policies with you…” he would begin, and sometimes be greeted in return with bloody conservatives, you can get away from my door before I unscrew your bloody head!

Or the householder might be gentler, the fair sex even, and invite him in for a cup of tea while she changed into something more comfortable, which often involved him having to hold this or that strap or do up this or that button which she couldn’t quite reach while she said I’ll vote for you, darling, just you do that again and I will…

Or once or twice it was a bored bloke, home after a tiring day at work and desperately wanting a drinking companion because he had a fridge full of beers and didn’t like drinking on his own and moaning that what the spivs in London don’t understand is how hard it is being a bloke in this neck of the woods when the nearest pub’s too far away when a bloke’s worn to a frazzle, come on in squire, I’ve got a couple of beers going begging…

And on rare occasions he actually got to explaining what he supposed were his policies, though in all honesty they were based on his understanding of society a couple of centuries earlier because to him the control of the masses via the gift of fear was a winner..

“What should happen,” he said to one twitching mother being pulled about by bored twins who he judged would be lucky to make it to their teens, “is that there should be a large man with a stick dedicated to thrashing urchins like you seem to be bringing up until they know how to behave…”

“Oooh, you are strong,” she replied, hitching her skirt up.

“And somewhere to put them while they’re recovering,” he added, a cruel glint in his eyes, “a workhouse or somewhere like that…”

And pre-teen twins would hear what he said, stick their tongues out in a strange sort of distasteful harmony and one of them would somehow contrive to kick him on the shins, which came keen.

Unrealistic, maybe, and certainly unsavoury, but it was during that and several other doorstep consultations that he formulated the bulk of his political policies, many of them having more to do with discipline and punishment than to the actual work that decent and socially-minded politicians would find themselves doing in parliament.

But he rather liked that train of thought, and he mentioned it to Eva Curry when he bumped into her during one of his rounds while she was smiling angelically at even the brashest of residents.

“Our job, in Parliament, should be controlling the plebs,” he told her after a particularly brutal chat with a madman who seemed to want to threaten him with an axe every time he mentioned his own political intentions.

“What do you mean, controlling?” she asked, knowing what he really thought but wanting to hear him say it.

“Punishing,” he growled, “with whips and stuff.”

“There are some good people around,” she said, “all they need is a fair bite of the apple. Take Mr Average, working all hours the good Lord gives and then having to go to food banks for free or even cheap food so that he can feed his kids.”

“He should work harder!” growled Indigo Quilps, “there’s nothing so rewarding as hard work! Or the workhouse. They should bring them back and then whole families could be taught the merit of hard work.”

“You can’t mean that,” she said, shocked.

“Ah, but I do,” he replied.

Eva Curry decided to make it her job to tell the world what her top hatted opposition said he really thought, and the papers lapped it up and even mentioned the word Victorian when they mentioned him.

Which makes it rather odd that he won that bye-election by the biggest margin ever recorded.

Apparently the electorate wanted a strong disciplinary member in Government, one who would do his best to see see the return of what he called Victorian values. His avowed policies might seem to go against their own particular best interests, but that didn’t matter if scumbags were to be punished for being scumbags.

© Peter Rogerson 29.07.22

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