LORD FINGLESTOP’S POVERTY

Not part of anything longer but a stand-alone piece of nonsense in which some social imbalances sort of get put right,

Lord Sebastian Finglestop had been born thirty or so years ago before the now of this story to a family that knew what money meant because, to them it meant big numbers to count, loads of zeroes on the end of a bank statement (printed in black) and a place for all three sons at Eton without having to worry about increasing the tenants’ rent above a couple of percent, which they might not notice.

Apropos those tenants, Bill Smythe was one of them and he’d had his leg amputated a decade or so ago because it got infected after the ancient and disintegrating mower he used to keep Sebastian’s grass neat and tidy flung a wedge of sharp metal onto it and he was at a loss when it came to the doctor telling him how much a few drops of cure-all would cost because if he’d had a bank statement the only noughts on it would have been printed in red.

All this, of course, was when people were better off than they are today because they hadn’t had a wodge of their income subtracted at source to pay for the National Health Service. They were halcyon days back then. The grass was greener no matter on what side of the hill you looked at it, roses bloomed brighter and the beer tasted better when it hadn’t, and here’s a technical term, gone off. Women knew their place, which was either blacking the hearth or in the kitchen when the clock said it wasn’t bed time.

Order: that’s what controlled life. Two houses, Sebastion’s mansion with its thirty two unoccupied bedrooms and Bill’s cottage with a landing big enough to put a small single bed for the twins so that Bill and Mavis could sleep together in a bed of their own and make more twins (or not if they ever became too tired for such antics, which was common).

That, then, was the order of things, best counted by the enumeration of bedrooms and other trivial things, like the colour of the noughts on bank statements.

It was at the actual apex of this wonderland of plenty and virtue that the virus struck. Bill’s absent leg didn’t suffer, but the rest of him did, coughing and spluttering and spitting huge globules of nastiness almost onto the newly blackened hearth. Sebastian caught it too because someone, maybe the good Lord, had decided the playing field for viruses should be level, and he passed it on to the oldest of his sons, who was at Eton where he was soundly thrashed for being ill (weakness of any sort not being tolerated) and then sent home when his scars faded enough for Sebastian not to worry overmuch. After all, he’d been to Eton himself and understood the need for discipline. It hadn’t done him any harm, had it? Though he still had nightmares involving a long whippy stick being wielded by a manic geriatric history master because he’d been detected farting instead of copying this or that coat of arms of this or that royal king into his copy book.

Half the people in the land caught the virus, or it may have been three quarters. Bill’s wife Mavis was one of those who managed to deter the virus from assaulting her (she had a concoction inherited from a wise woman in her ancestry, and she attributed her good health to teaspoons of that revolting medicine.) Bill, on the other hand, spat it out when she tried to force it between his lips, so he got ill and did a whole lot of moaning and telling everyone he must be dying, which turned out to be a lie because he didn’t die at the time. That would be much mater and beyond the range of this tale.

In the mansion, two of the three sons did die, though the one thrashed at school for having it did survive. The two that died, therefore escaped the sort of education that would make them into men and sadly the United Kingdom lost a future prime minister it might have had. The youngest boy had showed prime ministerial qualities when he was only three, when he had teased a kitten by hiding its food until it died. But that boy passed away too, which was good for the world of felines who were all immune to that particular virus, and also for humans who consequently escaped what maye have become the viciousness of his kind of taxation

As a useful follow-up to the mass deaths brought about by the virus, and not one corner in the land was immune to piles of rotting corpses waiting to be buried as soon as holes could be dug to lower them in, there were shortages of just about everything., but mostly food. Mavis had inherited, besides the concoction already mentioned, a natural skill when it came to cooking weeds in that she knew almost instinctively which weeds might be wholesome and which may be toxic. So the diet in the cottage (both twins had survived, probably due to the concoction) was both nourishing and vile, but it did keep them alive and well.

The manor house was less blessed. Almost all of the army of staff either left to care for their own flesh and blood despite harsh threats made to them by Sebastian in which he suggested that bailiffs might well call on them for no better reason than he ordered them to, or died. Such power in one man’s had, though remarkable, had little effect, and so it was that his lady wife Ophelia had to attend to matters that were the proper preserve of servants and slaves. It is no lie to inform you that it took her a week to locate the kitchen and a further week to decide they would have to go out to eat because by then, even the portly elegance of Sebastian was somewhat ground down due to a diet of fresh air and not much else.

The virus eventually subsided and all that was left to show its passing were bulging churchyards and the faintest aroma of unburied death that still lingered in the air. The surviving Sebastian son returned to school (where he was caned for being late), the twins from the cottage went to the village school, where they sat their eleven-plus and both did well. Bill was fitted in the fulness of time with a peg leg so he could return to the land on two legs rather than have to tend a plough with only one, Lady Ophelia took to her bed with worms that wouldn’t go away even when the surgeon came and cut bits of her out because he felt he ought to do something, but the worms continued crawling out of her. Sebastion became a government minister and introduced a special tax to be paid (on pain of death) by those with a wealth that was best shown in red numbers, and Mavis won a competition involving creating wholesome bread out of sawdust.

The surviving Finglestop boy left school and became a politician himself because the wages were high enough for him to maintain a decent standard of living, and died at the age of twenty three because that decent standard of living involved too much red wine and other nourishing liquids. Sebastian, in his grief, fell into terminal decline and by the end of the century the manor house was boarded up until an act of human kindness by Bill and Mavis (there being nobody around to object) opened it up as a safe home for refugees from anywhere.

And life, without a single Finglestop left in the county, went on as happily or unhappily as its people wanted it to go on.

© Peter Rogerson 27.12.22

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