Curl up with the CT’s Coffee Hour, and the second part of our romantic serial: ‘Anne of Gitting-Barrow’…
By Sharon Bronte.
Chapter Two
(Anne enters her teenage years, and meets the handsome Willoughby Chuff).
‘It weren’t long after my fourteenth birthday that Ma decided school were no good for me any longer. She said Mr. Whipsnade had had a long talk with my form mistress, Miss. Spencer-Waddle, and both of them were fully agreed. Miss. Spencer-Waddle reckoned I’d be no better for staying on; she said my English were poor and my ‘rithmatic even worse. She said I were no good on the games field, and my cooking left a lot to be desired. (It weren’t my fault she got food poisoning from my lemon meringue pie, and as for the accident with the Victoria Sponge – well! Mr. Whipsnade shouldn’t have been standing with his todger so close to the MagiMix).
So I left the little school and all my friends, and went to begin work as a scullery maid at the local manor. (There were eleven local manors dotted about the village, and every week they’d be a romantic melodrama unfolding in one of them. Granny once told us about a ruction that happened up at Badger’s Pants Hall some years back, when she were just seven. There was some trouble involving a girl, her evil fiancée who just wanted her for the money, and a poor gardener with only half a face and no arse who really loved her, but thought she’d never be interested as he only had half a face and no arse. But amazingly enough, the girl realised she didn’t love her evil fiancée, and instead decided to marry the poor gardener with only half a face and no arse, who then discovered he was related to the king. The king made him Lord of Berkshire, and the evil fiancée met a sticky end during a climatic duel in a trumpet factory. It were made into a novel by someone called Tabitha Fumble. She gave herself a different pen name; something Austen I think it was. Anyway, they divorced in the end, and the children were sold for cheap labour. Granny said it were a shame).
I enjoyed working at Knackerley Manor. The work were easy; I just had to scull about in the scullery. The cook were a nice
old fat woman called Mrs. Saddlebum; she were really fat. Really, really fat. In fact, she were so fat that the Government eventually classified her as a battleship. (She eventually got sent to the North Sea, where she sank three German cruisers and a peddle-o).
The housekeeper weren’t so nice. She called herself Mrs. Hardbrush, mainly because it was her name. She were evil, even more evil than Mr. Whipsnade. She hated me from the first moment we met, right from the moment I pulled the pepper mill out of her left nostril. She said I’d put it there on purpose! But it were an accident. And I didn’t push her down the back stairs on a tricycle either! AND I didn’t fill up her blouse with potting compost. AND it wasn’t me who interfered with the elastic in her knickers right before the bishop came round for tea. Oh, but she hated me all right. If she felt like it, she’d really tell me off. If she were being really wicked, she’d even send me to bed without a Brandy.
Lord and Lady Chuff were really nice. He was a jolly old fellow, who liked to hunt and drink and chase the local women. The only woman he didn’t chase was Mrs. Saddlebum, because he’d tried it once and caught her. (He told me he still had dents in his pantaloons, and had to take pills for his ‘Dicky Thomas’. I didn’t know what that was).
Lady Chuff were much quieter, but none the less nice to me for all that. She managed to teach me how to read properly, and I practised on the tins in the kitchen cupboard. By the time I’d been there a year, I could spell my name perfect, though it were twenty-years before I realised I weren’t called ‘Fifty percent beef extract with no added colouring’. (And a further five before I found out my middle name weren’t ‘Apply liberally round rim with damp cloth’).
But it were the young master who opened my eyes to a whole other world. His name were Willoughby, and he were all of seventeen years old, though with a chin that made him look thirty-three. He used to walk with me in the gardens, when I’d finished all my chores. He spoke kindly to me, and taught me all about the birds, the bees, the rushes along the riverbank, the squirrel’s dray up in the old oak tree, the swallows’ eggs in the outhouse gables, the hedgehog prints by the kitchen garden – he were right sodding keen on nature. (I had to give him a slap when he went on for six hours about the bloody Wombles).
Still, they were pleasant days and no mistake, though brought to an end much quicker than I could have known. It came completely out of the blue, like Lord Chuff on a penny-farthing chasing the curate’s wife. My life turned upside down, and Gitting-Barrow weren’t never the same again. Things changed for good after the summer of 1914’.
