by Tom Sharpe
‘I want it to be a monument to my success in life,’ he told the first architect he employed, ‘and I haven’t got where I am today by being nice and namby-pamby. I’ve come up the hard way and I mean to leave a house that is as hard as I am.’
The architect, a man of some discernment, had his own ideas about how his client had ‘come up’ and supposed correctly that the lives of his employees must have been exceedingly hard. Accordingly he had presented a design that had all the charm of a concrete blockhouse (Black Midden had built a great many blockhouses for the British during the Boer War). The old man had rejected the design. ‘I said a house, not a bloody prison,’ he said. ‘I want towers and turrets and stained-glass windows and a huge verandah on which I can sit and smoke my pipe. And where are the bathrooms?’
‘Well, there’s one here and another there –’
‘I want one for every bedroom. I’m not having people wandering about in dressing-gowns looking for the things. I don’t care what other people have. I want something better. And different.’
The architect, who already knew that, went away and added towers and turrets and stained glass and a vast verandah and put bathrooms in for every bedroom. Even then Black Midden wasn’t satisfied. ‘Where’s the pillars along the front like they have in Greece?’ he demanded. ‘And the gargoyles.’
‘Pillars and gargoyles?’ the architect said weakly. He had known he was dealing with a difficult client but this was too much. ‘You want me to add pillars and gargoyles?’
‘That’s what I said and that’s what I meant.’
‘But they hardly go together. I mean . . .’ protested the architect, a devotee of Charles Mackintosh.
‘I know that. I’m not a damned fool,’ said Black Midden stoutly. ‘The pillars are for holding up the front of the house and the gargoyles are for spouting the rainwater off the gutters.’
‘If you say so,’ said the architect, who needed the money, but who was also beginning to wonder what sort of damage this appalling building was going to inflict on his reputation, ‘but there is a slight problem with the verandah. I mean if you want pillars and a verandah –’
‘And I do,’ Black Midden insisted. ‘It’s your business to solve problems. And don’t put the pillars in front of the verandah. I want to sit there and enjoy the view. I don’t want it spoilt by a whole lot of damned great pillars in front of me. Put them behind.’
The architect had gone away and had spent a fortnight desperately trying to find a way of meeting his dreadful client’s requirements while at the same time teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In the end he had produced a design that met with the old man’s approval. The Middenhall had gargoyles and stained glass. Every bedroom had a bathroom, the columns were behind the vast verandah, and there were all the towers and turrets, balconies and loggias imaginable. Nothing matched, and everything was immensely strong and consequently quite out of proportion. Black Midden was delighted. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the Middens. The family had never had any social pretensions and had been quite content to be small farmers or shopkeepers or even very occasionally to enter the professions and become doctors or solicitors. They had liked to think of themselves as solid, respectable people who worked hard and went to Chapel on Sunday. Black Midden destroyed that comfortable reputation. His excesses were not confined to building a ghastly house. A succession of too well-endowed mistresses, some of whom couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be called white, had been brought to the Middenhall, always in open carriages so that their presence couldn’t be ignored, and had disported their excessive charms on the lawns and, on the most memorable occasion, by swimming naked in the lake at a garden party which the Bishop of Twixt had most inadvisedly agreed to attend.
‘Well, that stupid old bugger isn’t going to forget me,’ Black Midden had commented at the time, and had gone on to make absolutely sure that no one else who came to the Middenhall would ever forget him by lining the drive with a series of sculptures in the hardest Coadstone, each of which depicted some ostensibly mythical event with a verisimilitude that was revoltingly authentic except in size. At the top of the drive a twenty-foot Leda was all too obviously enjoying the attentions of a vast swan, while further down the Sabine women were getting theirs from some remarkably well-hung Roman soldiers.
All this had pleased Black Midden immensely. Other people felt differently. Having planned a celebration party to mark the completion of the statues he was thwarted when the entire outdoor staff had gone on strike and the cook and the indoor women had left without notice. For a year Black Midden had held out against local opposition to the revolting statues by importing staff from outside the county at enormous cost. Finally, ostracized by every one of his own relatives and by the rest of the county, he had retired to Lausanne only to die of monkey-gland poisoning in an attempt to restore his virility in 1931. By then the statues had been dismantled by a blasting squad from the quarries at Long Stretchon in the course of which a number of windows in the Middenhall had also been blown out, largely, it was thought, thanks to the attempt of his nephew, Herbert Midden, to bribe the demolition men into blowing up the entire house. Black Midden’s revenge was revealed only with the reading of his will, drawn up by the most experienced lawyers in London. He left the house, demesne, lands, and estate, together with his entire fortune, to the youngest Midden over the age of twenty-one in each succeeding generation with the proviso that the Middenhall be kept in unaltered condition and a room be provided for any Midden who wished to have one.
At the time these terms had not seemed too burdensome. No sane Midden would want to live in the awful house and the income from the Midden Trust was considerable. By the time Miss Midden inherited the place things had changed.
11
At first the change had been almost imperceptible, so much so that some Middens – Lawrence Midden the bank manager in Tween was one – maintained that with their disreputable uncle’s death things had gone back to normal.
‘Of course, there is that indestructible palazzo,’ Lawrence admitted, giving vent to his feelings about foreigners, art, and extravagance at the same time, ‘but the Trust provides for its upkeep and I am told that there are ample funds.’
‘In Liechtenstein,’ said Herbert bitterly. ‘And who are the Trustees? Do we know anything about them? No, we don’t. Not one damned thing except their address, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it is a post box. Or poste restante, Hell.’
It was true. Black Midden’s funds had been so discreetly dispersed into numbered and hidden accounts all over the world that, even if the Middens had tried to find out what their total was and had got past the barrier of secrecy erected in Liechtenstein, they would never have found out. But the quarterly payments arrived regularly and for some years it had been possible to maintain the gardens and the artificial lake with its little island in their former condition. The Middenhall itself didn’t need maintaining. It was too gracelessly solid for that. All it seemed to require was sweeping and polishing and dusting, and this was done by the indoor staff.
But change, however imperceptible, did come, as Frederick Midden, the pathologist, pointed out with morbid glee. ‘The process of extinction is marked by a number of fascinating bodily conditions. First we have the healthy person whose physiological state we call normal. Then we have the onset of disease, which may take many forms. From that we move on to the dying patient, who may linger for a considerable time. Parts of the body remain unaffected while vital organs degenerate, sometimes to the point where pre-mortal putrefaction begins to take place as in gas gangrene. Now, consequent upon this most interesting process the patient is said to die. In fact, paradoxically, he may become far more alive than at any time during his previous existence. Flies, maggots –’
‘For God’s sake, shut up,’ Herbert shouted. ‘Can’t you see what you’ve done to Aunt Mildred?’
Frederick Midden turned his bleak eyes on his aunt and agreed that she
didn’t look at all well. ‘Why isn’t she eating her soup?’ he enquired. ‘It’s very good soup and in her condition, and out of delicacy for her feelings, I won’t give my opinion –’
‘Don’t,’ Herbert ordered. ‘Just shut up.’
But Frederick insisted on making his point. ‘All I have been trying to tell you is that changes take place in a variety of unforeseen ways.’
He was proved right. None of the Middens had foreseen the coming of war in 1939 and the changes it brought about. The Middenhall was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for the duration. Herbert Midden was killed in an air raid on Tween and succeeded by Miss Midden’s father, Bernard, as heir to the estate. Since he was only eighteen when he was captured at Singapore by the Japanese and spent the rest of the war as a POW, it was left to Lawrence, now in his eighties, to do what he could to see that the house was damaged as much as possible by the various units that occupied it. The unspoken prayer in everyone’s minds was that the Germans would do their bit for the architectural heritage of England by dropping their largest bombs on the place. But it was not to be. The Middenhall remained inviolate. In the grounds Nissen huts proliferated and a rifle range was constructed in the walled garden while round the estate itself a barbed-wire fence was erected and the lodge at the top of the drive became a guard house. What went on inside the camp no one knew. It was said that agents and saboteurs were trained there before being dropped into Occupied Europe; that much of the planning for the invasion on D-Day took place in the billiard room; that somewhere in the grounds a deep shelter had been built to house resistance fighters in the event of a successful German occupation of Britain. The only two certain facts were that the Canadians had used the house as a hospital and that at the end of the war German generals and senior officers were held there and interrogated in the hope that the mental disorientation produced by the architectural insanity of the Middenhall would persuade them to cooperate.
There were other consequences of the war. Black Midden’s hidden funds were, according to the Trustees in Liechtenstein, badly hit by the fall of Hong Kong and, worse still, his investment in certain German industries had been wiped quite literally off the face of the earth by thousand-bomber raids by Lancasters. To cap this series of financial catastrophes a number of gold bars the old man had placed for safe keeping in a bank in Madrid had disappeared, along with the directors of the bank. The news, together with the suspicion that the Trustees were lying, confirmed Lawrence Midden in his loathing for anything foreign, and particularly foreign bankers. ‘It could never happen in England,’ he murmured on his deathbed two weeks later.
But change continued. As Britain withdrew from the Empire, Black Midden’s fortune declined and with it the quarterly cheques. At the same time people from all over Africa and Asia who claimed to be Middens also claimed their right to accommodation and full board at the Middenhall. They brought with them their colonial prejudices and a demanding arrogance that was commensurate with their poverty.
The house became a cauldron of discontent and heated argument. On summer evenings the verandah echoed to shouts of ‘Boy, bring me another pink gin,’ or ‘We used to get a damned sight better service from the kaffirs in Kampala. Nobody in this bloody country does a stroke of work.’ Which, since the ‘boy’ in question happened to be a young woman from Twixt who was helping her mother in the kitchen where she was the cook, did nothing to enhance the quality of the lunches and dinners and may well have accounted for the discovery of a slug in the coq-au-vin one particularly vehement evening. Miss Midden’s father, a mild man who had spent most of his life since the war working in an office in Stagstead nursing various digestive complaints caused by his stint on the Burma railway, found the situation intolerable. He was constantly having to placate the cook and the other staff or having to find replacements for them. At night he would lie awake and wonder if it wouldn’t be better to up sticks with his family and disappear to somewhere peaceful like Belfast. Only his sense of duty restrained him. That and the thought that the damned colonials, as he called them, were bound to die before too long either naturally or, as seemed only too likely, as a result of mass poisoning by a justifiably demented cook. All the same he had moved into the old farmhouse and had tried to forget the Middenhall by being away for a few hours in the evening and at night, sitting by the old iron range in the kitchen and reading his beloved Pepys. But the house had worn him down and in the end, a broken man, his ill-health forced him to retire to a rented apartment overlooking the sea in Scarborough. Miss Midden remained behind to take over ‘that hell-hole’.
She had done so readily enough. She was made of sterner stuff than her mild father and she resented the way he had been treated by the very people he had been supposed to be defending in the war. ‘Those damned colonials,’ those Middens who had scuttled from the Far East and India, from Kenya and Rhodesia as soon as their comfort was threatened and who had fought no wars, were going to learn to mend their manners. Or leave the Middenhall and make way for more deserving cases. Within months of becoming what they jokingly and disparagingly called ‘The Mistress of the Middenhall’ she had mastered them. Or broken their spirit. Not that they had much to break, these gin-sodden creatures who had lorded it over native peoples whom they called savages and whom they had done nothing to educate or civilize. She did it simply and with malice aforethought, a great deal of forethought, by choosing Edgar Cunningham Midden, or E.C. as he liked to be called, as her target. He it was who, having spent a lifetime bullying and beating his way to the top of some obscure province of Portuguese East Africa where he had a vast commercial empire, had once threatened to bastinado a black student from Hull University who had made the mistake of taking a holiday job at the Middenhall and had spilt a bowl of soup on E.C.’s lap while serving at dinner. Miss Midden had not wasted words on the old brute. She had simply and deliberately broken the tap on the central heating radiator in his room during a very cold spell, had refused him the use of an electric fire and, to compound his discomfort, had used her knowledge of the intricate system of plumbing in the Middenhall to cut off the hot water in his bathroom. E.C.’s complaints had been met with the retort that he wasn’t in Africa now. And when he demanded another room immediately – ‘and don’t waste time about it, have my stuff moved by the servants’ – before stumping off downstairs to a late breakfast, Miss Midden had complied with his request.
Edgar Cunningham Midden came back from his morning constitutional to find he had been allocated a very small room above the kitchen which had previously been occupied by the man who in earlier years had attended to the central-heating boiler which needed stoking during the night. There was no bathroom and the view from the window was an unedifying one of the back yard and the dustbins. E.C. had exploded at the prospect not only from the window but of walking down a long corridor to a bathroom and had demanded his old room back. Miss Midden said she had allotted it to Mrs Devizes and that she was already moving in. ‘She didn’t like her room so I’ve given her yours,’ she said. ‘If you want it back you should ask her for it.’
It was the very last thing E.C. was going to do. Mrs Devizes, a Midden by marriage, was a woman he detested and whom he had openly referred to as ‘that half-caste’. He had suggested instead moving into her old room only to be told that it was being redecorated. A week later, during which he had been kept awake by the noise coming from the kitchen directly below him – Major MacPhee had been sent down to spend the nights there and to drop several large pots every quarter of an hour – the old bully left the Middenhall in a battered taxi. Miss Midden stood with folded arms on the verandah and saw him off. Then she had turned on the other guests and had asked if anyone else wanted to leave because, if they did, now was the time to do it. ‘I have no intention of allowing the staff to be treated impolitely,’ she said, slapping her breeches with the riding crop. There had been no misunderstanding her meaning. The guest Middens had behaved with great civility to the cook and the cleaning women a
fter that and had confined their quarrels to themselves. There had been some further weeding out to be done but in the end Miss Midden was satisfied.
Now, driving back to the farm, she was in a dangerous mood. Her plans for the weekend had been thwarted by her own pathetic sentimentality. That was the way she saw it. She had taken pity on the wretched Major from the very first day she met him at the bus station in Tween where he had arrived in answer to an advertisement she had put in The Lady for a handyman. Standing there in his little polished shoes and regimental tie and with an old raincoat over one arm he was so obviously neither handy nor entirely a man that Miss Midden’s first impulse was to tell him to forget it. Instead she picked up one of his old suitcases, hoisted it into the back of the Humber, and told him to get in. It was an impulse she had never been able to explain to herself. The Major had been rejected so often that his anticipation was almost palpable. In other circumstances Miss Midden would have followed her common sense but the bus station at Tween was too desolate a place for common sense. Besides, she liked surprising people and the Major needed a few pleasant surprises in his life. He was also easy to bully and Miss Midden had recognized his need for that too.
