by Mark Evans
5 The World Praying Cup competition took place every four years. Britain’s team was decimated by the Reformation in the sixteenth century and never regained its previous eminence. For forty-three consecutive tournaments the final was contested by Ireland and Italy.
6 The medical profession at the time believed there was a gland connected to every human behaviour. It was only when they really began cutting people up in the name of science that they discovered this was untrue.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD
Thank you, O Lord, thank you!
Actually, we were safely out the next morning, which was much quicker than I had been anticipating and our lives were free and our own to live once more.
Once free, I immediately— Hmm? What’s that? How? You desire to know the how of our escape from povertous punishment?
Very well.
I shall tell.
Ooh, those two lines rhyme. Take that, Thomas Hardy!
You’re not the only man who can write novels and poetry, you miserable grump.1
I woke after nearly four whole seconds of exhausted sleep to face another workhouse day with all the fun that that entailed, which was to say none. None fun.
By this time Harry and I had been moved from the bottle factory to different duties, namely the treadmill. Pacing in place, we drove a great geared belt, which turned a grindstone, itself connected to that most notorious of workhouse punishments, the pain-wheel, a horrific circle of agony to which were strapped miscreants whom the beadle had deemed to have committed sins such as being short (the sin of not striving to reach high enough to Heaven), being meek (they were destined to inherit the earth and therefore commit the sin of avarice), or being ugly (he didn’t like ugly people). The wheel rotated them through a scraping, stinging mass of brambles and nettles before dunking them in a bath of lemon juice, and their shrieks of woe could be heard as far afield as nearby and really far away. As we ran on the treadmill, large men in strangely skin-tight outfits shouted at us if we slowed, utilizing phrases such as ‘No pain, no gain’, ‘Work it’ and ‘Feel the burn’.
Then, over the noise of these hectoring hectorizers, I heard the phrase that heralded a change in my fortunes as great as that experienced by wily Odysseus himself when he rolled nine consecutive double sixes to defeat Circe the witch in a game of backgammon after having previously only thrown rubbish scores such as three, one and two.2
‘Letter for Pip Bin!’
It was a representative of the Royal Postal Corps, the most noble of Britain’s armed forces after the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Wish-we-could-fly Force.3 By law, if a stamped letter was addressed to you even slightly it had to be delivered, or the postman would be locked up in the Tower of London for treason; anyone stopping you receiving your letter faced the same punishment.
Thus I was allowed to dismount the treadmill and receive my epistolary gift. The envelope it came in was marked ‘Pip Bin, Somewhere’. It was a vague address, but enough to have found me, thanks to the diligence of the postman. What could it contain? It was not my birthday so was unlikely to be a missive with a birthday greeting; equally it was not Christmas, Easter or Harvest Festival, those other great card-sending holidays; true, it was the day after the Greek Orthodox tyrine or Cheese Sunday,4 but I had never heard of a card sent in celebration of that curdled-milk-product feast day.
So what was within?
Could it be the answer to my prayers of the night before? Though I doubted God would actually use the post for His reply.
Despite my desperate desire to see what was inside, I gently and carefully opened the envelope – I had heard many a tale of someone tearing an envelope hastily open with excitement only to accidentally rip the stamp containing our glorious monarch’s head and therefore be executed.
Inside were two pieces of paper. On one were some barely legible letters, spelling out ‘Hope this helps you as you helped me.’ Beneath was a smudged and smeared signature: ‘Bakewell Havertwitch’.
The escaped convict from the churchyard whose chains I had broken with Pippa’s anvil! Had my kindness to him now been repaid? I looked at the second piece of paper and saw that it had indeed.
For it was no ordinary piece of paper.
It was a note.
And not a note saying ‘Buy more milk’ or a musical note or any of the other sorts of note that would have been less than helpful in the circumstances.
It was a banknote.
Specifically, it was a £312 banknote.
This was more money than I had ever seen ever in my whole life ever.
My prayers had been answered; in terms of the plot of my life this was less deus ex machina and more pecunia ex deo et fugiente malefactore. Truly Bakewell Havertwitch had not fibbed or spoken untrue when he had promised one day to repay my kindness!
The news of my letter had been heard around the work-house and Harry, Pippa and Mr Parsimonious had joined me.
‘Gosh,’ said Harry. ‘With that you could buy three hundred and twelve one-pound notes. Or a hundred and fifty-six two-pound notes. Or seventy-eight four-pound notes. Or—’
‘I get the idea, Harry.’ I feared if I did not stop him he would go through every possible money-changing permutation.
‘Does this mean we are poor no more?’ asked Pippa.
‘It does. Surely now the beadle will release us for we no longer belong in a workhouse or poorhouse but in a rich-house or leisurehouse.’5
‘Oh, such a rich note! May I hold it, Pip Bin?’ Mr Parsimonious held out a hopeful hand.
‘No, Mr Parsimonious. For you are a man of such generosity I fear you would only give it away.’
‘It is a fair point, well made. Have my apologies. And my humble sorryments. Not to mention a hefty dollop of ruefulness.’ He rubbed his hands together and walked away from me, bowing his head like some sort of guilty solicitor’s clerk.6
‘You are generous even in apology, Mr Parsimonious. Now, let us leave this hideous place!’
But at that moment, Beadle Hardthrasher appeared and he was less pleased by the money’s arrival and the prospect of our departure than we were by some considerable degree.
‘Money? You have money, Pip Bin?’
‘I do, Beadle. And that makes me no longer poor. Therefore I am leaving, and my family with me!’ I declared.
‘Oh no you are not. For money is the work of the Horned One!’
This puzzled me, as I knew not what he referred to. Harry, however, had an idea. ‘Do you mean . . . a goat?’
‘No! I mean Satan! Beelzebub! Lucifer! The Devil!’
‘So both poverty and riches are the Devil’s work?’ I asked, confused.
‘They are! The Lord of the Flies and Prince of Darkness is responsible for the sin of possessing both too little and too much money, leaving only a narrow range of virtuous wealth outside which you conveniently fall.’ Now he strode towards me, hand outstretched. ‘Besides, that money was not earned by Christian sweat, Christian toil and Christian exploitation of the poor. That, in my book, is blasphemy – and seeing as my book is the Bible, I am right!’
‘But, sir—’
‘No buts!’
‘How can—’
‘No hows, no cans!’
He would not allow me to speak; and I realized there was to be no reasoning with him.
‘I will listen to you no more, sir. We are leaving.’
‘No wes, no ares, no leavings! You are sinners, and must learn to be pure through hard study of the scriptures!’
‘Hard study of the scriptures’ meant standing in front of a large wall of bricks on which the books of the Bible had been inscribed, then having your head smashed into it by the beadle. For he believed that true Christian knowledge came only through direct bodily contact with the word of the Lord.
I was dragged to the wall and the beadle prepared to propel me head first into Deuteronomy. But I was not going to let this cruel man and his twisted religious views destroy me as he had destroyed poor P
oppy, and a surge of strength-giving anger now flooded through me, a flood that the Beadle could not avoid, even if, Noah-like, he had quickly built a flood-dodging ark.
As he drove me towards the wall I grabbed him and, twisting round so that he impacted first, we tumbled into the holy wall, which collapsed in Biblical bits. Blocks of scripture tumbled around us: Leviticus plummeted past my left ear, Numbers past my right, and, with a jerk of my head, I narrowly escaped a synoptic braining as, with the exception of John, the gospels plunged to earth.
Alas, Beadle Hardthrasher was not so lucky.
Well, I say alas, but as I looked at his crumpled, scripture-struck body, I felt very un-alas, and certainly not at all alack. For there he lay, his legs pinned by Psalms, his chest crushed by Revelation and Ruth perched on his head.
‘Yay, got him!’ said Ruth, for this last was not a book of the Bible, but a workhouse inmate who had come to gloat.
‘Get off his head, Ruth,’ I said. ‘Give him some dignity in death.’ For though he had shown none of us dignity in life, with his demise we could very much take the moral high ground; besides, dignity was the least I could offer, given that I had now been partially or wholly responsible for the deaths of three Hardthrasher siblings.
Then the other inmates of the workhouse came in and starting kicking his dead body and I thought, Dignity be damned, and, clutching my £312 note, I led Pippa, Harry and Mr Parsimonious out of that place of wretchedness and forth unto a life of riches, wealth, luxury, proper food, good clothes, lovely houses, servants, a box at the opera, weekends away, things you can’t even remember buying you’re so rich, exotic fruits, proper art on the walls . . . Oh, you get the idea.
1 The author had a long-running feud with Thomas Hardy. Its origins are unclear – some say Hardy took Sir Philip’s satirical novel Jude the Obvious as a gibe at himself; others say it was because at the AGM of the Society of Authors in 1876 they had a fight over the last mini pork-pie at the buffet.
2 No idea what he’s on about. Sir Philip seems to have read an utterly different version of The Odyssey from anyone else ever.
3 Founded in 1817, the RWF eventually became the Royal Flying Corps with the invention of powered flight. Until then they sat around cultivating dashing moustaches and inventing words such as ‘prang’, ‘Blighty’ and ‘bally Hun’.
4 Seriously. Look it up if you doubt me.
5 Nineteenth-century terms for luxury hotels. The deliberate echo of ‘workhouse’ and ‘poorhouse’ was meant to make the lower classes feel better; it didn’t.
6 I suspect this is some kind of literary reference but can’t quite work it out. Something to do with David Copperfield, perhaps? No. The Hunt for Red October? Probably not.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH
I is loaded, innit?
As I stepped richly from the workhouse on to the streets of the East End of London, I inhaled deeply of the air of freedom.
Oh, liberty, how sweet dost thou taste?
Actually, not that sweet, because on one side of the workhouse was an abattoir and on the other an ordure refinery, but metaphorically it was yummy.
The first order of business was to find somewhere to live, so I immediately bought a massive townhouse in London’s fashionable West End. Of course, back then, houses only cost about £20 each, so the estate agent was more than a little annoyed when I tried to pay with such a large note as the one I had.
‘A three-hundred-and-twelve-pound note?’ he whined. ‘You haven’t got anything smaller, have you?’
‘He could just keep the change,’ suggested Mr Parsimonious, as generous as ever, albeit with money that wasn’t strictly, or indeed in any sense, his.
In the end I received change of two hundred pounds in cash, a row of mews houses and the entirety of that village in Wales with the incredibly long name.1
With a guaranteed home to return to, the next item on the rich-now agenda was a ginormous and enormiant meal, so we went to the finest restaurant in London: Snetterton’s Eatatorium. The contrast to the workhouse was as stark as a dead jester in a snowdrift. All was gentility, linen and class – not a hint of gruel to be found. The menu was long and meaty, and as we surveyed it, our stomachs rumbled hungrily, like starving thunder. There was so much choice! When the waiter approached, we were so hungry it was all we could do not to eat him.
‘Sirs, Madam, are you ready to order?’
‘Indeed we are, my good man,’ I said, though I had no idea as to his moral character at all. ‘To start with we’ll have the crispy deep-fried elephant.’
‘An excellent choice, sir. And for your main course?’
‘I’d like the roast dodo, please. Is that rare?’
‘Increasingly so.’ Now he turned to Pippa. ‘And for Madam?’
‘I’ll just have an otter salad, please.’ Dear Pippa, even half starved she ordered with lady-like restraint!
‘What sort of dressing would you like?’
‘I’d like it wearing trousers and a little hat, please.’
‘Of course.’
‘Mr Parsimonious, what will you have?’ I was delighted to be able to offer this munificent man some of my own generosity for once, though it seemed to make him feel awkward.
‘Dear Pip, I cannot accept your offer, for it is I who should be treating you! You are merely a boy and I am a man, a generous one at that.’
‘But, Mr Parsimonious, you have no money.’
‘Nevertheless, I will not abuse your kindness.’
‘Please, I insist,’ I insisted.
‘Well, I politely refuse,’ he politely refused.
I am ashamed to admit that at this point my temper frayed and then snapped, as I slammed Mr Parsimonious face-down into the table, twisted his arm up behind his back and shouted loudly, ‘Order some food!’
He quickly and meekly ordered a fruits-of-the-forest platter, a dish of badgers, weasels, stoats and hedgehogs garnished with saplings and dead leaves. Now there was only Harry to order – and I doubted he would require much persuasion.
‘What is this multi-layered meat feast?’ Harry pointed askily at the menu.
‘Ah, that is the speciality of the house,’ replied the waiter. ‘It is an ox stuffed with a slightly smaller ox stuffed with a tiny ox stuffed with a sheep stuffed with a goose stuffed with a duck stuffed with a hen stuffed with a wren stuffed with a robin stuffed with a humming bird stuffed with a mouse.’
‘Does it come with stuffing?’ asked Harry, but I was more interested in the mechanics of the dish.
‘How ever do they prepare such a thing?’ I enquired.
‘They carefully line up the animals nose to tail in size order, then startle the mouse. The mouse runs straight inside the humming bird, which is itself startled and runs inside the robin and so on and so forth until the slightly smaller ox runs into the large ox, which topples into a huge oven enabling the whole fleshy parcel to be cooked.’
‘That sounds brilliant!’ yelled Harry, not unreasonably, because it did. ‘I want that!’
‘Very well, sir.’
At that moment there came a terrible bestial uproar from the kitchen, as if a mouse, humming bird, wren, hen, duck, goose, sheep, tiny ox, small ox and large ox had just been startled. Then the kitchen doors burst open and the afore-mentioned animals sped out with assorted squeaks, cheeps, chirps, squawks, quacks, honks, bleats, lows and deeper lows, making straight for the restaurant exit and disappearing into the street.
‘Ah, it would appear the multi-layered meat feast is off, sir. They obviously didn’t line them up carefully enough.’
‘Oh.’ Harry sounded disappointed, but could rarely be kept down for long when food was in the offing. ‘Then I shall just have the spaniel tartare and the porpoise dolphinoise.’2
To celebrate our escape, I decided to order some wine, and I could as, although I was still beneath the age of eighteen, in those less complicated times the legal drinking age was a much more reasonable twelve, or five if you asked nicely.
‘Now, to drink. Perhaps a bottle of the house red. And one of the white. And, because I am feeling patriotic, also one of the house blue.’3
‘No need, sir. Your drinks have been taken care of.’
At this the waiter clapped his hands, summoning a pair of men bearing a vast bottle between them.
‘By whom?’
‘A gentleman over there insists you have this as a gift.’
It was a generous gift indeed. Bigger than a magnum, greater than a jeroboam, more size-y than even a Nebuchadnezzar, this was the largest bottle one could get: a Giganto-abrahamium. The waiter pointed across the restaurant at the giftor, and I looked his way to acknowledge the present with perhaps a manly nod of the head, a fingerly salute of gratitude or a bellowed ‘Thanks a lot.’
But I did none of those things, instead feeling myself become rooted to the spot, like a human tree or a swan that has stepped on glue.
For the man the waiter had pointed out was a sharp-featured, saturnine man dressed entirely in black with maliciously glinting eyes of purest obsidian: Mr Gently Benevolent.
My evil guardian.
Destroyer of my life, ruiner of my father and captor of my mad mother; surely no gift from him could be generous or even safe. As if to confirm this fact, Harry now read the label of the wine bottle.
‘Mmm, Château Cyanide . . . Sounds authentically French and delicious!’
‘Harry, no!’
He went to take a sip of the wine, but I knocked the glass from his hand, spraying a nearby table with the contents. A drop landed in a gentleman’s open mouth as he went to slurp some soup, and he immediately collapsed in what might have been an entirely coincidental fit of death but almost certainly wasn’t.
‘The gentleman sent a note as well, sir.’
The waiter handed over a slip of paper, and I began to read.
‘“Dear Pip Bin, if I said I was glad to see you alive I would be lying . . .”’
I set the note down and turned to Mr Benevolent, who had silently and sinuously crept up behind me. ‘Yes, thank you, I can read it myself you know!’
