House and Garden : Suspected Child Abuse Issue
When 14 year old Flora Fairly-Farleigh confided in her school teacher Mrs Favourly-Fairfax that things were not good at home, the 47 year old headmistress leapt into action. "The wellbeing of our pupils is absolutely paramount, and with child abuse being so rife nowadays, I immediately deployed interior designer Jocasta Annas-Pastoralis, Head of Pastoral Care to do a home visit". "She's incredibly remarkable" Mrs F-F (known as Fifi to close friends) assures me. "Her dedication and passion for pupil safety is simply unparalleled, when she received my disclosure via pigeon carrier on handmade paper using natural pigments from my garden, she immediately paused her riding holiday in Kyrgyzstan. She was visiting our friend Alexandra, who custom made my
drawing room lampshade from the recycled French knickers of the late Queen Victoria of 1531. They even have naughty stains on them!" she hoots.
Mrs F-F very kindly gave me permission to accompany Jocasta (cheekily nicknamed Ass by ex lovers, she tells me, due to her love of taking it up the Oxo Tower, with a bellow of laughter and a swoosh of her beautifully bouncy hair). As I wait in my 1995 Ford Fiesta for Ass (which feels so incredibly naughty!) in the sprawling driveway of the breathtaking Heresfordshire home, I cannot imagine anyone living here to be even remotely of danger to a child. The purple wisteria flower heads dangle like an octogenarian's wilted breasts over the wooden red stable front door, and a solitary hummingbird whizzes by, leaving a large lavender tinged splat of milky bird fluids on my windscreen. This is how the other half live, I think to myself, whilst taking a bite of the left over apple turnover I have conveniently found under my seat, a remnant of last week's sale in the Lidl bakery. It had been my dream to write for Country Living, where those featured would have made a lucrative business out of hummingbird 'gifts', but until they realized my true potential I was stuck with the Ass's and Fifi's of society, being paid only with scraps of discontinued fabric, which I used to fuel the coal fire every night in a bid to ward off hypothermia.
Suddenly Ass sweeps up the driveway, her long legs only momentarily showing through her jade green kaftan (that she later tells me was mouth painted by a komodo dragon she made friends with whilst on a recuperation holiday in Sumatra) wafting in rhythm with her sultry strides. I'm taken back to a childhood summer, spent in a Haven Bronze caravan in Bognor Regis. The children's entertainer (who introduced 11 year old me to White Lightening) had had a similar-ish cape - if you closed one eye, cocked your head to the left and blinked three times, the resemblance was striking. I was brought back to the moment when Ass sharply knocked on my windscreen, exclaiming through hoots of laughter that I looked like an Afghani child street urchin with an addiction to non-organic heroin. "You are just adorable!" she lovingly endears me, "look at your clothes, you are sooooo alternative!" she compliments, as I look down at my carefully selected Hobbs-in-the-sale suit that took me three years of savings to buy. "I have so much admiration for people who simply don't give a damn about how they look" she encourages. "It's a very attractive trait you know" she says with both eyebrows raised, "I would love to introduce you to my good friend Rob. He loves an androgenous looking woman with no sense of design shame".
What surprises me is that Ass enters the house without knocking. I had read on Mumsnet that the upper echelons have nothing to prove as they know their place, and here I was, seeing it unravel before my very eyes. Ass produces an earth brown clipboard, "made by my friend Hans, from Dead Sea mud dating back to the birth of Christ" she explains. "Quality and finesse is essential in a job like this" she tells me, whilst inspecting the room we were both standing in, at times reaching out to touch a cushion or brush the upholstery on the chairs. Feeling very uncomfortable at this apparent intrusion into what appears to be an empty home, I sit on the antique high backed chair and simply regard Ass, who hasn't even noticed I'm not following her. I look around what I thought was the living room, but Ass corrected me with snug. A myriad of old clocks, army regalia and plates which undoubtedly were made by good friends were crowding the walls, bringing on my positional vertigo. Poshos really have a phobia of bare walls, I thought to myself. Suddenly a terrier dog bounded into the room, as if he felt more important than me, cocked his leg, and confidently urinated over my worn out pleather shoe. I was brought back to my senses when I heard a shriek from down the hall.
"Oh daaaahhhhling! I cannot believe it is you!" shouted Ass from the butler's pantry. "How long has it been? Twenty...thirty... years since we met in Katmandu?" Ass questioned. At this point I was intrigued, sneaking down the hall, my sodden shoe squelching over the carpet runner that was no doubt handwoven in India. I peered into the butler's pantry, where a middle aged, slightly frazzled woman with short, frizzy hair was equally surprised, yet delighted to see Ass. "Oh Jocasta!", she cried, and I realized that she had only known her in her virginal days. "It has been such a long time! I was just out there in the cold frame talking to the succulents, you know the ones I propagated in my gap year in the Solomon Islands, and here you are, standing in my very humble abode. What an absolute deeeeliiiiight" suspected child abuse woman said, ennunciating the vowels, but I could tell she really did mean it. "Whatever are you here for?" she asked, not in a common, aggressive way, but the way people in Jane Eyre spoke.
"Well Twiggy, you know how it is these days", Ass offered, with a slightly apologetic tone and mock roll of the eyes. "Flora, you know, your daughter Flora, told Fifi that things at home were not as they should be". She put on a fake robotic voice for the last sentence, "but don't worry, I've carried out an assessment of the home and although not entirely optimal, it is quite adequate for a child. I mean, the furniture is a bit newer than what I would want, and I don't always think the pieces marry together, however, I counted at least 182 antiques in the drawing room alone, so that's always a good sign. And of course I'm not one to judge. Oh, apart from that ghastly Ikea kallax monstrosity in the boot room. Whatever were you thinking dear? Are you sure your Tibetan chakras are aligned?" she asked, genuinely with great concern, taking suspected-child-abuse-woman by the shoulders. I could put you in contact with my good friend Mog, who makes bespoke shoe racks out of molted reindeer antlers. The only problem is though he only works 15 days a year". Just then, a sheepish looking man appears from what must be a study. Wide rimmed silver glasses frame his face, which is furrowed with worry lines. "Ass, whatever are you doing here?" he exclaims happily. "I haven't seen you since that naughty weekend in Centreparcs! It's soooo good to see you again! But yes, things have not been as they should be around here" he says, taking the glasses off his head slowly. I knew something dreadful was going to be revealed, and held my breath, whilst still hiding behind the door.
"Well", he said slowly, leading up to the big reveal. "Do you remember those curtains I told you about that our mutual friend Bunty hand sewed whilst sitting on a lily pad in Lombok? You know, the ones with the batik border with the coat of arms of every Englishman embroidered with the silk of the Peruvian silkworm? "Yeeeees" Ass replied, equally as slowly. She could just feel the impending doom looming; the tension was as thick as a 14th century damask tapestry, and it was already smothering her.
"Something so incredibly awful happened" the man explained. "I don't quite know how to say this...but....you know.....well I might as well just blurt it out. When summering in Addis Ababa two years ago, I commissioned a set of matching cushions to be made. But disaster struck. Once they arrived via the bactrian camel delivery service, and I even paid extra for Injira, the camel to have a bespoke waterproof macrame brow band made to account for our inclement weather...not that money is the point. No...anyway.....once the cushions arrived, after months of anticipation, you can imagine our absolute shock horror to discover that the shade of Ethiopian Elephant's Breath did not quite perfectly colour match that of Farrow & Ball.
"Oh my God, stop.....I can't take anymore" cried Ass, clutching her stomach, feeling the intense need to be violently sick. "Yes indeed, now you can see why our household has just been turned upside down...nothing will ever be the same again" furrowed brow man said, with a resigned sadness. "The domino effect has been catastrophic" he went on. "First, Twiggy's neuro-frontal-lobe died. Then her hair lost it's swooshiness. Then, just as things couldn't have gotten any worse, the Columbian Fofo cake that she won the worldwide competition for, you know the one everyone raves about....it just hasn't tasted the same since. I've spent all my waking hours in the study trying to figure out the solution. It has just been catastrophic" he said, tears made out of natural charcoal pigment rolling down his cheek. "And to top it all off, the children expect to see us once every six weeks. Can they really not see what a terrible situation we are facing? This is the modern day David and Goliath".
Just then, Twiggy collapsed onto the floor, writhing. "Oh drat!" shouts the devastated father, "her neuro-rear-lobe has gone into arrest. What in the name of Cath Kidston did we do to deserve all of this?" I looked at the man, clearly broken and unable to go on, cradling his head with his hands whilst his wife was slipping away into the next life, where no such traumas such as unmatched colour schemes exists. "Next we will have to move into a rented house in Cambridge!" he shouted to the skies, clearly in anguish.
Just then, Ass jumped into action. Pulling a small, glass vial out of her handmade linen pouch that was made by her good friend Jinny's daughter Persephone, she unscrewed the lid, made from the cap of an acorn. "Here, give her this!" Ass shouted, practically throwing it at the man. "It's the colostrum from the male Argentinan armadillo. My good friend Pedro says it is a literal lifesaver. It's only to be used in lifesaving situations" cries Ass, urging him to drop the elixir of life into Twiggy's mouth. He struggles, with Twiggy now frothing at the mouth. "Come on old girl" he cries, finally pouring the precious drops into her. Almost immediately, Twiggy's convulsion calm. Her frizzy, man like bob turn into a luscious, swooshy mop. She slowly comes around, the weight of the world has clearly come off her shoulders. "Thank God you are back" cries the man, "everything will be ok from now on. We will not lose everything and have to move into a rented house in Cambridge with a free standing kitchen". Twiggy looks up, straight into his eyes. "But what about the cushions?" she asks, remembering the ordeal that has thrown them into the depths of darkness. "Oh it's fine, I will just ask my good friend Enrico to make some more. Ones that look like friends when sitting together, as all cushions should".
As the relief clearly sweeps over them like the grey foamy waves of my Bognor beach holiday, I decide to leave quietly. The three of them are in the moment, bonded tightly by this potential earth shattering series of events. As I tiptoe out, I hear the man tell Ass that he will take her to Centreparcs Windermere, as a way of saying thankyou. "It's the least I can do" he says.
Two weeks later, back in the office of Fifi Favourly-Fairfax, I sit as she reads Ass's child protection asasessment. "The problem with today's young people is that they have it so good, too good really" she asserts. When I was young, my Mummy was away 524 days a year. I had to stay at home with the nanny, and I was so grateful if Mummy wrote twice a year. In those days, us children understood the incredible stress our parents were under" she solemnly monologues. "I blame it on the bursaries" she says, looking at with eyes of steel. These children come in, telling our children that eating meals together, day trips and Netflix and chill are all part of family life. "Bah humbag to them!" she shouts, throwing the report across the room. "They do not understand our ways!" she wails, sliding down the wall in exasperation.
I decide to leave, and as I walk down the corridor with polished oak panelling that Richard III had custom built, I say a silent, and final prayer that Country Living will be my final place.