The Great East-Highland Midge Circus
The diary of Queen Victoria’s gillie John Brown…
It was during the late summer of the year of 1959, when the wine harvest in France would produce a particularly ripe and expensive vintage, that a ‘tweenie’ found the diary that we will unfold for your solitary delectation during the coming months…
Our current Queen, Elizabeth II, blessed be her name and long may she reign over us, had been on the throne a mere 8 years, when the chronicle was found amongst a small pile of neatly folded laundry over-looked for almost 80 years by successive generations of servants.
The small cupboard, under the left hand stairs of the right-hand tower, third curtain wall in the estate of Balmoral, her Majesty’s Scottish residence, was being emptied ahead of a much needed bout of restoration.
And yes the tweenie - unaccustomed to such tasks - was handling the Queens under-garments, but was quick enough to understand the historical significance of what she had found therein.
For it was not the present monarchs simmet and garters she was rifling through, but those of her great-grand-mother Queen Victoria, and the treasure found inside the left leg of a particularly snug pair of silk bloomers: the long lost diary of her gillie, John Brown!
The ‘tweenie,’ although, just a ‘tweenie,’ if there is indeed such a thing, was aghast when she read the contents of the scandalous rag. But she was no fool either and knew a good thing when she read it, but what was done with it? For the past 48 years it has lain at the bottom of a sock drawer in an ordinary suburban-semi in Northampton, until discovered by her daughter on the occasion of her mothers death. Within 24 minutes of posting the find on the web our intrepid reporter Basil McDuff had purchased it for the site, beating off stiff competition from the likes of The Herald, The Sun, Sporting Life and Fiesta.
And so now, yes even you Mrs Lavinia Aardvark Johnson, of Chiswick, West London, must be told that that we the editors will not rest our pen until the offices of The Dumpdee-Major, has unfolded this rude, dastardly, unfortunate, and dare we say compelling tale of sordid Victorian mores…
Its fun down the mines. Part One…
Dateline - 2nd September...1893, Sunderland.
See me, I love Monday mornings, me! Even before the gaffer sends the lads around to kick the door in at 10 past 2, I am up, washed, shaved and a freshly picked carnation adorns the buttonhole of my pressed white boiler suit!
I take three rounds of cucumber sandwiches for my mid-day sustenance - crusts cut off of course - and a bottle of the 1835 claret. Sometimes on alternate Wednesdays I take a flask of Vodka-Martini - when we can get the olives that is - and a couple of Bath Oliver biscuits to have before my afternoon nap. That is of course if the cleaners are not in tidying up the pit head, always disturbing us boys with their endless hovering..
We try to have communal singing in the afternoon, well, it whiles away the time between the endless coffee breaks, and a few rubbers of whist. Why I even won the crown jewels off of Prince Albert when he were here a couple of weeks ago; she’s been wearing them down the bingo ever since.
Sometimes we have a real emergency, and one of the canaries chirps out, so that we know that one of the lads has come across a really bad problem. He has either broken a nail - ‘Oh, theirs terrible, look you…?’ Or even worse he has gone and dropped a stitch on the huge canvas of Queen Victoria - A life in Velcro -
that we are crocheting in time for her next Diamond Jubilee. We dry his tear streaked face, and get him to lie down for a bit, which normally does the trick
I sometimes does a bit of overtime at the library in the north bore, as those young lads do like their and Mallory and Dickens; but then I cant say I’ve ever been to one. Oh yes, its fun down the mines, and make no mistake about it…
Captain Matthew Webb and the troublesome Turbot…
Dateline - 25th August...1875, Dover.
Today the master mariner Captain Mathew Webb became the first person to successfully swim the English Channel. (For any of my readers who may not know of it, it is that big bit of water between England and France.
Captain Webb, whose stiff-upper-lip is so stiff, that it in-fact it has welded his lips together, is a plucky as a porpoise, in fact the very thing whose oil he had rubbed all over his torso before he dove into the water at Dover Harbour.
It happened as he viewed the White-Cliffs as they vanished in the mist. What happened? Well, the unexpected of course, as the unexpected always turns up when you least expect it? A large and somewhat amorous turbot (a big fish, lives in the sea) swam close to him, and being naked at the time (Captain Webb, not the marine-life) he managed to trap it in the cleft of his buttocks. Well, one never knows when one will eat again on these sea crossings.
21 hours and 45 minutes later a rather limp and dishevelled - or should that be shrivelled - swimmer trawled up on the French coast near Calais. He was then promptly arrested by the local gendarmerie and spent a night in a police cell, for the apparent crime of importing live marine life into French territorial waters.
At the time of writing there is no confirmation as yet to the rumour that the gallant Captain is to be indicted by the Association of French Fishermen for the apparent perverted and unwarranted molestation of an endangered species. But it appears that a trial is unlikely as the evidence was eaten in a garlic, butter and white wine sauce for last nights supper.
Master Peter Thompson’s Schooldays…
Dateline - 3rd July...1854,Surrey.
It was young Peter Thompson’s second week at High-Field - Private School for those who do not wish their sons to go Public - and frankly he was a tad disappointed. He was terrified when Pater had informed him that this, was his boarding-school of choice. He had grown up on the terrible tales of cruelty meted out to Daddy during this time there. The merciless beatings, the perversions, the appalling food, and never mind corporal punishment, why, they had only recently outlawed capital punishment, for all but the upper-fifth. But no, what did he find on his arrival, and two pairs of his best drawers spoiled on the train; but a haven of jovial tranquillity.
Masters woke you in the morning with a full cooked English. Rough games were voluntary. Cross-country - i.e. running from the school gates on a wet Wednesday in January, to Scotland and back again, was banned, flower arranging and fuzzy-felt pictures making the only permissible extra-curricular activity. No extreme sports, no mixed bathing - naked of course. Alcohol with every meal, pipe-smoking and brandy in the library after dinner, along with help-yourself bowls of a particular brand of herbal tobacco, much favoured by natives in our West Indian Colonies. No, this was not what he had expected from High-Field. This was not the reason that Nanny had kept him chained to his bed in the nursery for the past three years - ‘just to get you ready for the hard times ahead dearrie,’ she would taunt as she nailed up the nursery door for the night.
Quite frankly he was bored, but forever a plucky little lad, he put his best foot forward, determined to change all that…All he needed was a suitably gullible first year, a roaring log fire, and a pile of unmade toast. Then a whip, and some nipple clamps, and, oh yes, perhaps some of that scrummy black leather underwear that Pater wears to the office..!
What a whiz…boarding school may not be so bad after all…
MORE ON THE WAY...