I may be betraying a confidence here, but since (if it is a confidence) it is one between Your Poet and someone in my employ, I have no qualms. They live on my money and consume my consumables. I have had a note, written in pencil and on what appears to be paper filched from my own private supply of 80gm Silky Touch Ultra-Bright Navigator which I use for my poems, and I am relaying it here because I think it needs to be put on record that in even the best-managed and easy-going and I-would-not-mind-living-there-myself-if-I-was-not-already-the Master households, the relationship between employer and employee can be fraught with tensions and tenuous and, if truth be told, shaky, which is another word for ‘tenuous’. I had not thought I reigned over such an establishment.
The note came from Cook, about whom, incidentally, I have had several requests (3) from fans and admirers (including one notable twit) to the effect that they long to know more about she whom I mention lots of times in my Diary. Well, read on.
This same Cook recently discovered – I do not know how – that I am writing an Autobiography about my life, and she has pointed out in the aforementioned note that since she has been Queen of Quisine in this house for a very long time indeed and knows more than is good for her about the history of the household I could do worse than consult her on occasion to check my facts and, furthermore if (she did not actually say “furthermore” – it is a long word, and she appears to be unable to stretch that far) if, and as would appear to be apparent (another word she did not use; I am interpreting here: take it as read from now on that most of her words were at most two-syllables and I am re-writing) that is to say, regarding her who if
Wait. I’ve lost track of the grammar there; too may parentheses. Let me take a moment and calm down and I will start again. (I may need to rewrite this.)
The gist of her note was that if I am intending to write about the relationship between who I am calling the Governess from Hell #2 and my tutor, Mr. O’Flanagan, then I should be aware that she, Cook, has a personal interest in the matter and she would very much appreciate it if I consult with her before putting pen to paper. She goes on to complain that in the Autobiography so far I should have described my Pa and Ma much more than I have, especially as, according to her, my Pa was a very handsome gent and something of a heartthrob, popular with the local females (and also with one or two males).
Well, I suppose I can go back and chuck in a brief paragraph about Pa’s good looks to keep her happy. I shall do it when I can be bothered. But that is not the point. What on earth is going on and what has the world come to when my Cook is writing notes to me like this, on my not inexpensive paper? And what is her “personal interest”? Needless to say I summoned her into the master’s presence forthwith, and demanded to know what the flaming heck she was on about. And I did not use the words “flaming heck”, by the way, and did not hold back on the expletives.
My first port of call was about her saying that she had been in the house, in her words, “a very long time”. I have never actually been sure how long she has been here. It feels like forever, and I cannot remember another Cook before her, and she is pretty old, verging on the antique, and as far as I am concerned all Cooks look the same so that is not surprising. But look, I am not going to waste too much time on this. In a nutshell, she said that there had been a right hoo-hah in the village about the governess and the tutor, and she did not care to go into details regarding her personal interest, but that I should tread carefully because the reputation of my Pa was also involved and it would do no good to stir things up because there were people locally who also had personal interests in what had happened and suddenly it dawned on me that what I had here was potentially some kind of cross between an Agatha Christy whodunnit and a Jilly Copper bodice-ripper which, if nothing else, would divert attention away from my Autobiography, which was supposed to be about my life and not anyone else’s.
Anyhow, in the light of what she told me and to be on the safe side I contacted my agent and legal people again with a draft of what I have written about the Governess from Hell #2 and what she got up to with the tutor and it came back with almost everything blacked out, so I am going to have to skip all of that and just write something pretty bloody boring about how she liked to take me to the park and oversee my bathtimes and he could not keep up with my reading, said he found “Middlemarch” unreadable, and asked me to explain calculus to him.
I suppose the upside is that I can concentrate on writing about myself, which is what I am best at. I think some people will be disappointed after my hinting at something steamy, but let me say here and now that “they were two very moral and well-behaved individuals whose behaviour was beyond reproach and about whom any contemporaneous rumours and local gossip had no foundation in fact and/or reality.” (One of my lawyers wrote that bit and suggested I stick it in here word-for-word.)
And, I realize, I have not told you anything more about Cook, as requested by those admirers. Well, now I know she is likely to read this let me say that she is a very attractive lady of mature years, very intelligent, and a chef of the highest quality. Her steak and kidney pie is out of this world, and her bread and butter pudding is to die for. I am very happy to have her as a key member of my household and I do not know what I would do without her. Starve, probably. By the way, the picture above is NOT Cook. She does not like to have her photograph taken, I think because when the film is developed there is always an empty space where she should be. (Remind me to tell them not to print that bit.) Also, one can tell the photo is not her, because she is smiling.
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James Henderson
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