Directory of Humor Blogs
Miss Havering and The Status Quo Ante
It simply would not do, this business of having common bog creatures cavorting freely in one’s second-best purple bonnet. Especially when one was sitting on an upper branch of an extremely uncomfortable tree and being forced to conduct oneself in a serene and dignified manner. It occurred to Miss Havering Ma’am that life had been much simpler, and certainly more delightful, before the tiresome God business had been thrust in such an untimely manner upon her shoulders. In her prior existence, she had been pretty much restricted to extolling the virtues of her house and estates, entertaining the right people (in moderation), and in between these labours, consuming large quantities of Mrs. Beasley’s suet pudding. In short, she had been born and bred to a station wherein she took very seriously the responsibility of observing, maintaining, and in her own oblique fashion, promoting the status quo ante. Farmers, servants and various retainers and factotums did much of the actual physical labour and were responsible for making tiresome day-to-day decisions, and as long as she remembered her splendid position and let them get on with the tasks at hand without interference, they were (or so it seemed) quite happy to continue the arrangement forever (possibly even throughout all eternity). After all, to a man (and woman), they did pretty much as they pleased, lived more comfortably than most and had few if any personal expenses; and as long as they were content with wearing quaint uniforms and periwigs, and were willing to put up with their mistress’s idiosyncrasies, life could not have been less demanding. As for her own requirements (persons such as Herself distained ‘needs’), as far as she was concerned, it only mattered that a great deal of splendidly presented food, however poorly cooked, inevitably materialised on the table or sideboard at the appointed times, that fires perpetually burned in the grates, and that her linen was seen to every day without fail. To ask any more of life was to tempt fate, regardless of one’s social position vis-à-vis the green baize door.
By custom and breeding Miss Havering Ma’am was not possessed of either a great intelligence or curiosity. What her neighbours did (not that she had any, so to speak) was their own business. Similarly, what her household got up to behind the green baize door was theirs. It never would have occurred to her to pop into the kitchen unannounced and conduct an impromptu inspection. In the first place, Mrs. Beasley would never have stood for it; in the second place, although Miss Havering Ma’am was fairly certain where the green baize door was, the aura permeating and surrounding it was far too off-putting for her even to contemplate. Of course, as a small child she had visited the lower regions with what the adults considered alarming frequency. In fact, several aunts had approached both the child’s nanny and the French governess to air their objections, only to be informed that with time and the inevitable onset of reason, The Blood Of The Haverings would eradicate the common touch. “Should the child be denied access to the lower orders and be confined solely to the day and night nurseries and the schoolroom, she will undoubtedly acquire socialist leanings,” was how the Scots nanny, Miss Harriet McTavish (‘Tavy’ for short) put it. “Besides,” she continued (but only to herself, for she knew upon which side her bread was buttered), “she needs someone to play with; the skivvies and tweenies and the boots are barely more than children themselves. Besides, they are the only ones willing to put up with her ineptitude and anti-social tendencies.”
Miss Havering Ma’am had grown up imbued with a tradition no more nonsensical than any other, and she saw no reason why she should change with the times. The fact that Havering Hall, its demesne and estates, had pretty much crumbled beneath her considerable bulk mattered not, nor was it important that the only habitable rooms were the greater end of the former family morning dining room (not to be confused with the former family breakfast room, which was in ruins), the adjoining butler’s pantry and the silver vault. To be sure, she had the most functional fireplace, and with Edders busily chopping down the remains of the plantation, as well as the panelling from the house’s upper reaches, thereby facilitating the roaring fires that burned day and night, what more was needed?
In a long life of potentially bitter regrets and emptiness, during which she had accomplished very little if anything at all, Miss Havering Ma’am was curiously at peace with her lot. She considered the total lack of suitors in her youth to be a blessing. “We are not chattel and never were destined for baser urges,” she liked to boast to herself over her evening pint of Flaming Ram’s Nectar (a blend of Auld Ram’s Fundament from the centenary cask, cognac, Cointreau, and a whole mandarin orange stuck with three cloves and served in a silver chalice and heated with a red-hot poker by Sherbot, the senile footman). “Thanks to The General, who forbad all youngish men with ruttish tendencies from approaching the house, we were to be freed from the onerous burden of childbirth, filthy intimacy and betrayal.” Whether or not she had ever been instinctually drawn to the maternal vocation is moot, for her mother’s example did little to stimulate her ovaries. For during the few times the languid Penelope remembered having such a possession as a daughter and deigned to see her during one of her delightful afternoon séances in her private solarium, she forced the poor child to sit upon a low stool in the aviary she kept for her tamed ravens. Tiny Miss Havering Miss (as she was then) was then required to remain motionless for the best part of an hour, silently observing her mother perform the spiritual exercises designed for her by the famous geneticist Professor Herbert d’ À-Peu-Près. “We no longer possess a childproof enclosure such as The Aviary in which to contain the antics of a nasty child,” Miss Havering Ma’am once commented to The Reverend Father Pickle, on one of his rare visits to Havering Hall before succumbing to the ague at the age of twenty-seven. “Our beloved mother chose to be buried in That Splendid Cage along with the ravens, which means that any child of ours would have been at liberty to approach our person,” she groaned, truly appalled at such a prospect. “You do understand, don’t you? One is a frail and sensitive creature, and one fears that children (even those of one’s own blood, which in all other respects would be exceptional) are contagious.” And as for sex (not that the word was ever to raise its ugly head within the precincts), it was out of the question. “We reiterate, we are of a delicate and sensitive disposition,” she once recorded in her personal memoir (though she certainly never expressed herself in so many words to The Reverend Father Pickle), “much like the rarest orchid. One should expire at the merest suggestion of passion.” That she was known to keep a small Shi Tzu under her skirts (“to comfort us in our utter loneliness”) was not considered in the least bit untoward. “Harold (the Shi Tzu) is our knight in shining armour,” she wrote, “and our boon companion. We shall never be parted.” And she was true to her word. When he eventually died, age twenty-two or thereabouts, he was extracted from under her petticoats just long enough for MacSweeney, the noted furrier, to fashion a pair of drawers from the luxuriant pelt. These she donned in the privacy of her armoire, in the dead of night, after first extinguishing all the lamps and turning the key in the lock to prevent any unwanted intrusion by Mortimer (who was inclined to fuss). She decreed in a memorandum to her physician, Dr. Slingsby deMotte-Pension (with instructions that he inform her solicitor, the undertaker and the maids accordingly) that the drawers (“dearest Harold, how soft he is and how very considerate”) were never to be removed for any reason whatsoever, not even after her death (“an eventuality as yet to be determined”).
Miss Havering Ma’am, during one of her rare excursions to London by train (“One was but a child, but one shall never forget it. The funeral cortege of the old queen. The funeral service, during which one contented oneself by playing with one’s pottikins and pannikens behind the alter screen. The funeral banquet, when one had one’s first soupçon of oxtail en gelée”) was exposed for the first and last time to that most odious of articles, The Common Newspaper. “We shall never forget,” she wrote in her memoir immediately afterwards, “the stench and filth of the ink upon our fingers, nor the effect that the foul drivel, obviously penned by ignorant and bitter savants who were jealous of the world and sought only to debase its genius, had upon our soul. After less than three minutes’ exposure to its insidious tirades and self-righteous smirks, we were, for the first time in my life, quite willing to commit mass murder upon every goose who deigned provide the quill and upon every man jack who wielded a press.” Thereinafter and for the remainder of her (not as yet completed) life no newspaper was permitted within the demesne precincts, and nor was her mind opened to the possibilities of television when, in the full flowering of her third and fourth dotage, she had determined that such a device was polluting to the soul and fatal to one’s emotional and mental independence, as well as scientifically abnormal.
When it was (in her opinion) ordained that she assume the mantel of God, a difficult though not improbably task for the daughter of Unitarians, Miss Havering Ma’am, although not terribly pleased, was not taken aback. “We, ourselves, are perhaps not a member of The Great and Good,” she demurred to Lady Morticia Dungeon-Pickle, revered aunt to The (late) Reverend Father Pickle, during one of their famous afternoon soirees, “but we feel that, in our baseness, we shall one day be asked to perform great deeds, in spite of our disposition towards unmannerly thighs.” Whereupon Lady Morticia, demurring as only those of great breeding can demur, coughed subtly into her lace handkerchief, poured a second cup of Auld Ram’s Fundament-enriched Special Blend Darjeeling and helped herself to a third slice of Madeira cake. Miss Havering Ma’am brushed a grouping of crumbs from her chin, wherein they had congregated around a thatch of whiskers and a carbuncle, and continued. “One cannot begin to express to you, dearest Lady Morticia, how very changed one shall become, and how one shall have to discipline oneself when it comes to socialising.”
Lady Morticia examined the rim of her cup for possible smudges and plucked a deep beige and mould embossed cucumber and cress sandwich from the salver, all the while thinking, “How slatternly my oldest friend has become in her decrepitude.”
Miss Havering Ma’am fell silent and watched her guest out of the corner of her eye. “Such impudence,” she thought, “rubbing the dirt from our third-best Spode with her thumbnail.” But not wanting to offend her guest, one of her most ancient and cherished friends and one of the few still living who recalled the favours bestowed upon the fortunate by The General, she held her tongue. “Morticia is undoubtedly gaga,” she decided. “Never mind, we shall tell Mortimer to destroy the cup when she leaves. Bad manners are contagious, quite worse than the plague.”
And so it was that Miss Havering Ma’am kept her silence, using the time to bask in the glow of her incipient Godhood, until such time as her guest had replaced her cup on to its companion saucer (and in the process spilling a full ounce of the fragrant amber liquid onto the decaying surface of Miss Havering Ma’am’s fourth favourite papier mâché whatnot, an unforgivable solecism). However, desirous not to mortify her aged companion, Miss Havering Ma’am masked her scowl behind the large Chinese fan she kept for such occasions, until she had composed an appropriate response. Only then did she continue speaking. “We shall miss our little get-togethers, our dear Lady Morticia.”
“Oh?” asked the older lady, quite startled. “Are you planning to leave our little part of the world?”
“Not at all,” laughed Miss Havering Ma’am.
Lady Morticia glanced at her friend over the top of her lorgnette. It had occurred to her that Miss Havering Ma’am’s eccentricity was getting worse. Recalling certain incidents involving her poor mother before she was locked in the aviary ‘for her own good’, The (Late) Reverend Father Pickle’s aunt wondered if she might possibly be dangerous.
Being The Divine Entity (a moniker she much preferred, “God” being, as far as she was concerned, over-used and smacking of the common) put Miss Havering Your Worship (as she would thenceforth be addressed) in mind of Lady Hortense and her cat, the late Colonel Flavius Aurelius Bossington-ffiend, her constant companion, who still resided in his glass dome along with the fourteen stuffed canaries and the decayed remains of his favourite half-eaten pigeon. How magnificent he looked, and how proud and how great his savagery, and how he illuminated the special niche over the Adam’s fireplace in The Morning Family Dining Room (next to an eighteenth century still-life of cabbages and a disembowelled stag). In all respects, the late Colonel Flavius Aurelius Bossington-ffiend was hugely superior to all his successors, and Lady Hortense, never the most balanced of souls, had lapsed into a severe depression upon his death. Forever after the redoubtable matron forbad smiling in her presence and decreed that all those who succumbed to flights of fancy should be flogged by the cat ‘o nine tails she had designed specifically for the occasion. “It does so remind one of our beloved companion, the late Colonel Flavius Aurelius Bossington-ffiend,” she confided in a letter to the infant Miss Havering Miss (as was). “Orrix (the blacksmith/cobbler) has thrilled us with his artistry. Not possessing an artistic talent to speak of, ourselves, we shall refrain from illustrating this missive with a likeness of the knob on the end of this most exquisite of all weapons. Suffice it to say, however, that it resembles our beloved feline’s broad head and savage expression in every respect. Remind us to remove it from the silver vault upon the occasion of your next visit, and if it will thrill you, we shall ask Runnymede, our nurse, to lash your maidenly shoulders with its tongues.” Miss Havering Miss (as was) was only prevented in sending a piquant telegram to Lady Hortense by her grandfather’s spiritual advisor, Prof. Dr. Mittenhausen, and as a consequence was immediately expunged from the great lady’s guest list. Miss Havering Miss (as was) was never allowed into her salon again and the old lady eventually died alone and unmourned, and was interred in an unwashed state.
Lady Morticia Dungeon-Pickle, after eating the last of the oeufs de caille en gelée and proceeding to the prune tartlets, cleared her throat once again, wondering perhaps how she might pose a potentially embarrassing question to her dearest friend. Unlike Miss Havering Your Worship, she had not been brought up as either a Unitarian or an Agnostic, and her father, the archdeacon (albeit defrocked) of one of the larger and more important cathedrals, was not known for his spiritual flexibility. “My daughter,” he had informed her as a child, “you are but gristle for the jaws of Satan, a blemish unto the face of The Lord. I do cast thee into the dwelling of the unclean swine, and order thy spleen to repent.” No, questioning or being seen to criticise the overlord of one’s earth was not undertaken lightly, even if the Godhead was seemingly self-proclaimed. The last thing she wanted to do was offend an exalted entity such as the one seated opposite her smoking an ivory pipe and striking her unfortunate maidservant (never mind that she had inadvertently dropped an apricot blancmange down her mistress’ décolletage) with a spoon. “How utterly mortifying,” Lady Morticia mused to herself, “it is so difficult knowing quite what to do. Perhaps if I simply pretended to go to sleep I might save myself.”
Miss Havering Your Worship, however, was not so easily deceived. “You are twitching, our dear Lady Morticia. Is something troubling you?”
“My dear…” At his point Lady Morticia lapsed into embarrassed and incoherent mumbling and fell to rummaging through her copious Gladstone bag, eventually emerging with the bottom half of a Scotch egg, to which was adhered a chocolate éclair. These she hurriedly jammed into her mouth, lest she be expected to continue with the conversation. “Please,” she prayed to herself, “permit me to swoon this very moment. Should I perhaps pretend to choke, so that I may go to the window for a breath of fresh air? Once there, it would be but a tiny step to tumbling through the aperture into the garden…”
But her companion interrupted her before she could carry out her plans. “Come, come, Lady Morticia,” chided Miss Havering Your Worship, “you are far too modest. You forget that we Gods can pillage the thoughts of mortals. We know what you are thinking. Speak up! You will find it comforting.”
“Well,” said Lady Morticia doubtfully, “I shall try, but I do not guarantee success. You see, it is so very embarrassing…”
“What is?” snapped her dearest friend. “The low cushion upon which you cringe is twelfth century. It was embroidered by Eleanor of Aquitaine during her confinement with Coeur de Lion. But never mind; if you have bespoiled it with your common, person soil, it is no matter. It is, as they say, quite replaceable.”
“Oh, Your Worshipful Presence” interjected Lady Morticia, desperately, “how could you even think of such a thing? I assure you I…”
“Ah, but can you be completely sure?” answered Miss Havering Your Worship in a schoolmistressy voice. “I seem to recall there was that occasion when you left a stain on The General’s Aubusson portmaneau…”
“B… b… but I was only nine weeks old,” stuttered Lady Morticia.
“That,” thundered Miss Havering Your Worship, “was no excuse, and you ought to have been severely beaten.
“B… b… but you were sitting at my side, and it was you who was appallingly flatulent,” squealed Lady Morticia angrily.
There was a moment of frosty silence, during which Mortimer entered the room bearing a cochon de lait en crôute and a plate of macaroons. After she had placed the items on the table and refolded the napkins, which had become somewhat over-used and soggy, she bobbed once in the annoyingly French manner and left the room. The door closed with an ominous kerchunk, and Miss Havering Your Worship returned to the matter at hand. Sitting ramrod straight, she bared her yellowish wolfish teeth and smiled at Lady Morticia.
“And WHAT, pray tell, were you implying by that remark?” she asked in a soft and pleasant voice, laden with unction.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Lady Morticia with a blank stare, having quite lost the thread of the conversation.
“You were, I believe, accusing us of moving our bowels upon our beloved grandsahib’s priceless portmanteau,” hissed Miss Havering Your Worship with teeth bared and exposing her yellowed and granite-like gums (“quite like the Pennines, in aspect, including the odd sprigs of heather and the occasional ptarmigan,” her physician had once remarked to his biographer). “Of course,” continued Miss Havering, after first sipping from her cup and offering Lady Morticia a slice of cold tongue on an esplanade of rutabaga, “although our hearing is excellent, you may have been mumbling. Please, our dearest Lady Morticia, reassure us that you were speaking metaphorically. Was it concerning the perils of riding an elephant astride? Are you wishing to confess to us the sundry fragrant embarrassments as yet unknown to us?”
Lady Morticia coughed violently, expelling the succulent canard decapité sauce robespierre she had recently swallowed, and patted her lips with a thin slice of pan de miel. Clearly, it was time to speak her mind. Reorganising her thoughts, a feat which required additional sustenance in the form of a cold leg of mutton with mint jelly and a carafe of Romanee Conti (1847, not perhaps the best of years, which lowered her estimation of her friend and emboldened her somewhat), she placed her lorgnette upon her slender nose (so unlike Miss Havering’s fullsome snout) and fluttered her eyelashes. Unfortunately, in so doing, she happened to glimpse her friend’s face in the full glare of the afternoon monsoon, and very nearly shrieked.
“For goodness sake, our dear Lady Morticia,” barked Miss Havering Your Worship, “if you do not tell us at once what is on your mind we shall go mad!”
Lady Morticia took a very deep breath, an act she instantly regretted due to Miss Havering’s proximity, and swallowed. “In for a penny, in for a pound, I always say,” she said, addressing her remark to her left shoe.
“We are waiting,” said her friend.
“How should I put this?” murmured Lady Morticia to her right glove. “Are you feeling in the best of health?” she asked, quickly adding, “if it is not too forward of me to enquire.”
“We are in the full bloom of our maidenhood,” answered her companion, “why do you enquire?”
Lady Morticia thought she had detected a slight edge creeping into her friend’s voice, but realised that she had inadvertently opened a door that could not be closed. But as she groped for the right words, a flicker of an idea took hold and instead of speaking she rummaged once more in her Gladstone bag and pulled out a large silver and mother-of pearl mirror.
Miss Havering Your Worship let out a most unattractive snort. “Vanity,” she said caustically, “is most unbecoming in a woman your age, Lady Morticia.”
Lady Morticia blushed crimson but continued munching thoughtfully on the two squares of Turkish Delight she had pried loose from the mirror. She then looked her oldest and dearest friend squarely in the face. “But Miss Havering Your Worship,” she said softly, “it is not I who ought to look in the glass.” And with that, she turned the mirror in the direction of Miss Havering. “I am not in the least bit perceptive, but I fear for either my sanity or your health. You see, dearest one, when we sat down to tea your complexion was as it always has been. Since then, however, you have grown a most startling beard. If I may hazard a guess, I should say it is now more than two feet long…”
Miss Havering Your Worship was not in the least taken aback, nor was she particularly surprised. “Kneel before The Great Ourselves,” she commanded. “We are come to save the world!”
Copyright 2007 JA Weeks
