This happened. The editor thinks it's a book of dog sitter stories waiting to happen. I am scribbling away at same...
I first house-sat by accident. I was originally at Haven House, Lembton, as a live-in safety net for Lady Olive Simmonds, a seventy-nine year-old Bostonian with a lilac afro, a Temazepam habit and leg ulcers. Haven House was by the sea. Eighteenth century, elegant, comfortable.
But there was Olive...
Always in pain; either drunk, hungover or both; barely educated. She had married a man who was knighted, and believed this gave her a licence to be a twat. According to Olive, her fellow Lembtonians were all dull academics - this group having reading ages older than hers, which was thirteen - or failed schizophrenics. She had serious monophobia, with staff working (unnecessarily) every day apart from weekends. At weekends, first thing, anxious, she would ring round the Lembtonians that were still speaking to her - six in number - inviting them for coffee, brunch, lunch, tea, drinks and dinner. 'Oh, is seven-am a bit early, Daphne? Well, the light always gets me up...'
And spinning, with the cocktail of antibiotics, whiskey and Mirtazapine.
On fine mornings she would rush out onto the beach to entrap walkers. 'You must need a coffee, surely, having walked all those two miles up here? Well, I can't quite offer you cafe standard, but it won't be too shabby, either. No? Oh...'
I had nowhere else to go at the time (burnout from teaching) and lovely Miranda Coombes-Taylor (think the MGM lion top to toe in discontinued BHS clothing lines) arranged with Olive for me to go and stay at the top of Haven House. 'We'll try it over the summer...' said Olive. She was still smiling at me then.
I had a tiny attic room, food and beer. Olive's four daughters hymned my being there, as it meant they needn't be. One said to me, 'I would come more, maybe, if she didn't look at me with such hatred. I get out of the car, I call out, she comes into the hall, she focuses on me and her eyes turn just so evil. I find that really off-putting.'
On the rare occasions when Olive could guilt herself some guests, I was an unofficial butler. And I was last resort company for her when she couldn't guilt herself into being a guest. She was marginally more successful at this. We would watch TV in the brown room. (She called all her rooms after their wallpaper. Brown, Beige, Magnolia, etc.) She could never follow the plot of anything. 'Here comes Poirot again, is it? Him there, with the stick? No hair. You'd think they'd have at least given the actor a wig. And why does he walk like that? It isn't attractive, is it? Who is this one now? His secretary? Why would he have a secretary when he doesn't work anywhere? Who's dead again? Oh, nobody yet. Really, just started? - you'd think it'd been going for hours. Days, even...' Continually checking the clock. Which I tend to do now at sixty, bored with life.
'Iestyn,' Olive said, once, 'how about you give us all a treat and wear a different shirt for a change?'
Fenella, who spent the most time with her - Catholic, probably, trying to earn time off purgatory - hushed her. 'Olive, no, really. He hasn't...'
'Iestyn, how about you visit the barber's, pronto?'
'Iestyn, how about you tread more lightly overhead for a change? Eighteenth century joists weren't designed for twentieth century morbid obesity.'
The time came for her to fly to LA for Christmas, leaving me in charge of the house. I had an account at the village stores, Olive's recipe books - there would be parties ahead. So when the doctor forbade her to fly with her leg ulcers in such a parlous state, I told her, 'No, you'll be fine, flying, Olive. Doctors don't know anything.'
And being as silly as she was, she went.
***
Christ alive, I was thinking, has that idiot jammed the doorbell?
It was seven-forty am, mid-December, barely getting light.
At the door was Daphne (Callen-Osborne) in the grey mac that made her look like Queen Victoria hiding in a halibut.
'Olive has had an upset,' she told me. 'Carried off the plane. Can you house sit on? Thought you might. Olive says you have nothing to move on to.’
Oh...
'This will be for quite some weeks. Months, possibly. Olive caught the flesh-eating disease. They think in the departures lounge. They carried her off the plane, she was in such a state, but have managed to confine the outbreak to just behind her left knee.'
Oh, again.
And the rest, as they say, is history...
#dogsitter #dogsitting #memoir #funny #sundaytimes #iestynedwards #books #comedy
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