Trienkie went away for ten days on her Kontiki tour, and then the Lady asked me if I would mind staying alone at the house for five days, as they were going to a wedding, and the butler, who always look after the place when they went away, was off tho Wales to see his children. I thought about the dark and mysterious rooms in the older part, and the circular stairs that only had one very faint light, and my pants started shivering, but, I reasoned, I won't have to go in there, so it shouldn't scare me at all.
Mmm! After I had promised to water the plants, keep the doggies with me in my room, and at night just put the alarm on, I relaxed, as that did not sound that bad at all! What I did not know, was that the alarm was on the top floor in the second oldest part of this enormous house that was built in three different and far apart centuries, and hid a lot of secrets! So, the butler explained to me, I had to go up the main staircase, a wide, woodflanked and quite showy affair, the walls hung with this paintings of austere old men who glared angrily if you passed them, putting off the lights as far as I went, then I would come to the part where the alarm was situated, and then, he stressed, I had to put the alarm on, and there was just enough time to run for the door to the circular stairs and closing it. Ans this door I could only reach by running through the oldest and scariest part! Almost had a bally heart failure! Thomas assured me that there was no ghosts running loose, but I did not believe it, and it was with sinking spirits and an aweful feeling of loneliness that I saw his car disappear through the gate.It was hell! The first night I had to run back and forth about five times after putting on the alarm, to put it off again as it was now so dark with only one faint light to show me the way to the corridor through which I had to run, that I got cold feet when I saw the dark passage that I had to conquer.! I was too faint hearted to run through that spooky corridor and just the thought of that ill lit spiral stairs with the holes where the Christians were hid, was enough to give me the jitters. The second night was no better, and it was with a heart pounding fit to jump out of my throat that I got to my flat and the five doggies that were fighting and bitching as they all wanted to sleep with their heads on my pillow!
On the second day the gamekeeper brought a bunch of pheasants that were quite dead and tied by their legs, and told me that he was hanging it in the empty coal shed to ripen, and please not to forget to tell the cook when she came back. Which I promptly did. The five days of my ordeal did pass, and the spoiled dogs were still all alive, and no crook had come to steal the family jewels, but I was a nervous wreck. The other lot eventually came back, and I was so glad I couldn't stop smiling, and felt suddenly light and calm again. A few days after all was back a stench started hanging like a thick blanket over the back side of the house where the kitchen and also the outbuildings were situated. Everybody was walking around with pinched faces and scrunched up noses, and later the stench was so bad that the butler got somebody in to clean the drains that was situated near to the coal shed, where the stench was pinpointed.
It was when the lorry with all its draincleaning tools pulled up in front of the coal shed that it hit me like a bally bomb! The precious French Pheasants! Needless to say, the pheasants were putrid, and the butler NOT impressed, and the gamekeeper when he heard even less, and the old Lord had to forsake this delicacy! I was now considering a part time job in the afternoons at Tesco, as it cost a lot of money to drive around like I did, and when Heather told me that there were vacancies, I rushed to apply!