'For God's sake, shut up,' Herbert shouted. 'Can't you see what you've done to Aunt Mildred?'
Frederick Midden turned his bleak eyes on his aunt and agreed that she didn't look at all well. 'Why isn't she eating her soup?' he enquired. 'It's very good soup and in her condition, and out of delicacy for her feelings, I won't give my opinion '
'Don't,' Herbert ordered. 'Just shut up.'
But Frederick insisted on making his point. 'All I have been trying to tell you is that changes take place in a variety of unforeseen ways.'
He was proved right. None of the Middens had foreseen the coming of war in 1939 and the changes it brought about. The Middenhall was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for the duration. Herbert Midden was killed in an air raid on Tween and succeeded by Miss Midden's father, Bernard, as heir to the estate. Since he was only eighteen when he was captured at Singapore by the Japanese and spent the rest of the war as a POW, it was left to Lawrence, now in his eighties, to do what he could to see that the house was damaged as much as possible by the various units that occupied it. The unspoken prayer in everyone's minds was that the Germans would do their bit for the architectural heritage of England by dropping their largest bombs on the place. But it was not to be. The Middenhall remained inviolate. In the grounds Nissen huts proliferated and a rifle range was constructed in the walled garden while round the estate itself a barbed-wire fence was erected and the lodge at the top of the drive became a guard house. What went on inside the camp no one knew. It was said that agents and saboteurs were trained there before being dropped into Occupied Europe; that much of the planning for the invasion on D-Day took place in the billiard room; that somewhere in the grounds a deep shelter had been built to house resistance fighters in the event of a successful German occupation of Britain. The only two certain facts were that the Canadians had used the house as a hospital and that at the end of the war German generals and senior officers were held there and interrogated in the hope that the mental disorientation produced by the architectural insanity of the Middenhall would persuade them to cooperate.
There were other consequences of the war. Black Midden's hidden funds were, according to the Trustees in Liechtenstein, badly hit by the fall of Hong Kong and, worse still, his investment in certain German industries had been wiped quite literally off the face of the earth by thousand-bomber raids by Lancasters. To cap this series of financial catastrophes a number of gold bars the old man had placed for safe keeping in a bank in Madrid had disappeared, along with the directors of the bank. The news, together with the suspicion that the Trustees were lying, confirmed Lawrence Midden in his loathing for anything foreign, and particularly foreign bankers. 'It could never happen in England,' he murmured on his deathbed two weeks later.
But change continued. As Britain withdrew from the Empire, Black Midden's fortune declined and with it the quarterly cheques. At the same time people from all over Africa and Asia who claimed to be Middens also claimed their right to accommodation and full board at the Middenhall. They brought with them their colonial prejudices and a demanding arrogance that was commensurate with their poverty.
The house became a cauldron of discontent and heated argument. On summer evenings the verandah echoed to shouts of 'Boy, bring me another pink gin,' or 'We used to get a damned sight better service from the kaffirs in Kampala. Nobody in this bloody country does a stroke of work.' Which, since the 'boy' in question happened to be a young woman from Twixt who was helping her mother in the kitchen where she was the cook, did nothing to enhance the quality of the lunches and dinners and may well have accounted for the discovery of a slug in the coq-au-vin one particularly vehement evening. Miss Midden's father, a mild man who had spent most of his life since the war working in an office in Stagstead nursing various digestive complaints caused by his stint on the Burma railway, found the situation intolerable. He was constantly having to placate the cook and the other staff or having to find replacements for them. At night he would lie awake and wonder if it wouldn't be better to up sticks with his family and disappear to somewhere peaceful like Belfast. Only his sense of duty restrained him. That and the thought that the damned colonials, as he called them, were bound to die before too long either naturally or, as seemed only too likely, as a result of mass poisoning by a justifiably demented cook. All the same he had moved into the old farmhouse and had tried to forget the Middenhall by being away for a few hours in the evening and at night, sitting by the old iron range in the kitchen and reading his beloved Pepys. But the house had worn him down and in the end, a broken man, his ill-health forced him to retire to a rented apartment overlooking the sea in Scarborough. Miss Midden remained behind to take over 'that hell-hole'.
She had done so readily enough. She was made of sterner stuff than her mild father and she resented the way he had been treated by the very people he had been supposed to be defending in the war. 'Those damned colonials,' those Middens who had scuttled from the Far East and India, from Kenya and Rhodesia as soon as their comfort was threatened and who had fought no wars, were going to learn to mend their manners. Or leave the Middenhall and make way for more deserving cases. Within months of becoming what they jokingly and disparagingly called 'The Mistress of the Middenhall' she had mastered them. Or broken their spirit. Not that they had much to break, these gin-sodden creatures who had lorded it over native peoples whom they called savages and whom they had done nothing to educate or civilize. She did it simply and with malice aforethought, a great deal of forethought, by choosing Edgar Cunningham Midden, or E.C. as he liked to be called, as her target. He it was who, having spent a lifetime bullying and beating his way to the top of some obscure province of Portuguese East Africa where he had a vast commercial empire, had once threatened to bastinado a black student from Hull University who had made the mistake of taking a holiday job at the Middenhall and had spilt a bowl of soup on E.C.'s lap while serving at dinner. Miss Midden had not wasted words on the old brute. She had simply and deliberately broken the tap on the central heating radiator in his room during a very cold spell, had refused him the use of an electric fire and, to compound his discomfort, had used her knowledge of the intricate system of plumbing in the Middenhall to cut off the hot water in his bathroom. E.C.'s complaints had been met with the retort that he wasn't in Africa now. And when he demanded another room immediately 'and don't waste time about it, have my stuff moved by the servants' before stumping off downstairs to a late breakfast, Miss Midden had complied with his request.
Edgar Cunningham Midden came back from his morning constitutional to find he had been allocated a very small room above the kitchen which had previously been occupied by the man who in earlier years had attended to the central-heating boiler which needed stoking during the night. There was no bathroom and the view from the window was an unedifying one of the back yard and the dustbins. E.C. had exploded at the prospect not only from the window but of walking down a long corridor to a bathroom and had demanded his old room back. Miss Midden said she had allotted it to Mrs Devizes and that she was already moving in. 'She didn't like her room so I've given her yours,' she said. 'If you want it back you should ask her for it.'
It was the very last thing E.C. was going to do. Mrs Devizes, a Midden by marriage, was a woman he detested and whom he had openly referred to as 'that half-caste'. He had suggested instead moving into her old room only to be told that it was being redecorated. A week later, during which he had been kept awake by the noise coming from the kitchen directly below him Major MacPhee had been sent down to spend the nights there and to drop several large pots every quarter of an hour the old bully left the Middenhall in a battered taxi. Miss Midden stood with folded arms on the verandah and saw him off. Then she had turned on the other guests and had asked if anyone else wanted to leave because, if they did, now was the time to do it. 'I have no intention of allowing the staff to be treated impolitely,' she said, slapping her breeches with the riding crop. There had been no misunderstanding her meaning. The guest Middens had behaved with great civility to the cook and the cleaning women after that and had confined their quarrels to themselves. There had been some further weeding out to be done but in the end Miss Midden was satisfied.