“All the clocks are wrong; time keeps on slipping away, and we haven’t even made the tea!” proclaimed Mrs. Dee, roughly towelling her hands on the tattered fold of her apron. All around her chaos reigned supreme in her kitchen of plenty; pots and crocks and spoons and ladles stood lip and lank-ways, in at all ways, poking fun at every corner of a room that celebrated mess. The greasy pans paid their homage to the brown, tea stained, un-strained teapot, nodding leeward in its gently tilting pile. The sink, eye high with plates and bowls, each glazed with yesterday’s breakfast and last night’s supper, while somewhere, veiled in the deepening gloom of a murk that prayed to the shades, a tired old moggy slept soundly in a custard bowl, occasionally licking his pad paws with an air of feline indifference. Mice ran. Noses ran, and all in Mrs. Dee’s kitchen.
Indeed, despite her renowned hospitality, no visitor to the Dee household was ever gripped by the prospect of a cup of tea served in one of Mrs. Dee infamously filthy china cups, or a suspiciously mouldy looking scone with a delicate dusting of blue bottle flies. And flies there were aplenty. Every available surface, be it window sill or bookshelf, was home to a myriad of little brittle insect bodies, their tiny hairy legs all pointing skywards.
The big house fascinated all the local children, with its huge overgrown hedges and broken down gates, every stick of what used to be the garden fence was now green and rotten, chocked with ivy, rotten moss and maggoty leaves. Somewhere amongst the gooseberry buses and tall limes, an old shell of a car lay dying, its tyres exhausted. The tax disk was always valid and up-to-date, since Mrs. Dee never liked to be ‘on the wrong side of the truth’ as she called it. The huge mechanical oak that grew stoutly in the centre of the garden was festooned with punctured rubber balls, kites and Christmas lights of Christmas’ past, each tiny fractured bulb turned a dull green with age. Everywhere everything was in a state of decay, but for all the age and waste that abounded in old Mrs. Dee’s garden, a garden it remained, looking as if it was meant to be that way and that some higher force was busy at work. The local children, what few there were, would often try and steal a glimpse at the old recluse, about whom there were the usual nightmarish speculations and tall tales. But save the milkman and the Tucker family, nobody ever bothered to bother with old Mrs. Dee and her strange ways. The house itself stood at the end of a sparsely populated street, over looking the fields where the ponies played amongst the cowslip and hawthorn, so there were no neighbours to complain or complain of. It is often remarked by some that no village town or province is complete without an eccentric or two, and it seemed that old Mrs. Dee was well suited to her calling. Rumours circulated that she had been a famous writer who had made her name with scandalous novels about maids and their lusty masters, whilst others believed she had lost her mind when her betrothed was lost in the great losses of war. In fact, like all rumours of any interest, this was all nonsense, and the truth was that Mrs. Dee had lived in Wood View for as long as anyone could remember; as much a part of the local social history as the hang man’s tree and Norman, the provincial pervert.
