Someone on Tumblr asked me to comment on the accuracy of an article called 'Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village', and my answer included a story I don't think I've told here before, so I thought I'd reproduce it.
At the risk of sounding like a braggart, I’ve been to a few English villages and come back alive, so I may know a little on the topic.
First, the example list of village names: ‘Womble Hollow or Shrimpling or Pickles-in-the-Woods or Nasty Bottom or Wombat-on-Sea’. Very accurate. Actual English place names I’ve seen road signs pointing to: Six Mile Bottom, Giggleswick, Wigglesworth, Swaffham Bulbeck and Westward Ho! (exclamation point included).
The article neglects to mention what you should do if the village has a homemade scarecrow in every front garden, but there are no people to be seen. My family and I have experienced this. Get out. Get out immediately.
‘If you enter a town while the fête is happening, you are already dead.’ Not necessarily true. I went to a village fête once. It was nice. It was perfectly normal. A man dueted on a song called ‘Stick Your Finger up My Arse’ with a Henry Hoover.
‘Just remove water as a category.’ Good advice. As a child, I got my arm caught under a big rock on a Devon beach. All the locals gathered around me to shake their heads and say, ‘Tide’s coming in,’ with a sort of solemn enjoyment of the scene.
When other efforts to free me had failed, my dad went to the car and got an axe out of the boot. I distinctly remember being a child, my arm caught under a rock, the tide coming in, and my father approaching with an enormous axe.
His plan, it turned out, was to use the handle to lever the rock off my arm. I was permitted to keep my limbs.
Then a police officer turned up, looked at the axe in my father’s hands and said, ‘That’s a funny thing to bring to the beach, sir.’
It is possible, come to think of it, that my father is the murderer you need to avoid.
At the risk of sounding like a braggart, I’ve been to a few English villages and come back alive, so I may know a little on the topic.
First, the example list of village names: ‘Womble Hollow or Shrimpling or Pickles-in-the-Woods or Nasty Bottom or Wombat-on-Sea’. Very accurate. Actual English place names I’ve seen road signs pointing to: Six Mile Bottom, Giggleswick, Wigglesworth, Swaffham Bulbeck and Westward Ho! (exclamation point included).
The article neglects to mention what you should do if the village has a homemade scarecrow in every front garden, but there are no people to be seen. My family and I have experienced this. Get out. Get out immediately.
‘If you enter a town while the fête is happening, you are already dead.’ Not necessarily true. I went to a village fête once. It was nice. It was perfectly normal. A man dueted on a song called ‘Stick Your Finger up My Arse’ with a Henry Hoover.
‘Just remove water as a category.’ Good advice. As a child, I got my arm caught under a big rock on a Devon beach. All the locals gathered around me to shake their heads and say, ‘Tide’s coming in,’ with a sort of solemn enjoyment of the scene.
When other efforts to free me had failed, my dad went to the car and got an axe out of the boot. I distinctly remember being a child, my arm caught under a rock, the tide coming in, and my father approaching with an enormous axe.
His plan, it turned out, was to use the handle to lever the rock off my arm. I was permitted to keep my limbs.
Then a police officer turned up, looked at the axe in my father’s hands and said, ‘That’s a funny thing to bring to the beach, sir.’
It is possible, come to think of it, that my father is the murderer you need to avoid.
