Mrs Nollys came in, and looked down the toilet bowl. She stared for a moment, before grunting. “I dunno how you did it, son, but you’ve done a serviceable job cleaning the loo. Mrs Scratch and I’ll be needing you this evening. Remember that. We need you to boil the kettle.”

“It’ll be a tad late for tea by then.”

“Not for tea, you idiot. For our bath.”

Who on earth, you might be asking, still used a kettle to fill a bathtub? That was a question worth asking. I got up and went out of the bathroom, and finally met Mrs Scratch. Where Mrs Nollys was brash, brazen and rude, Mrs Scratch appeared to be smaller and meeker. She was dressed almost exclusively in white, and she looked like the classic image of an old woman in the storybooks. You know the sort of thing – beaklike nose, tiny spectacles and greying silvery hair. She and Mrs Nollys embraced each other and kissed – not in a friendly kiss, but in the sense of a kiss that is commonly shared between husband and wife.

To my child brain, this was something unnatural, odd. They couldn’t be married. They just couldn’t be. Then again, certain events had taken place long before I was born which meant that they could be. Mrs Nollys looked at me again, sharply.

“What are you looking at, boy?”

I trembled. “Nothing.”

Mrs Nollys dipped into the pocket of her jacket and retrieved what appeared to be a purse. She opened it and retrieved a coin, which she roughly forced into my hand. To my disappointment, it turned out to be a fifty pence piece. I turned over the coin and I was amazed by the picture I saw on the back. Staring up at me wasn’t the face of the Queen I had expected to see. Instead, a man looked up at me – a man with slick hair, and a large nose. I examined the writing around the surface of the coin. Examining it closely, I found that it read GEORGE.

I put the coin in my pocket and ran out of the house, a bit angry at being short-changed like this. That coin had to be at least forty years out of date, maybe more. What kinds of outdated coins were they going to give me next? I went down into the village, and wandered for a while, looking for people I could help. It was more difficult than I’d imagined it being.

Very few people needed help with anything. Eventually, the old man with mad scientist hair came up to me and bowed gracefully. “You’re Clarence’s boy, right?” he said. I nodded. He placed his hand to his chest.

“My name is Thomas Harris. I need your help with something, yes. At my house. Now, move along, boy!” He said it in such a rude manner that I felt inclined to run.

Mr Harris’ house was located somewhere close to Mrs Nollys’, although not quite in the same street. It was located in the “brick”, next door to the house that had been painted red. It was rather small, and it had a medium-sized garden outside, with a fine picket fence around it, and a lawn, on which a large armchair stood. I entered the house and took a look around. The hall was an old-fashioned affair with barren striped wallpaper. The floor was made of several polished wooden planks, and a doorway carved into one side of the room led into a living room, with furniture that was covered in dust. At the end of the hall was a staircase, leading upstairs.

Mr Harris entered the hall and presented me with a feather duster with a black handle. He told me to go and dust off the entire living room. I bowed before him and went into the living room. Performing the task was much better than taking care of Mrs Nollys’ and Mrs Scratch’s toilet, since it was easier to wave the duster around and let the dust get blown off into the carpet. Once my task was done, Mr Harris came in, and looked at the room and told me to get upstairs and take all his dirty clothes to the washing machine.

I went to the washing machine, which was located in the corner of the kitchen. It was here that I found myself baffled. The washing machine Mr Harris used wasn’t exactly the kind of washing machine everyone else used these days. In fact, it was little better than a wooden barrel on legs with a lever sticking out of it and a pair of rolling pins in a metal frame standing over it. That was extremely unnerving. I found it both somewhat interesting and, of course, incredibly annoying that these villagers were already using technology that must be at least a hundred years, if not more, out of date, in spite of the fact that Clarence owned a telly. You just cannot imagine how difficult it was to get used to this kind of washing machine. Let me tell you, it was quite difficult at first to get used to using it, but eventually, once I understood how to use it, I did it swimmingly.

The clothes Mr Harris wanted me to clean were, in essence, his old trousers, a pair of boxer shorts which I could swear were soiled, a pair of trousers (from whose pockets I could find a whole host of tissues, which were unpleasant and covered with some sort of mucus), a pair of blue socks, and some other clothes, which I had to very carefully and laboriously clean one by one. Turning the crank was especially difficult, and trying to do that while holding the clothes in case the machine mangled them made things even harder. It took some hours before the task was done. Afterwards, I went out, and put together a washing line and hang all the clothes out to dry. Mr Harris nodded silently.

“Boy!” I turned my head. It was Mrs Nollys. She marched towards the garden, firmly annoyed. I looked around to find that the sun had begun to set. “Do you know what time it is?” she snapped. “Twilight,” I replied, nervously.

“It’s our bath time,” she snapped. “The water needs to be boiled and the bath needs to be run. Now hop to it.”

I hurried over to Mrs Nollys’ cottage and turned on the stove. The kettle they used was very old-fashioned, to say the least. It looked as you’d expect a kettle to look – black, with an ornate handle on top, and a spout on the side. It looked absolutely nothing like our modern, electric kettles, with their different handles and their broader spouts. The stove took a while to heat up. I breathed for a while. Mrs Nollys and Mrs Scratch were in the living room, watching television, which it also seems they had.

The kettle screeched. I went up, removed the kettle from the stove and bore it up to the bathroom, where I poured the hot water down into the metal bathtub. Mrs Nollys and Mrs Scratch were clearly waiting impatiently outside the room, since I could hear their grunting and cursing with impatience outside, albeit muffled by the door. I went and opened the door and let Mrs Nollys and Mrs Scratch in.

By the time the day ended, I was exhausted to the point of collapse. I went to Clarence’s cottage and then collapsed in utter defeat on my bed. Clarence later entered my room and informed me that he had been busy mending Mr Jones’ fence. He exploded into a long rant about how long it took, and he delivered it in some sort of anxious tone. “A-Anyway,” he stammered, “I-I sh-shall make you some t-t-tea.” He turned and left the room. To be honest, I really didn’t feel like having any tea. I was too tired to care and all I wanted to do was to get some sleep. Clarence returned with a small, dainty mug of tea in his hand.

“E-Earl G-G-Grey,” he announced.

Reluctantly, I gulped down the entire mug. I did it in a very slurpy manner, I must admit. Back on the council estate I lived on, nobody ever taught me how I should drink tea in the proper manner, as you do when you’re meeting the Queen. Some of the drink ended up going down the wrong hole, which made me choke. The fact that it was a hot drink didn’t help matters much, either, since the heat of the drink made it even more uncomfortable when I swallowed.