'A London Diary'

New prose fiction by Ben Greenway

December 24th, 2025

Life at the apartment is becoming increasingly more stressful. Mrs Templeton has recently found out that Miss Marie is a supporter of the Reform movement and constantly feels the need to berate her about it. Quite frankly their incessant squawking is starting to drive me little crazy, and I am actually considering finding another residence away from my eccentric (and noisy) great aunt. This morning as I was eating my breakfast in the tiny kitchen the two old ladies began a particularly heated argument, so bad that I feared that Miss Marie was going to be hurled out of the apartment down the mouldy staircase by Mrs Templeton.

‘Silence. You don’t know what you are talking about Mrs Templeton. It is past your time. What we need right now is action, against immigrants, and nobody is going to achieve that but Reform, least of all you passive Torys’ Miss Marie spat, in her imperious tone. As per usual, she was in full military dress, already, at seven in the morning, in fact the only time I have ever seen her without her military uniform on is when she is working as a security guard at the local Sainsbury’s. I remember she tried to wear it on her first day of the job, but I think she frightened so many of the customers that the manager had to tell her that she was going to be fired if she didn’t get into the ugly Sainsbury’s costumes like the rest of them. That is the only time I’ve known Miss Marie to lose an argument, and I’m sure she didn’t go down without substantial shouting, still, neon orange Sainsbury’s outfit or not, I would not want to be the one caught stealing a pre-packaged meal deal by her.

‘Mish Marie! How outrageous you are!’ squealed Mrs Templeton in her bat-like, rather annoying voice, ‘I will not shtand for this in my kitchen! You and your glorified racists are going to be the ones who bring this great country to deshpair!’ As she began to tremble, rather violently, I was transfixed by the wobbly bit on the end of her nose, which seemed to me, in this particular moment, to be dancing the cha-cha. You’ll know the part of the nose I’m talking about if you’ve ever had a great aunt, or perhaps maybe a great grandma, or perhaps, you might be a great grandma yourself. They have an almost hypnotic power, a little witch’s bulb that appears once the skin begins to expire, and sag off the main body, a sign of wisdom and strength, although I’m not sure Mrs Templeton could be called either wise or strong. They really are quite amazing. When Mrs Templeton is happy it seems to almost be sucked up, back into her nose like it was never there at all, when she’s sad it tends to hang lower, drooping to the point where it hangs so close to her lips that I bet you she could bite it if she wanted to, and when she gets really truly angry, it begins to shake violently in an uncontrolled manor, jumping back and forth, like a Spanish bailaora. Mrs Templeton is a born and raised WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) you see, from the proper society, as she puts it, which is all the reason she needed to be quite so angry at Miss Marie’s political stance ‘One musht remain true to those core valuesh one grew up with’ she muttered to me once, when she was in a philosophical mood. Mrs Templeton tends to mutter a lot to me and, in fact, felt the need to relate the entire circumstances of her life and childhood in seven hour-long sessions at the dinner table within the first week after I had arrived!

*

She was born Rosalind Elizabeth Tabitha Templeton at some point in the years after the second world war, she never told me the exact date so I’m not entirely sure how old she is, and I’m inclined to believe that she has probably forgotten herself. Her father was an Anglican priest, and had been promoted to a bishop the year she was born. He was a quiet man, stoic, reserved, and devoted to God. He was a man you could find either in his study, or preaching at the parish church, and he passed his traditional Christian conservatism onto all his seven children, of which Rosalind was the sixth, and the only girl. Rosalind had no idea of her father’s life before he married her mother, only that he didn’t like his home and preferred not to talk about it.

‘Trivial pasts do not matter’, was her father’s response when one day Rosalind worked up the courage to ask him at the dinner table, after her eldest brother, James, had left to attend Oxford, studying medicine. After her father’s answer, the dinner continued in silence, as usual, except for her youngest brother, Henry, and his continual snivelling. Once he finished eating, her father stood up from the table, making no noise at all, and the harsh light cast a deep shadow across his dark features and wrinkled face, which in combination with his black cassock made him appear to Rosalind rather like the shadows themselves, a ghost out of a fairy tale, or horror story. After that dinner, Rosalind never asked her father a question again. She was eight years old. Her mother was from a long line of aristocrats, and so she was the one from whom the Templeton family name came from. She was the only daughter of a baron, and so when the time came, she inherited the family house and wealth, and well, never had to work a day in her life. From her mother, Rosalind was imparted with those sexist values of gentility which were still flourishing in the fifties when she grew up, such as playing the violin, sewing, and being seen and not heard. Rosalind was particularly close to her mother however, as being the only two girls in the ginormous family house, apart from the maids (who I was informed by Mrs. Templeton, ‘didn’t count’) forced them to bond together quite closely on those aforementioned topics of fifties gentility, which her mother seemed rather giddy to talk about with someone else.

‘So, so, have you heard, Noah’s been engaged to a farmer’s daughter in the local village. What a scandal!’, her mother chattered to her giddily, who although well into her forties and married over twenty years with seven children, had not lost any of her youthful energy or her childhood love of a good drama, even if the drama was about one of her own sons. She was an absolute family making machine, a perfect mother, by fifties standards, still beautiful, in a maternal way, and admired by the people from the local village and respected family acquaintances alike. Rosalind hypothesised that her mother’s love of drama was likely one of those side effects of being born an only child, that since you spend so much time alone growing up, you tend to fixate on other people’s business to occupy that social part of your brain that was neglected. An interesting theory but one that I think is a little too far-fetched. It appeared to me that Mrs. Templeton Senior needed no reason but the love of attention to be the biggest gossip around. Much of Rosalind’s early life before she was old enough to be a confidant of her mother, was therefore spent either alone, practising those gentile skills to impress her mostly absent parents, or being tormented by her older brothers, particularly the triplets, Luke, Noah, and Jude, who were three years older than her, and the undeniable masters of the house during Rosalind’s childhood years. They knew every secret passageway, dark corner, and ultimate hiding spot of the great big manor house in Dorset, and due to the chaotic force of young boys which ran strong in all of them, they felt the need to fill their boredom with the rush of danger. Initially the one in danger was themselves, as they use to see who could complete the most daring and extreme physical feat, which climaxed in a competition to see who could climb the highest on the great oak tree out on the family gardens, which was ultimately how Jude ended up in a wheelchair with a broken leg and arm, when Rosalind was four, although he did win that competition and relentlessly held it over his brother’s heads. Jude was the youngest out of the triplets you see, by fifteen minutes, which ultimately gave him an inferiority complex and a burning passion to destroy his marginally older brothers utterly and entirely in every thrilling action they undertook, as if to make up for that fatal first race, in which he had finished last. Once Jude recovered however, the brothers were not satisfied with just mortally endangering themselves, but instead felt the need to endanger others, and so they took up the swords of their ancestors off of various mantlepieces and fireplaces and began to wield them against the maids, ambushing them during cooking, or employing a pincer attack while they were hanging out the laundry. Rosalind’s parents had no protest to this, her mother believed it was simply the natural behaviour of young boys, and her father remained impartial to all actions of the family, although did often give the triplets stern looks of disapproval over dinner. Eventually, however, the triplets became bored again, since the maids weren’t fun enough targets, they never ran, and they never fought back, they just stood there and squealed, which all three boys agreed was a rather inappropriate response to the situation, as if they were actual soldiers, the maids surely would have died. Therefore, the triplets turned their attention to other targets, their parents and two older brothers were ruled out straight away, as they felt targeting their mother was in some way unjust, and that they would be seriously pounded if they attempted to sneak attack their father, James, or David. That just left Rosalind and Henry, the youngest brother. They attempted to attack Henry once, but the sickly child was frightened so much he burst into a fit of coughing that left him in his bed for days, and so the only target left was Rosalind, who ran and tried to avoid their tackles and attacks every time, to the triplets delight, and so, that was how much of Rosalind’s early childhood was spent, playing the Anglo-Saxon in the triplets’ endless game of Vikings. This carried on until Rosalind was fourteen, and Henry died of pneumonia at twelve years old. It was a particularly harsh winter, and as usual Henry was sick, laid up in bed and smothered in blankets by his mother, but this year, his cough kept getting worse. The local doctors were called, and did what they could, doctors from London were called, and they administered treatments and remedies, but still, after a month in bed, Henry died on January 2nd. It struck me that Mrs. Templeton remembered this date, despite not being able to remember her own birthday. The triplets at this point were all seventeen, and so only had one year left before they had to leave the comfort of the manor’s private tutor, and head off to university, since Rosalind’s father was a strong believer in a formal education, and in this year, Rosalind was not tackled, swung at, or jumped on by the nearly adult boys, who she assumed once they looked death in the eyes, stopped playing poker with him. And so, Rosalind was alone in the house, with only the maids her father and her mother for company, of course she did go down to the local village, a lot, but she really couldn’t enjoy spending time with the locals. She lived in a different world than they did, and everyone knew it. Noah, however, was living in the village, due to the aforementioned scandal of him marrying the daughter of a local farmer and refusing to go off to university, something which caused him to be cast out of the family home by their father. I assumed this made for some rather awkward interactions when he went to attend church on Sundays. Rosalind did continue to visit Noah occasionally in secret however, although he was often very busy, helping on the farm, and adjusting to the level of manual labour he was required to do.

‘I’m glad I got all that practice swinging those old swords at you, or there’s no way I would have been able to get used to all o’ this godamn hoein’, although the new tractor does help a lot with most o’ it’, he told her one day, once he had begun to settle in. He had quickly picked up the farmer’s drawl, and their way of life, and he seemed happier to Rosalind, in a simple way. Despite his new, rather forced, accent, Rosalind thought Noah had turned into a proper gentleman. Rosalind approved of Noah’s wife as well, a rather skinny thing, and pale, but nonetheless pretty and kind. The two had been in love in secret for over five years, ever since Noah was thirteen! Imagine that! By the time Rosalind was preparing to leave for university, Noah’s wife, Janine, was happily pregnant, and life at the manor had adjusted to Noah’s permanent absence. And so, Rosalind was off, to university, as the decade turned to the 60s, just in time for hippies, mind boggling drugs, and weird sexual orgy parties. University was an interesting place for Rosalind, a time when all her preconceptions about the world were abruptly shattered and put back together in a different order. Life was not the one-track path to becoming a wife that she had been brought up to imagine, but rather with her newfound independence she found she could fight for her right.