Maddie Fingers

A native of Much Muttering, I’ve been in and around the estate on and off, since I was tall enough to scrump from the cider orchards (apples were a bit ningy, but I had to start somewhere and after all, I had my own ladder, whittled from the wood of a fallen goat willow by my dad for my ninth birthday and what else was I going to use it for?).

Dad was butler up at the Hall under the Old Man, Sir Fred’s predecessor, and what he didn’t know about the goings on there could have been written on the back of a fag packet. In fact I used to find scraps of yellow card with Capstan Full Strength on them and lots of exclamation marks, all over the place and for some reason I collected them up and kept them in an old tin box in the attic ….. But, I digress.

It was a toss up for a while, in my teenage years, between poacher or university, but Dad wanted me to go away to to improve myself …. or just go away perhaps. Certainly we frequently had words about the number of times I climbed back through my bedroom window at dawn, covered in mud, though I think the old darling was quite fond of me, really.

So I left and then stayed away for far longer than either of us had meant, travelling the world extensively in search of personal growth and fulfilment (….yep, I dropped in on Glastonbury on the way …) and you could say I’ve been round the block a bit – fabric printing in Fiji, blacksmithing in Barbados, horticulturalising gardening in Hungary, engineering in Ecuador and running a software company in Surinam – but none of it appealed long-term and I came back on impulse, doing casual work on the estate while I looked after Dad and waited to see what turned up next.

That all changed when the great ditch threatened to burst its banks (a scrummit had got twisted into the spigot of the madgem on the weir) and flood the Hall and ably assisted by Root, I was able to fix it. Sir Fred was so grateful that the repair cost him only a couple of pairs of steel-capped boots that he offered me the job as Estate Manager. And then Dad died, leaving me the cottage that the OM had given him in recognition of services rendered and I decided to stay for a bit.

So it seems my life has come full circle as I’m back where I started – except now I’m the one keeping an eye on the poachers…..