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HAMILTON MANOR WAS ALDBOURNE'S STAPLE MID-CENTURY VICTORIAN MANSION: every town had this same kind of residence, one girdled by sure iron gates and rumours of hauntings, with standard gothic architecture and golden-haired inhabitants. Mind! Perhaps not all people whom lived so lavishly had silken hair, but the Hamiltons certainly did — they weren't much a family for public appearances, but having spent the best of a year in service of the said townspeople, Robin Winifred Hubbard was in no position to declare otherwise.
Working both day shifts and night shifts as a nanny for the youngest of the two Hamilton children, Robin Winifred, of anyone, spent the most time in the company of the infamous family. She tended to the little chap's every need, oiling his flaxen hair and shining his hobnail shoes and even playing Navy with him in the fountain outside the manor. As a demonstration of quite the standard life he was being set up to live, Cyril Hamilton's father had gifted the lucky sod with a set of limited edition tin miniatures, replicas of the real boats that had been used at sea against the Jerry since circa 1940. Naturally, the young man had been keen to put them to use in the obelisk fountain that was at affront of the house, and Robin could do nothing but comply, as she was left with no option but than to meet his every demand if she even wanted the slightest chance of getting paid that month.
Harold Hamilton was the family patriarch and head of the house, the father of dear Cyril and Miss Millicent. He was the type of person that with one glance could have blinded a man just with his gold pins and brooches — however, the bulk of the irony was that this man was a nice old thing, especially to Robin Winifred, whom he favoured exceptionally and cared for as one of his own. However, his wife, Irene Hamilton, was the bookkeeper of the ins and outs of the house: she did everything with a wrinkled lip and potent sneer — and had she not been wiser, Robin Winifred probably would have been conditioned to believe that the said woman was a witch.
And just to stir things up a little more inside the poverty cauldron, the lack of a substantial paycheck in recent months had set Robin on edge, as she had a stack of nursing class tuition fees to pay for if she wanted any chance of being able to enlist with the girls at the Red Cross before the war was over; that, and a lack of parental funding at age eighteen was really beginning to take its toll, as she was cooped up with her grandfather and he was down with a cold again, poor geezer.
This meant that if Cyril wanted her to bump two boats around with him in the frontal fountain of the manor, then she would happily do so. So the pair geared up and set off onto the lawn, walking a full acre across the grounds from the cushy manor and towards the fountain. Perhaps she ought to have complained that it was too far to walk and convinced Cyril otherwise, but Robin didn't find it too arduous. She absolutely adored gathering the fresh air into her lungs, and was quite the amateur gardener — there was nothing she enjoyed more than getting her hands dirty and planting the hydrangeas and the carnations and the chrysanthemums that carpeted the clods of dirt with punctual colouring.
