Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Mapp at Fifty
    Mapp at Fifty
    Mapp at Fifty
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    Mapp at Fifty

    By Hugh Ashton

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Elizabeth Mapp-Flint of Tilling is approaching her fiftieth birthday, and plans a party to celebrate the event. However, as so often happens in Tilling, things don’t go entirely according to plan, as Major Benjy, her husband, over-refreshes himself at the party, and presents her with an entirely unwelcome birthday gift. Meanwhile, Emmeline (“Lucia”) Pillson and her husband Georgie, together with the rest of Tilling look on as Elizabeth’s sister, the existence of whom had been hitherto unsuspected, visits Tilling and exposes a few family secrets.

    Mapp at Fifty is written in sincere tribute to the original Mapp and Lucia novels by E.F.Benson, comic but yet sympathetic portraits of middle-class society in England in the 1920s and 1930s.

    LanguageEnglish
    Publisherj-views Publishing
    Release dateApr 11, 2020
    ISBN9781912605651
    Mapp at Fifty
    Author

    Hugh Ashton

    Hugh Ashton was born in the UK in 1956, and after graduation from university worked in the technology industry around Cambridge (the first personal computer he used was Sir Clive Sinclair’s personal TRS-80) until 1988, when a long-standing interest in the country took him to Japan.There he worked for a Japanese company producing documentation for electronic instruments and high-end professional audio equipment, helped to set up the infrastructure for Japan’s first public Internet service provider, worked for major international finance houses, and worked on various writing projects, including interviewing figures in the business and scientific fields, and creating advertorial reports for Japanese corporations to be reprinted in international business magazines.Along the way, he met and married Yoshiko, and also gained certificates in tea ceremony and iaidō (the art of drawing a sword quickly).In 2008, he wrote and self-published his first published novel, Beneath Gray Skies, an alternative history in which the American Civil War was never fought, and the independent Confederacy forms an alliance with the German National Socialist party. This was followed by At the Sharpe End, a techno-financial-thriller set in Japan at the time of the Lehman’s crash, and Red Wheels Turning, which re-introduced Brian Finch-Malloy, the hero of Beneath Gray Skies, referred to by one reviewer as “a 1920s James Bond”.In 2012, Inknbeans Press of California published his first collection of Sherlock Holmes adventures, Tales from the Deed Box of John H. Watson M.D., which was swiftly followed by many other volumes of Holmes’ adventures, hailed by Sherlockians round the world as being true to the style and the spirit of the originals by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Inknbeans also published Tales of Old Japanese and other books by Ashton, including the Sherlock Ferret series of detective adventures for children. He and Yoshiko returned to the UK in 2016 for family reasons, where they now live in the Midlands cathedral city of Lichfield.In December 2017, Inknbeans Press ceased to be, following the sudden death of the proprietor, chief editor and leading light. Since that time, Ashton has reclaimed the copyright of his work, and has republished it in ebook and paper editions, along with the work of several other former Inknbeans authors.He continues to write Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as various other fiction and non-fiction projects, including documentation for forensic software, and editing and layout work on a freelance basis, in between studying for an MSc in forensic psychological studies with the Open University.

    Read more from Hugh Ashton

    Related to Mapp at Fifty

    Related ebooks

    Humor & Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Captain Back On Deck!

      Nov 3, 2021

      Captain Back On Deck!
      1 min read

    • Article

      Not Of This Earth?

      Sep 10, 2020

      In this issue, we revisit an almost forgotten case of high strangeness from the 1970s – the mystery of the ‘Risley Silver Man’, in which an alien invasion appeared to be targeting a highly sensitive British nuclear research site. Late one night in Ma

      2 min read

    • Article

      Nevertheless, Her Majesty Persisted

      Apr 1, 2017

      An oppressive era and the demands of motherhood never kept Queen Victoria from embracing public power and enjoying private satisfaction.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Wise old Mrs Merrow

      Jul 27, 2020

      Littlesea was everything the description said: a white stone cottage with beams and higgledy-piggledy walls and steps away from a tiny quay in a private bay. It would have been the perfect spot for honeymooners had it not had just the one single bed

      8 min read

    • Article

      Drinking With The UNDEAD

      Oct 27, 2020

      At this time of year, it’s usually wonderful running a pub, seeing the regulars crowd in for a glass of their favourite tipple and some Christmas cheer! I’ve been running The Rose and Crown in Tewin, Hertfordshire, since August 2017, with the help of

      4 min read

    • Article

      Deadly family Secrets

      Apr 8, 2021

      With her girls and family dog perched on her knee, mum Shanann Watts, 34, beams happily at the camera. ‘Hey guys, my name is Shanann Watts. Say hi, Cece...say hi, Bells,’ she smiles. It’d usually be a touching, enchanting scene. But this is the openi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Data Streams

      Jan 29, 2020

      SCI-FACT! Rivers Of London has been optioned for TV by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Stolen Pictures. AFTER ALL PREVIOUS PLOTLINES were brought to a close in 2018’s Lies Sleeping, False Value – the eighth installment in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of Lond

      2 min read

    • Article

      Mysterious World

      Aug 27, 2020

      Mysterious World
      1 min read

    • Article

      A Few Railway Ghosts

      Nov 17, 2022

      The author does not believe in ghosts but he knows that human beings can be extremely unreliable witnesses of strange phenomena they claim to have seen or experienced. Some people are not above inventing stories about their ‘ghostly’ experiences in o

      14 min read

    • Article

      Saturday, July 30

      Jul 21, 2022

      Saturday, July 30
      1 min read

    • Article

      Things Fall Apart: On Ali Smith’s ‘Autumn’ and ‘Winter’

      Jan 16, 2018

      It’s a care, a real care, when a writer whose work you love takes on a project like a seasonal quartet. The potential for readerly woe is plain: four novels forced into a form already replete with corny allegories and tired themes. Ali Smith begins h

      10 min read

    • Article

      Eyes On The Prizes — And The Surprises

      Apr 25, 2024

      WHAT A LOT OF LITERARY PRIZES there are nowadays. The great grandaddy, the Booker, is surrounded by awards that capture every category: novels by women, debuts, experimental books, debuts, historical fiction, debuts — and there are also a few prizes

      6 min read

    • Article

      Breathing And Interested

      Jul 1, 2019

      I want to tell you a story about my daughter Jane Bell. Not long ago, she was nearly five at the time, we were walking to get the mail. Our driveway is long—about two-fifths of a mile from the house to the mailbox—so it is a substantial hike for some

      15 min read

    • Article

      Some Are Born Great…

      Mar 10, 2020

      Some Are Born Great…
      3 min read

    • Article

      Summer Beach Reads

      Jan 10, 2021

      Summer Beach Reads
      7 min read

    • Article

      City Journal’s Leonardo

      Jun 22, 2018

      City Journal’s Leonardo
      3 min read

    • Article

      Now Is the Time

      Nov 24, 2020

      Now Is the Time
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Alice Show

      Mar 20, 2020

      The Alice Show
      12 min read

    • Article

      Framed

      Oct 18, 2023

      Framed
      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Mapp at Fifty

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Mapp at Fifty - Hugh Ashton

      Mapp at Fifty

      Mapp at Fifty

      A Mapp and Lucia story in the style of the originals by E.F.Benson

      Hugh Ashton

      j-views Publishing

      Copyright © 2020 by Hugh Ashton & j-views Publishing

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are written in respectful tribute to the creator of the principal characters.

      ISBN: 978-1-912605-65-1

      Vellum flower icon Created with Vellum

      Contents

      Introduction

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

      Five

      Six

      Seven

      Eight

      Nine

      Ten

      Eleven

      Twelve

      Thirteen

      Fourteen

      Fifteen

      Sixteen

      Seventeen

      Also by Hugh Ashton

      About the Author

      Introduction

      Ifirst came into contact with the inhabitants of Tilling at university, and I am afraid at that time much of Benson’s subtlety and wit went over my head.

      However, Mapp and Lucia have been a constant part of my life ever since I rediscovered them a few years after leaving college, and they formed my specialist subject for Mastermind (2019/20 season).

      I confess to never having seen the BBC series, but I discovered the McEwan/Scales/Hawthorne DVDs in a shop in a visit to Rye in 2010 or so. I had no idea that they had been on TV, since I had been living in Japan for over twenty years at that time I discovered them. Despite their occasional departure from the script, I still find them to have captured the spirit of Tilling.

      Here I have attempted to do the same, with the characters, who, although I thought they were well-known to me, continue to surprise me with their thoughts and speech and actions. Not just the major characters of Mapp, Lucia and Georgie, but all of the Tilling gentry, who end up being so much more than caricatures of themselves.

      Benson’s narrative style is hard to imitate, even though putting words into the characters’ mouths is relatively easy. Since the words of so many Tillingites fail to express their actual thoughts, Benson often has to insert a little narrative barb to provide his readers with some guidance, lest they naïvely take the speaker at his or her (most often her) word.

      Little paradoxes and ironies abound, such as Elizabeth Mapp’s use of a handkerchief to conceal the fact that her eyes are not, in fact, filled with tears. Benson’s use of these is much more subtle than that of Oscar Wilde, for example, whose wit (as he himself acknowledged) often simply consisted of reversing a popular phrase or saying. In the Riseholme and Tilling books, these reversals and paradoxes are much more closely tied to the characters who speak them, and are used, not so much to demonstrate the cleverness of the author, as to bring the idiosyncrasies of the character into sharper relief. For this reason, these little barbs must be more than mere verbal tricks.

      Special thanks are due to the Mapp and Lucia group on Facebook who have encouraged me to hope that this little offering will not be completely unpleasing to you. I am hoping that it will not be my last such visit to Tilling, as there is so much more to write about. So, dear ones, I will not bid you farewell at this time, but Au reservoir.

      Hugh Ashton, Lichfield, 2020

      One

      T ime, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away. Elizabeth Mapp-Flint, as she sang these words as part of the choir of the Sunday morning service at Tilling church, reflected to herself that Time also bore away its daughters. Her current thoughts were chiefly concerned with one such daughter, namely herself.

      For, although she had long since – indeed, for nearly half a century – known of its approach, the imminent arrival of her fiftieth birthday was preying on her mind. A number of related matters presented themselves to her for her attention, and as she automatically sang the words of the hymn and sat for the sermon, she mulled them over to herself.

      Firstly, there was the problem of her age. Without having committed herself outright, she had, ever so delicately, put it about that she had been born several years after the date on her birth certificate. If she wanted to commemorate the half-century of the world’s being favoured by the presence of Mrs Elizabeth Mapp-Flint, or Miss Elizabeth Mapp, as she had been styled until only a few years previously, those missing years would have to be explained away. At present, she was unsure how this might be managed, but there was no doubt in her mind that managed it would be.

      Next, there was a glorious vision of a chance to outshine Lucia on the occasion of the celebration she was envisaging. Lucia, she remembered, had placed fifty-one candles on the cake that was presented to the guests to mark her fiftieth birthday. Very well, Elizabeth would have fifty-two. There would be no question of Elizabeth providing the quantities of wine that Lucia had served to her guests on that day, but the money saved by the production of the famous ancestral and economical cup (a bottle of white wine and quantities of ginger and soda water) would come in handy for the purchase of several hen lobsters, to be used in the production of lobster à la Riseholme. The expression on Lucia and Georgie Pillson’s faces when they tasted the dish would more than compensate for the extravagance.

      Lastly, but by no means least in her thoughts, she had a specific reason in mind for making it known that she had now reached the state of riper years. A few years ago, Lucia had been created Mayor of Tilling, and Elizabeth was of the strong opinion that her (Lucia’s) seniority in terms of chronological age had outweighed her (Elizabeth’s) seniority as the doyenne of Tilling society when it came to selecting the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1