Abducting The Cook

What do people get up to when they have few real problems?

Well, there was a thing that used to go on occasionally when I was around ten or so... Abducting of cooks. Yep. In fact there was this one particular older lady from India somewhere – though from memory I don't think she was northern Indian. She was incredibly good. She could cook dishes from absolutely anywhere but she had a few specialties for which she was absolutely famous. In fact she was unreasonably good.

Who started it all were a set of brothers and cousins who all carried the middle names of 'Roxborough.' Although their mother was from a stonkingly wealthy shipping family (not related to me however, sadly), their father shockingly insisted on making his own money as well, from doctoring or surgeoning or something of the like... The outcome was that the kids always had better toys and gadgets than the kids from all the other wealthy families with generally one stay-at-home parent. And, for some reason no one could ever fathom, they managed to have the time and patience to put together those ridiculously big and complicated Revel plastic kits of huge battle ships...

But they didn't possess the best cook.

The best cook belonged to another 'doctor family' – this time with the wife being the doctor and the husband an Oxford law and history graduate who for family reasons and politics was 'merely' a senior school teacher.

My own thrown-together mild chicken curry
from last night.

...And then one day the cook was abducted by the reprobate kids and forced to cook for them one weekend in secret when there was a gathering celebrating Churchill's birthday or Gandhi's ascension to heaven or the General Milk Company's contracting the doctors for some mercantile purpose, or something. The big families were going to have their household cooks do the honours, you see.

The whole thing was as far as I can recall both the greatest scandal and the most intrepid and successful event the country had witnessed since WWII ended. The tale of how the victim-family was invited to sample the dishes at table to see whether they could detect what was going on or not ranks as the biggest prank ever carried out in the hallowed dining rooms of the upper crust of this particular country that shall remain nameless here. I feel absolutely sure that cases of Tiger Beer were donated by the brewery beforehand so that the targeted doctor was as sozzled as possible before eating his own abducted cook's fare.

But then, it didn't end there because ransom was demanded in fact, for the cook to be returned, no one ever admitted formally to who had purloined the cook, and I am pretty sure both money changed hands, and the cook had to spend time at another household as well, that had bribed the kids to get her for a week, I think.

Oh yes wait a minute, I remember, (now) Professor Derek Llewelyn-Jones and Major Hunt of the Everest Expedition were g's-o.-h., at the dinner. Nothing to do with Gandhi or Churchill or General Milk.

Ah, those were the days. And those were the people. They don't make 'em like that any more. Well not much like that anyways.

Best, Calvin J. Bear