My father, Col. R.U.O.K."Gordon" Rohde, was born in Wollongong, NSW, Australia. He married my
mother, Nerida Gweneth Baldry, of New York, U.S.A. I was born on Dec.25, 1883, in a small craft (the
Mal de Mer) off the coast of St. Kilda, both my parents having lost
consciousness
by sheer force of alcoholic intoxication and inclement weather encountered while navigating from
Oban to their winter cottage on the Isle of Skye. Shortly thereafter , on pain of disinheritance by both
their families, my
father and mother agreed to take up residence in faraway Swinehurst, ancestral manor of the
Rohdes. Deserted ever since my paternal ancestors fled its dank corridors for sunny New South
Wales, the place had fallen to rack and ruin by the time my parents were banished to its foggy
environs. You
will not find it on any map. Suffice it to say that a more bleak and inhospitable terrain does not exist in
the living world. It was here that my sister Athena sprang from the womb. Much of her early
upbringing and education fell to me, as my dear parents had all they could do to repair the place and
fight off the Triffids night and day during those first years.
When I was sixteen I fell in love with Charlotte Pangborn, daughter of John Roland Pangborn who
was the Sheriff
hereabouts (now dead). We spent many happy days setting the hounds on trespassers and
training the crows to say frightening things to Athena. Alas, one foggy evening Charlotte ran off with
a pack of Geographic Society photographers and when she returned I was forbidden to speak with
her. The family
packed her off to a finishing school in Switzerland and I did not see her again until a chance meeting
twenty
years later, when both of us were hospitalized following a skirmish at Gallus Meg’s Tavern in New
York City. I doubt she recognized me, although I like to think old memories may have been
awakened when she identified me in the police line-up. No doubt she is dead now, poor girl, and I
blame the Geographic Society for interfering with the course of true love.
It was during my rather lengthy stay away in New York City that Athena met and married Horace
Flutterblast, scion of the Newport Flutterblasts, and bore him a son. That would be Hardy "Bingo"
Flutterblast who, like his mother, outlived the delicate Horace. Died of shame after one look at
Bingo, if you ask me, swiping gin and cigarettes from the other baby carriages of historic Newport.
My poor sister returned home a widow, resigned to living at Swinehurst, and here the three of us
remain, despite my efforts to interest Bingo in foreign travel. Athena has become an internationally
famous scientist and I do my best to keep the family concern, TipTopTea Ltd., afloat.
I
should explain that for
reasons which
continue to baffle the world of science no one dies in Swinehurst. My parents were in the pink of
health when they fell from an airplane somewhere over Halifax in l968, and I wouldn’t be surprised if
they turned up in the driveway one day soon, reeking of Cutty Sark. They did put in an appearance on
my birthday in 1997,both looking well I am happy to say, and then disappeared again quite
suddenly on First Night l998. I had hoped they would take Bingo with them but all efforts to awaken
him were unavailing.
Mind you, I don’t believe in The Eternal Curse of Swinehurst. If there’s any secret to all this blasted
longevity I’d have to guess it’s the tea. We don’t have much else in common. My paternal
grandfather, Col. S.L.A.M. "Gordon" Rohde, made his fortune as a tea merchant before retiring to
establish The Swinehurst Telegram Companion. He ran screaming from this
place a few days after his
hundredth birthday and warned the servants not to follow him back to Australia, where he
disappeared
in 1915. As for my mother’s people, they have all been deader than Kelsey’s nuts since 1925, ten
years after they all swore off Rohde’s Tiptop Tea out of spite. So there you are.
It would be too tiring to recount my adventures over the years, but I hope that as they surface in the
Gazette they will be of some small benefit to readers and correspondents. Now, before your eyes
glaze over any further, pour yourself a nice cup of good tea, hot and sweet, and return to that
publication at once.