Factotum

 

A bijou house to facilitate the residing of human beings within an abode scaled-down from a sprawling stately mansion in appearance. The gardens, secret as well as open, were equally scaled down to become flower beds and plots of easy maintenance, including a tiny rockery made from beach pebbles. And a maze topiary seeming to make a toylike pattern that needed no mechanical airborne drone to fathom, merely any strollers around it. Those who lived there were not Lilliputians, but a similar size to you and me, and when we were invited to inspect, we only bent our heads at the neck very slightly to enter through the door, although its knocker seemed no bigger than my thumb.  The servants who would open the door en masse  gave the vague impression that they felt themselves psychologically to be midgets, but  they did come up to our chins, and we soon sensed a friendship developing before we were taken deeper into not exactly a Tardis that might have shocked even Whovians, but, nevertheless, the establishment certainly felt bigger inside than we had expected from its outside. Only a slight adjustment on our part needed to be made, and when we were introduced to the so-called owner of the deceptively miniaturised mansion, they

hardly gave us the time of day, nor could we tell, as with the servants earlier, what sort of person we were actually dealing with. Apparently, we had been called out to deal with some plumbing issue or was it electrical?  It was hard to judge because we advertised ourselves as tackling any job in a rôle of factotum. Did we need to stay for more than a day? We had the foresight to bring an overnight case, just in case.

 Later, we were indeed shown to a small room, tucked into the corner of the roof, where we unpacked our things, soon discovering we had many more necessaries than we had remembered needing to pack. It was almost as if we performed a magic trick with this suitcase. It eventually turned out that we stayed a whole fortnight with all manner of odd jobs, most of which concerned mending various hinges with which the place abounded, such as cupboard doors, loft ladders, inanimate elbows and one huge hinge of which I could not be sure as to its purpose, other than the fact that it existed down the corner of one room, extending through the ceiling and floor into the room above and beyond. We had never considered ourselves to be hinge menders, but during those two weeks we garnered much experience in the art of the ad hoc, as well as in the creativity of lateral thinking. Like the thought that at at least parts of us are still on site, ever improvising and blue-sky thinking. By the way, after the first day, we never got to see the owner again and only the hindsight signs of the servants servicing us. At night, those of us left did take our bended knees and prayed. At least for me, there is a mot juste to describe my consequent condition, but it has escaped me.