Ten Commandments for Bed and Breakfast Guests: A Glimpse of Life on the Other Side of the Pinny

By David Hemmings

Have you ever stayed at a B&B? A quick look at the reviews on, say, Trip Advisor and you have as much information as you need.
This book is different. It looks at what it is like ‘on the other side of the pinny’.
It’s intention is not to help you choose or run a B&B but to amuse and entertain with an account of the strange and bizarre people or events encountered by David and Irene Hemmings when they opened their door to strangers aka ‘guests’.
Much of what happened and who turned up could not have been predicted, even by the most fertile imaginations, from the Swedish Mother-in-Law to exploding shower screens and a variety of bedroom encounters. It pauses occasionally to introduce ‘Captain Birdseye’ and the ‘Dangerous Brothers’ as well as looking at David’s boating incompetence.
The lessons learned from running this B&B suggested the need for a set of house rules to be pinned to each bedroom door, that we have called the ‘Ten Commandments’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Hemmings
• Release date: Dec 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370445943

David Hemmings

I’m retired, a grumpy optimist, writer, shallow humourist..I retired from a proper job in 2006 only to take up menial employment running a B&B with my wife, Irene.Those experiences are recounted in ‘Ten Commandments For Bed and Breakfast Guests’ - ‘A Glimpse of Life on the Other Side of the Pinny’ - my first book.Before retirement, my ‘career’ looks like it was cobbled together from a few different CVs - clerk, slightly more senior clerk, top notch clerk, Personnel Director before they downgraded the name to Human Resources, Advertising and Marketing Director, Partner in a management training outfit.I have written a number of short stories and non-fiction articles some of which have been published, and I’m planning to corral some of the better ones into an anthology.I am also working on a novel that is a humorous ‘whodunnit’, a genre not often seen, probably for good reason.

Book preview

Prologue

The Commandments

1. If thou turneth-up on the off chance, please be

minded to minimize thine oddities.

- The Swedish Entry

- All the Way from South America

- The German Contingent 1 - The E-Types

- The German Contingent 2 - Pastorised

- The German Contingent 3 - Don’t Mention the War

2. Thou shalt arrive at the appointed hour or

make jolly sure thou notify thine hosts of likely

delays, if thou knoweth that which is good for thee.

Thou must not loll in thy room on the day of

departure, but bugger off as soon as is possible.

- Advice for those driving in Devon

- Arrivals

- First Contact - An Early Lesson

3. Thou shalt turn up at breakfast when thou sayest

thou will and eat all that thou hath asked for. It

would be nice if thou can find words of praise for thine host’s attempts to make a convivial resting place.

- The Bed Part of the Deal

- Negotiating Breakfast

- Breakfast Time

- Mr. G

- Eggs and Allergies - Random Recollections

- A Note on the Full English Breakfast (FEB)

- and what do you do for a living?

4. Strew not thine apparel over the floor of thy

sleeping chamber, especially used undergarments.

- Mrs. Talcum Powder and Her Husband’s Nose

- Going Prematurely Orange

- Beware: Clothes Bomb Alert

- Bedroom ‘Activity’

- Where Is Gandalf When You Need Him?

5. Be considerate of thine hosts and the neighbours.

Pollute not the air with an ungodly racket when

thou returneth from the inn, but creep quieter than

a tiny mouse.

- Celebrations

- Neighbours and Other Characters

- Next Door

- The Shell Suit and the Farmer

- Introducing Captain Birdseye and the Dangerous Brothers

6. Thou shalt listen attentively to anything thine

host says, laugh at his jokes, and take heed of any

advice doled out.

- I Haven’t Always Done This You Know

- What Did You Do On Your Holidays?

- The Walking Fix

- The Running Fix

- I Suspect Twitching

- The ‘nothing strenuous, I’m on my holidays’ Fix

- Only For the Seriously Well Off

- The Royalty Imperative

- Goodbye to Gran

7. Thou shalt be parsimonious expending thine

host’s money - thou shalt not use the showers for

more than five minutes per person. Exceed not the allocation of toilet rolls. If thou does so – tough.

- The B&B Route to Great Riches?

- It’s been a bad year, hasn’t it?

- Sit Down, Darling, the Electricity Bill Has Arrived

- Bed Linen and the Tyranny of Supplies

- Where Did Our Social Life Go?

8. If thou be a wedding guest or participant, watch

thyself, and if thou hast managed to inveigle

thine hosts into allowing children, a low profile

keepeth.

- Three Best Men, Hot Bedding and Do you think it will come out with stain remover?

- And Baby Makes ...Too Many

- The Four-Day Wedding

- The Representatives from Gloucestershire

- Taxi Service

- What Is It About Children and Curtain Poles?

- Scrummage in the Bedroom

- Being Economical with the Truth

9. Thou shalt keep a sunny countenance at all

times, and make no enquiries about thine hosts’

watery incompetence, but if thou be a Grotty B,

take thyself off.

- What Will They Be Like?

- Grotty So And Sos

- The Man from Oxford

- Adult Talk

- A Bad Trip

- He’s Different from on the Telly

- Watery Incompetence Parts 1 and 2

10. Thou shalt forgive thine host’s small goofs and

cock-ups and not regard tipping as un-English,

slightly grubby, or insulting.

- To Tip or Trip?

- The Importance of Trip Advisor

- Goofs and Cock Ups

- It’s Later Than You Think

- The ‘J’ Word

- The Case of the Missing Money

Postscript

Appendix.

So, would you like to run a B&B?

PROLOGUE

I retired in 2005. After working for forty-two years, I reckoned I deserved a lie down. Years of gentle pursuits with my wife Irene beckoned. Although I accepted that there might be the odd, extra vigorous nostril hair that had escaped attention, and that reaching escape velocity from the depths of a comfortable armchair could involve little noises, I believed the mechanism was sound and ready for a life of leisure.

Going back to work a year later was definitely not part of the Plan, but it turned out there was an unexpected, and not entirely welcome, alternative plan that lay in wait.

Plan A was pretty simple – buy a house in the South Hams area of Devon and live happily ever after. Despite our experience of buying houses, however, and a willingness to undertake major renovations, we hit a snag. We couldn’t afford the houses we liked and we didn’t like the houses we could afford.

To illustrate, on our first visit to the area, my son seemed to be taking a keen interest in the steeply sloping garden opposite. It took us a while to realise that his attention was riveted on a bald head that was rising slowly through the rhododendrons as if on wheels. It slowly dawned on us that he was, indeed, on wheels, and that the garden was equipped with a stair lift of the kind normally found indoors.

These devices are not designed to travel any faster than ‘sedate’, presumably because when indoors it is desirable to avoid hurtling an OAP upstairs and spitting them out, sprawled, onto the next floor. In the time it took the garden lift to progress from front gate to front door, a distance you or I could have done in ten seconds, the man could have read ‘War and Peace’. If you were hostage to this machine you wouldn’t want to get to the top and think, Drat, I’ve forgotten the milk. In other words, people would go to extraordinary lengths and cost to live near the river and among the boating fraternity.

So, because the River Yealm and it’s setting were magnetic, the deep-water anchorage attracted boat fanciers with serious amounts of money. This is a strange and volatile combination, for which there must be an improbably named medical condition.

We had hardly been there a day before some local was telling us proudly, We’ve got more millionaires with houses here than you can shake a hairy stick at.

When you know what to look for (e.g. ratchet mechanisms) you realise that outside lifts are not uncommon in that part of the world, presumably installed by people who made a packet, retired, and are not yet over the hill but struggling to get up it.

With deep-water harbours at Dartmouth and Salcombe as well, the area was blanketed by wealthy people who owned first or second houses - creating a very expensive market.

Eventually we whittled down all of the possibilities to three, which were

1. too expensive, next to a pub.

2. too expensive, five miles down a single track lane

3. less expensive but on the main Kingsbridge to Dartmouth road.

We stopped for lunch after seeing Numbers 1 and 2. I had a tricky subject to raise with Irene so I waited until we’d eaten before saying my piece. Having a gloomy conversation was bad enough; having it with indigestion would be worse.

Darling, I’ve been doing some sums. Anything to do with ‘sums’ makes Irene’s brain freeze, but when I coupled sums with money she just went white and a worried look replaced her normal sunny countenance. She sat there waiting for the worst.

As good as I am at creative accounting, especially when it involves buying something I want, I’m really struggling to make the sums add up. All three of these places are either too expensive to buy and/or too expensive to run on my pension.

So what do we do?

I don’t know. Let’s look around the last place and then discuss which cliff to jump off. If you’ve got to jump off a cliff, then South Devon has some of the prettiest departure points.

When we were looking round the third house in a desultory way, the agent said You know, this would make an excellent Bed and Breakfast place.

Oh really, I said and had walked another four paces before my brain connected the dots.

A few sums later we bought number three, which was ideally suited for a B&B with two bedrooms on the ground floor, and we accepted that this was the ‘entrance fee’ for living in the South Hams.

So how was it? We started with a number of reservations, from Will we wake up and find all the silver gone, to What if we get lots of nasty people?

With just a couple of exceptions, nothing that we feared might happen, did, but our imaginations were not sufficiently vibrant to have anticipated most of the incidents that actually occurred..

Over the eight years we gradually came to recognise different types of Paying Guests (PGs), and if we were ever going to start another B&B I would be sorely tempted to pin a set of the ‘house rules’ on the bedroom door. These ‘rules’ are based on our accumulated wisdom and experience. They are ‘The Ten Commandments’.

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THE COMMANDMENTS

The First Commandment.

If thou turneth-up on the off chance, please be minded to minimise thine oddities

Most of the stories that produced this Commandment are taken from our early B&B days and illustrate that the only common thing that linked our guests was their uncommonness, to the point where the bizarre seemed almost normal.

In the beginning our marketing plan consisted of relying on the local tourist office to recommend us, together with a roadside sign displaying our house name and the words ‘Bed and Breakfast’. Irene and I were nervous about this.

What if they’re horrible or evil looking?

Perhaps we could charge extra for offensive looks.

I suppose we can always say that we’re full.

And definitely no children.

But the reality of those first few sign-directed guests was so unexpected they would have been impossible to predict if our lives had depended on it.

The Swedish Entry

At nine o’clock on a Sunday night a car swung into the courtyard. Its occupants must have been getting desperate if they had nowhere to stay for the night by that time. We discovered later that they had a ‘special’ requirement’ that other B&Bs could not, or would not, meet. Hence the lateness of the hour.

And so it was that at nine-thirty that Sunday evening, instead of relaxing with my feet up, I was frantically trying to clear the junk from our small single bedroom to create an impression of tidiness. This was no simple task as we had used the room as a general dumping ground, and I do have a tendency, if left unsupervised, to just lay stuff down. In an attempt to make the room reasonably habitable, I was whirling like a demon, stuffing things in drawers and moving other bits and pieces into another room, while muttering away to myself, wondering whether this was a pattern to be repeated as a frequent part of our embryonic business.

Why was I doing a quick ‘Cinderella’?

Because half an hour earlier, Irene and I were three-quarters of the way through a bottle of wine when that car crunched its way across our drive. This was only a short while after we opened and we had yet to become wary about what might be washed up on our ‘beach’. Irene groaned and crunched her way across the room, already forming the trade’s words for You must be joking i.e. I’m sorry but we’re full tonight.

She went downstairs, and as she didn’t return immediately, I thought a little moral support might be needed. I found Irene talking to a well-dressed but disheveled man of about forty who had a tired, slightly desperate, look in his blue eyes. He was accompanied by his wife and small daughter, who stood in mute supplication by his side, occasionally nodding at his halting English. I had the feeling that we were their last resort. Irene had long reached that conclusion and had agreed, reluctantly, to push the twin beds together so that the two-year old could sleep with her parents. I felt sorry for them, she said later.

The husband was less relieved than I had expected, and looking back I can almost see the wife and daughter holding their breath, because the conversation then took a strange turn. The husband, with a serious look as he struggled in broken English, said,