The Satirists Cabal: The Satirists Cabal, #1

By Phoebe Cutlass

Phoebe Cutlass sets the record straight on her obsessive parents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phoebe Cutlass
• Release date: Nov 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386833284

Book preview

January 2018

Tuesday 9th January 2018

What do you do if your parents are snobs? Write a book about them, obviously. In fact, you write a book about everything they stand for (or think they stand for). Revenge is what you make it. This book is my revenge.

Frightful stuff, but then I loathe my parents. From now until I leave for university, I want to map out what it means to be stuck in the same gene pool with these people and their ludicrous hopes.

Wednesday 10th January 2018

My name is Phoebe Cutlass and I’m seventeen years old. My father is a stockbroker. My mother is a faded debutante (as far as I can tell). And by the way, the wider family are no worse off in material terms. The Cutlasses have money by the shed-load, and that’s a fact. Not that my father would want the family associated with a shed of any sort. Sheds are for people who cannot afford a shepherd’s hut. 

It was a given that I would be educated privately, of course. (What better way of honouring the tribe was otherwise available to those with money?) And so, I’ve spent the vast bulk of my childhood at an ivy-clad hell-hole they call Rottesloe Public School for Girls.

And here’s another thing: the experience is not something I have ever thanked my parents for - nor ever will do. But then, not thanking them is something I have honed to perfection by now. Of necessity, it has replaced the act of murdering them in the Great Outdoors.

The image is not unreasonable to my mind. Nor indeed the images which often follow it: of me, with recourse to the battered Land Rover they love so much, towing their disfigured corpses through the Surrey Hills.

I suppose I could have gone about the business in another way. For a start, I could have knocked out their teeth with a toffee-hammer, and afterwards (just for the sake of being thorough) sand-papered their gums. I could have G-clamped their tongues to a lacquered table and then beaten them senseless with a hefty stick; or if I was in a hurry, a tyre-iron.

Thursday 11th January 2018

Rottesloe Public School for Girls is a huge rambling pile in the back-of-beyond. I’m a boarder here and have been since the age of eight. It’s gruesomely expensive (our parents wouldn’t have it any other way). To them, it seemed so obvious: a public-school education of the old kind was essential if I was to be a credit to the family.

A huge Gothic edifice with extensive grounds, I refer to it (but only to my trusted friends) as The