Waterworks in SC3: The SC3 Series - Volume 2

By Jacques de Hogdeville

Seventeen years after purchasing their grand residence, the narrator and his expanding family have comfortably settled into their dream home. Eager to enhance its beauty, they embark on a project to install a picturesque fountain in the garden. What seems like a straightforward task takes a mysterious turn when they unearth unexpected relics from the ground below. These discoveries reignite an old investigation they believed was long behind them.
As they delve deeper, they realize the house – and perhaps their family – harbours secrets that refuse to stay buried. Just when they thought they had moved past the shadows of their past, they find themselves confronting unsettling truths that threaten to shatter their newfound tranquillity. Dive into a tale where the past’s echoes can disrupt the present’s harmony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035828906

Jacques de Hogdeville

Jacques de Hogdeville was born in Paris in 1957 and brought up there. He studied English and Scandinavian languages at La Sorbonne and has been a modern language teacher for over 40 years in a variety of countries in Europe and Africa, and at present, teaches English phonetics at the Catholic University in Lille. He lives with his wife in Arras.

Book preview

About the Author

Jacques de Hogdeville was born in Paris in 1957 and brought up there. He studied English and Scandinavian languages at La Sorbonne and has been a modern language teacher for over 40 years in a variety of countries in Europe and Africa, and at present, teaches English phonetics at the Catholic University in Lille. He lives with his wife in Arras.

Dedication

This book is for Michel, a good friend who never shrank in the face of a DIY challenge.

Copyright Information ©

Jacques de Hogdeville 2024

The right of Jacques de Hogdeville to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035828890 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035828906 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my gratitude to all the people who have read the first volume of the series, Prince of Wales Lane, SC3, and given me very positive comments about it, thus encouraging me to go on writing: my lovely friends, Penny, Kate and Thierry, my daughter, Bénédicte, my colleague, Martin, my students, Émilie, Névé, Angélique, Cléo, and those who read excerpts from the manuscript and gave me useful tips to make it a better read.

Of course, I also must thank my dear wife and children for the support they provided by patiently adopting the characters in the stories as though they were personal friends, tolerated in the dinner table conversations for so many months!

I am also aware that all that would have meant very little if it had not been for the hard, efficient work of all the people from Austin Macauley and their constant efforts to ensure as smooth a progress as was possible to reach this final point. Thanks to all of you!

Chapter 1

How time flies! It would soon be seventeen years since I had bought that magnificent house in Prince of Wales Lane, SC3. My dream had been to settle down in England and live in this gorgeous manor house and if luck was on my side, I may even be able to grow something useful or pretty in the garden. Not that anything would need luck to grow, as the soil was so rich and willing in this part of the east coast of England.

But I had been brought up in a Paris flat and my only contact with agriculture up to my twenties had basically been by watching my mother tend to her kitchen garden, that is to say grow some parsley in a pot on the kitchen window sill in our Rue Guynemer flat.

My grandparents had long ago given up trying to teach me anything about gardening and had turned for comfort to my little sister, who had developed her skills beyond their hopes and could grow anything you just cared to name. But my sister’s green fingers had not been enough to boost my gardening competence to the level a bride would one day expect from her groom, who moved her into this sort of property.

In those days, I was dreaming of becoming a teacher in England, of maybe (with luck again) marrying a nice English girl and starting an English family. Clearly, the young Paris student was eager to practise the language he was studying at La Sorbonne and use it to change his life.

I had fallen in love with England and the English way of life at a very early age, which seemed mysterious to my friends at university, as even though we were basically all English students, many were not particularly keen on the language or the country.

Some dreamt of Hollywood, some wanted to become the new Kennedy or the new Rockefeller, the new Vivien Leigh or the new Clark Gable, but few thought that the Lake District, the Camden Lock market, or Stonehenge could attract a twenty-something year old as much as, if not more than, the Niagara Falls, Monument Valley or the sloping streets of San Francisco.

England did have that effect on me though, it was like a magnet which made me crave to go back there as often as possible and any pretext was good enough for me. Some of my friends thought I lacked ambition, but after all those years, I have fulfilled most of my more modest dreams.

Whereas most of them have become teachers of English in rough junior secondary schools in the rough suburbs of some God-forsaken French town, and have failed to make a name for themselves in America. People like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, or Emma Thomson, Sean Penn or Barack Obama, who were roughly the same age as we, have mercilessly bypassed them on that way to the American Halls of fame.

Anyway, I would not like to sound bitter now, because I am not, since I have been lucky enough to live out my dreams and I could not possibly have wished for a better life.

When I first viewed the house, I was a student at La Sorbonne, which also means that I should never have been considering buying a house, let alone in England, but in those days real estate in this country was very cheap for us. I took that leap, to the horrified astonishment of my mother, who had nevertheless been quite impressed by the property.

Of course, it could not be said to be in perfect condition, as it had been inhabited by a widow for many years before I bought it, and I suspect she lived in a limited part of the house, and the rest was probably neither heated nor aired, let alone regularly cleaned. But I was young and eager, I had some notion of DIY and I also had a cousin, Daniel, who was an absolute genius whenever it concerned plumbing, electricity, woodwork, you name it.

Whatever had to be done in a house, he could do it. And he would make it a point to teach whoever cared to be taught how to do it.

I arrived in my old blue 2CV and the few tools and materials I had at hand, and Daniel joined me a couple of weeks later in his old green 2CV and all the wealth of professional-standard tools he not only owned but also knew precisely how to use for the best possible results. Within less than two months, we had repaired the plumbing and wiring of the house and everything then worked fine.

The heating was satisfactory too, and I went back to the estate agent who had sold me the house and asked him to find tenants for me, as I had to go back over the sea and proceed with my studies.

And I drove my old faithful 2CV back to Paris at the end of the summer, went back to La Sorbonne, and came back to the house as often as possible during that academic year. Except that there were tenants living on the premises, so I slept in the rooms above the garage and started dreaming about ways to improve the house and garden.

One of the ideas I soon had was to have a nice little gazebo erected on the grounds, at the bottom of the garden, close to the garage. I had that done one summer, ‘in between two tenants’, while I was then living in London, first as a French assistant and later as a permanent teacher in a Camden Town school.

Then I sat and passed Agrégation, at last, and was sent as a trainee teacher to the French school in Oslo. The funny point is that I was not at all attracted to Norway, which was to me some kind of cultural Terra incognita. I very nearly refused to go, would you believe, and I would gladly have given up my hard-earned Agrégation together, of course.

But my mother talked me into taking the job, so I went and stayed in Oslo with a charming elderly lady called Ragnhild, who was a member of the St Olav’s Cathedral choir and took me there with her. Before I had begun realising what was happening, I had also become a full member of the choir too. I enjoyed singing in the choir, and all the more as I met there a young Norwegian who soon became my wife.

As a vote of thanks to my hostess, we named our first daughter after her, which is why that English girl with a French surname also has that typically Norwegian first name. Our young Ragnhild was born at Nightingale Hospital, SC3, while we lived here for just one year after our wedding. I taught French at St Cuthbert University, around twenty miles down the road, and my wife was a physiotherapist at Nightingale Hospital.

But after that one year, I was offered a job at the University of Oslo, so we moved back there and we spent the next six years there, where our next three daughters were born. When my contract with the Oslo University came to a close, I applied for a teaching job at the Queenthorpe Public School, where I was accepted and was soon awarded the post of Head of French, so we moved back here.

That time, there were no more tenants in the house and we moved in at long last. Fortunately, because bringing up four daughters in the two small rooms above the garage would not have been very practical, let alone comfortable. During that winter, our fifth child and first son was born at Nightingale Hospital, and he was followed by yet another girl two years later, and our second son another two years after.

Our children went to school here in England, and of course, spoke English in class and in the playground; my wife spoke to them in Norwegian, I in French, and my mother-in-law, who was born Icelandic, addressed them in her mother-tongue whenever she babysat for us as we lived in Oslo.

Which means our children were all ‘born’ trilingual, and the elder girls were even quadrilingual. But they also taught their younger siblings Icelandic, so that they were all able to communicate with both their grandmother and great-grandmother in their own language.

That is probably sufficient to explain why our house in Prince of Wales Lane, SC3, which did not actually have a name, was dubbed The Tower of Babel by most of our visitors. With time, we also picked up that nickname.

Our second son was now fifteen months old, and beginning to walk, and his elder brother and sisters were very protective of him and had already started speaking to him in Icelandic.

Daniel had never c-ome back here since that first summer, all those years ago, and we had honestly communicated together very little. His job had taken him around the globe, even more and much further than mine, and we somehow lost track of each other when he lived in Brazil.

When he heard about the birth of our seventh child however, he had been suitably impressed, he said, with our brave, confident approach to the future with our generous brood, and asked if we were planning many more. We did not give him a definite answer to that question, though, as we prided ourselves on being ‘open’.

Indeed, my job was safe, and I owned a large real estate portfolio in Paris, so money was no problem; my beloved wife enjoyed excellent health and did not suffer much from her pregnancies or deliveries, and loved her babies to bits, as did I, and we had such an enormously vast house to accommodate the new children that whatever we did, it always seemed more or less empty. So why not, after all?

My latest dream had been to have a fountain in the garden. We had asked a small building company if they thought it was feasible to build it. They came around and explained that they would not have any kind of technical problems about it.

If things were thought out properly, the system should be able to use very little water indeed, as it would work on a closed-circuit principle, with an electric pump that would take the water flowing out of the bottom of the basin and carry it back up, so that the same water would come back around permanently.

Except that, of course, some of it would evaporate, or could be drunk by birds or people, etc., and the rain may not provide enough to renew it, so there would have to be some pipes supplying more of it when needed to make sure it always worked nicely and beautifully.

So far, we were quite elated and thought it would be a good idea to have that new decoration in the garden, and besides the music of the water falling from the mouth of the fountain would be quite nice as well, at least during the day time. We would switch it off at night, of course.

Mentioning the mouth, they said we would have to think about what kind of mouth we wanted for it, some sort of statue, or just a ‘hole in the wall’ or a jet in the middle of the basin. They would offer several such options in their estimate.

Chapter 2

It has to be said that money was no major problem for us, as I was privileged enough to have inherited significant wealth.

My parents were driving instructors in Paris, and worked hard and a lot, including many evenings and all-day Saturdays, and had therefore, few opportunities to spend their hard-earned money. That we knew. What we did not know was that working that much brought in considerable amounts of cash.

When my father suddenly died of a massive heart attack in the car during one of his driving lessons with a pupil next to him, at the age of forty-nine, the solicitor who read his will caught us by surprise when he told us that my father had invested in real estate; even my mother was not aware of the extent of his acquisitions.

She was suddenly at the head of almost twenty flats in various parts of Paris, and my sister and I each inherited a block of twelve flats, all packed with faithfully paying tenants, in Rue Dalou, in the fifteenth Arrondissement, a stone’s throw from the Pasteur métro station.

That gave us some comfortably regular income, which proved very useful on many an occasion in our lives. My little sister got married in 1980 to Benjamin, the ideal Mr Right, who was not only the best-looking man she had ever met, but also loving, handsome, serious, thoughtful, had a good, safe job, nice parents, and seemed ready to kiss whatever spot of earth on which she had ever set foot.

But when in 1982 she gave birth to a lovely little girl, who became my goddaughter, my brother-in-law suddenly realised that he was not in the slightest interested in fatherhood after all and that his secretary was the very soulmate he had been seeking all his life. Something like three times in a row, from what I later heard, he exchanged a used wife for a brand new one who then gave up being his secretary.

Thankfully, he never produced any more offspring meanwhile. So, my niece had not met her father again since a couple of days after her christening, at the age of four months, or even got any news from him. Meanwhile, my sister had fallen into depression, had been subjected to psychiatric treatment after psychiatric treatment, on and off, for the past twelve years now.

The girl had basically been brought up by her Grand-Maman, who had taken early retirement from the driving school to look after her. Needless to add that my