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Mrs Fox Goes To War

Hilda Ffinch

The bird with all the answers

Hilda Ffinch, Little Hope’s very own Agony Aunt (page 5 of the Little
Hope Herald) was easily bored and terribly rich. She loved nothing
better than taking on the problems of others and either sorting them
out or claiming that she’d never heard of them if it all went tits up
and they had to leave the district under cover of darkness having
followed her sage advice.

The Little Hope Herald
Saturday, 14th September 1940
‘Beryl of Little Hope’
Dear Beryl, Yorkshire

Most married men, my dear, are in danger of falling prey to the call 9th September 1940
of the siren (the bane of Odysseus and his seamen, not the air raid Dear Mrs Ffinch
klaxon on top of the Village Hall) the moment they set foot outside
of the marital home and there isn’t a great deal one can do about it. I’m a little worried that my husband may fall prey
I myself invariably have a ‘frank and fearless’ on this very subject to a lady of the evening whilst away on active
with Colonel Ffinch whenever he’s home on leave and I tend to service, what measures might I take to allay my
follow it up when he returns to the front by waving him off with a fears?
handkerchief in one hand and a jolly sharp pair of gardening shears
in the other, taking care to point the latter in the general direction I do realise that it’s difficult for a chap when he’s
of his ‘gentleman’s equipment’ whilst mouthing “Snip! Snip!” before away and in the thick of it, but I’m so worried that
he gets into his staff car. As far as one is aware, this seems to do chewing my nails no longer suffices, last week I
the trick and one is reasonably confident that the only time that accidentally took a bite out of a china teacup.
the Colonelactually gets Percy out beyond the confines of Ffinch
Hall, it’s to point him at the porcelain, as it were. Yours frantically,

But would one really know if one’s spouse were consorting with ‘Beryl’
Miss Booby Trapp or her friend Miss Ida Down? I suspect not,
Beryl, unless of course he were to come home boz-eyed on
mercury tincture and smelling for all the world as though he’d
been had at with a vengeance by a pox doctor’s apprentice.
At the end of the day, dear girl, men will be men, they’re not so very different to the average tom cat and so it has been
for time out of memory. Sir Francis Drake was dreaming all the time of Plymouth Hoe and don’t imagine for one moment
that ‘Mad Carew’ didn’t have a wife and six dependent children at home in Chipping Sodbury either.

To this end, I am enclosing a beautifully framed poster detailing the inevitable consequences of infidelity for you to hang
above your mantelpiece when your spouse is next home on leave, the spectre of blindness, insanity, sterility, itchy na-
dgers and baldness ought to put him off his stroke if he is at it. Happy to send you some of the aforementioned garden
shears too if it helps.

Yours fragrantly,
Hilda Ffinch,
The Bird with All The Answers(and the Husband on a Very Tight Leash).

You can catch more of Mrs Fox and Friends at www.mrsfoxgoestowar.co.uk

or on Twitter @mrslaviniafox

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