Lord Burtonfarp and Nastley Estate

Delbor's father, Lord Burtonfarp of Much Leering, owned Nastley Estate where he, Delbor and a number of other people; friends, relatives, visitors, helpers..? - not always easy for Delbor to give a status to - lived. He had bought the place for a nominal sum from the local council in 1955, agreeing to maintaining the building and grounds in as good a state as possible.


Nastley Estate had been an outdated hospital that had been closed and was scheduled to be knocked down. It was originally built as a workhouse in 1870 for the far-too-many homeless; rapscallions; ne're-do-well; thieves; vagabonds and other scum that populated the thriving market town of Vulvaton. The bankers, shopkeeprs, merchants and new industrialists were doing well in Victorian England. But the better off they became the more the human vermin swarmed the streets.


Many of the names of the poor miscreants who found themselves in Nastley Estate - in fact a jumble of ugly buildings around a few quadrangles with a semblance of garden and lawns over by The Blocks where the mad girls and women were kept - would be written into the Bad Books that Delbor would find about eighty years later in the Old Mortuary. The records of punishments and fines meted out for cursing, being late, not finishing a task; mainly beatings and thrashings disguised as "caning" in the inky scrawl of a workhouse clerk.


Lord Burtonfarp was allowed to buy the old hospital for a handful of beans because he was, or had been, someone important. He may have been an artist or a writer; perhaps a scientist, politician or engineer. But it was obvious when you met him, spoke with him, that he was someone special. And knowledgeable. Also a very pleasant person: charming, considerate, thoughtful, witty. Good looking; very good looking women often repeated when talking of him. He wasn't married and apparently lived with his sisters and his mother and some other people who looked after Nastley. But no one knew anything about Delbor's mother.