Mrs Jellicoe was angry; angrier, she believed, that she had ever been in her life! Damn them! Damn then! Damn them!
Those awful people, Michael Munro who thought he was so good and his snobbish wife – what was her name, Mona, although everyone addressed her as Missus Munro. She had never heard anyone call by her given name. Mona, she thought, a fitting name – Mona the Moaner! And living directly across the road in their pretentious brick veneer cottage with its ordered gardens and a lawn that appeared as though it had been manicured with pair of nail clippers. They thought they were so good, that their place was the best in the street and their garden the grandest – a look-out anyone who dared to compete, or do something that, to the high and mighty Munros was not conducive to their streetscape.
And They had dobbed her in, reporting her to the council although she wasn’t aware that she had done the wrong thing.
As with most homes in her pretty little street she had no front fence and her garden and lawn melded in with the neat concrete footpath and the strip of lawn between that footpath and the kerbing. And it was that narrow strip of lawn, Mrs Jellicoe decided, that needed something more than grass to enhance its visual effect. So, she purchased and planted two flowering prunus trees. They looked very nice, she decided, hoping that her neighbours would follow her example and the whole street would become a delightful tree-lined avenue.
But the only neighbours who commented on her effort were the Munros across the street, and not to her directly. Their comment came in a form of a complaint to the city council. The first she was aware of it was when an obnoxious council official arrived on her doorstep to tell her rather rudely that it was against the local city by-laws to plant trees or shrubs or even gardens on the kerbside grassy fringe. It wasn’t acceptable to the city or to her neighbours who did the right thing, he said, and then stood watching her while she removed the trees and repaired the lawn.
She knew that it was Mona Munro who’d complained when she saw the sneering satisfaction as she watched her remove the trees, and then observed the friendly little wave that passed between her and the officious council official.
She would get her revenge! She swore.
But how?
She was a diminutive, old aged pensioner with no affluent friends in high places, while her neighbours were well positioned in the community and apparently quite wealthy going by the cars they drove, their backyard pool, and the classy boat in the driveway. They had a lot of visitors too, people who also drove flash cars and possessive of that air of indifference to lesser folk like old age pensioners and common workers. She wouldn’t stand a chance, she knew, in making any sort of stand against them, not physically or verbally.
But perhaps anonymously?
It was the germ of a foolish thought initially but one that developed quickly into a cunning determination.
Mrs Jellicoe was a very observant woman and spent hours in her rocker on her tiny front porch watching the world go by and seeing things that others perhaps didn’t see or didn’t want to see. And she had a vivid imagination. Her neighbours across the street were of particularly interest. There was the gardener who came twice a week and who seemed to spend most of his time in the backyard, out of sight where she had been told that Mona Munro sunbaked daily, nude, beside her pool.
There was the amount of booze her husband brought home with him every evening after work and never unloaded from his car until it was garaged, not realising that from her bedroom window she could see into the garage where the door, because of the three cars inside, could not be fully closed. There was another man who infrequently visited while her husband was at work, and who seemed to stay for quite some time and who, she later learned, was a local debt collector. She also learned from her contractor nephew that Munro himself, as well as criticising constantly, was never quick in paying for work performed on his house or workplace. Occasionally, too, Munro entertained visitors who, to Mrs Jellicoe, didn’t appear “gentlemanly”.
It may all be above board, she told herself, but insinuation was a potential weapon.
And insinuation, she decided, was what she would employ to put the fear of God into the snobbish pair!
Anonymously!
On her next trip to town Mrs Munro, wearing gloves even though it was the middle of summer, purchased several stationary items from a local shop including coloured copying paper, glue, and a large brown envelope. Then on her way home she dropped off a bundle of newspapers at the local recycling plant, and while the attendant wasn’t watching purloined two girlie magazines from the pile of paper waiting to be sorted.
The spare room at the rear of her house was rarely used except for occasional storage but it did contain a large flat table, and she completely covered its surface with a sheet of brown paper. Then, using the cheap pair of plastic scissors she’d also purchased from an opportunity shop, she happily cut out letters and phrases from the girlie magazines. The back side of some of her cut-out pieces clearly indicated that they had been taken from a girlie magazine. Oh, she was so clever, she told herself with a giggle. Even if there was any effort made to determine the source of the lettering, which she very much doubted, who could possibly suspect that she could be in possession of such trash?
Satisfied that she had sufficient material for her needs she began to sort the clipped letters and phrases to form sentences. It took her two long, painstaking evenings of sorting and gluing until she was satisfied with the result which covered two sheets of the coloured copy paper.
She read through the letter carefully and laughed aloud, visualising her snotty neighbours leaving town in a hurry when they received it. It never crossed her mind that the only crime her neighbours were guilty of was snobbishness and the threats and accusations made in the letter were probably too incredible to be believed. The first sentence was a threat – there was a contract on Munro, it stated, and it was too late to pay the debts that he owed!! There was a vague mention of a possible visit by a man called ‘Tuppence’ – which was a nickname given by the media to a particularly notorious bikie boss.
He and his wife, the letter continued, had become a threat to The Organisation (unnamed) because of their personal activities which conflicted with their (The Organisation’s) reputation and would undoubtedly arouse the interest of certain authorities which they did not want nor need.
It took her almost a full page to list those “certain” activities in a mixture of cut out letters ranging from very small print to extra large capitals.
There was Mrs Munroe’s “visiting” service – oh what a nice word for a brothel, she thought cattily. She named the gardener and the debt collector as two regular clients and suggested that Mrs Munro conducted her clandestine activities merely to help her husband meet his debts, or perhaps he was her pimp! Even if it wasn’t true, she thought nastily, the innuendo was there, and the woman could find herself in serious trouble with her spouse. And there was no doubt in her mind that Mona Munro was being naughty when her husband wasn’t at home.
Serves the bitch right!
There was his addiction to hard drink, lately he rarely seemed sober (so the letter accused) and he was selling booze to under-agers. Only last night she had seen their under-aged nephew and his friend leaving the house carrying a cartoon of beer. The Organisation hoped, her letter then stated, that he wasn’t undercutting them in the sale of “other items”.
She didn’t suggest what the “other items” might be, but with the recent epidemic of drug-related incidences in the town the innuendo, again, was clear.
There were several other carefully worded accusations, again in various sized and coloured letters, suggesting non payments for items received (she did not mention tradesmen and work on his house), of his undercutting in certain business dealings, and even “conning” his associates. A later sentence referred to him not to be expecting assistance from those authorities, including police, who were on his payroll.
Mrs Jellicoe wondered if she were perhaps being a little too melodramatic but pushed the thought aside. Where there was smoke, she decided, there was fire, and she intended to fan the flames into an inferno.
Overall, the message was clear, she decided, either get out of town and quickly – or face something worse.
Her finale sentence, she told herself, was a classic – a real piece of genius …
“There’s no CoMing back From a HoLe In tHe GrouNd.”
Satisfied, she folded the two sheets of her letter in half and carefully placed them into the envelope, sealing it, using a drip of water on the end of her gloved finger to dampen the seal to stickiness. Using more of the letters cut from the magazines, she addressed the envelope carefully then placed it in a large paper bag, sure that neither the envelope or its contents contained any trace of her involvement, not even that new-fangled DNA she’d read about.
Finally, she gathered together the remnants of her handiwork – the remaining magazines and lettering, the glue pot, the scissors, even the remaining coloured foolscap paper and the plastic bag in which it had come, and finally the household rubber gloves she wore throughout the entire operation, and wrapped them in the sheet of brown paper she used to cover the table.
She checked the floor thoroughly to ensure that no shred of paper remained.
On her usually early morning walk next day the resulting parcel was consigned, unobserved, into the fiery depths of the industrial incinerator behind the neighbouring recycling plant.
All she had to do now, she told herself gleefully, was post the letter and there was no way known that it would ever be traced to her!
At the post office she purchased a booklet of stamps so that a single stamp could be removed from an adhesive surface without any fingerprints or whatever might disclose her DNA. With gloved hands, she carefully removed a stamp from its adhesive backing and placed it onto the envelope.
After she had posted the letter into the outside posting box, she decided she would get rid of the paper bag, her gloves, and the stamp booklet with its remaining stamps where they would never be found or traced to her.
Oh, yes, she was so clever she thought, briefly scanning the notice displayed on the notice board behind the writing slopes. Yes, the postcode was included in the address and … thoughtfully she frowned and turned the envelope over.
A few minutes later she dropped the letter into the outside posting box and walked away softly humming to herself. Her snotty-nosed neighbours wouldn’t know where it came from, and only they would see it. She had made sure of that. In the unlikely event of a delivery failure it would be returned to her, unopened because, as the notice behind the writing desks suggested … she had carefully printed her name and address on the back of the envelope.
Author: Jim Kent
Jim Kent is a widowed, retired Area Postal Manager with Australia Post, living in Port Fairy, Victoria. An amateur bush balladist and writer, his hobbies include researching his family tree. He says: “Once I knew a lovely old lady who planned revenge on an interfering neighbour with an anonymous letter.”
