It became known that, in a delicate way, Miss Foale had bequeathed her own suggestion. The Committee accordingly decided that the memorial should be a Tittingham Folk Museum, which would house Miss Foale’s collection of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century boots, and shelter the Mopselling Maidens’ dances when Mopsell Day happened to be a wet one. The site was soon agreed on. At the junction of Lady Street and Cow Lane there was a sizable open space, which could be enlarged by pulling down Opie Cottage—a small Georgian house in very bad repair, with a garden in front of it overgrown with lilac bushes and frequented by all the low cats of the town. Its freehold belonged to a Miss Bishop, who many years before had been removed to a Home for the Aged. Though she was senile, it was felt that she was not too senile to sign an agreement to sell the property. The Chairman of the Memorial Committee guided her hand as she did so, and afterwards congratulated her on the sum of a hundred pounds—quite a little fortune—deposited in her name in the Post Office Savings Bank.157

The foundation-stone of the Museum had been laid when Aubrey Cutbush, who for the last five years had been travelling in Asia Minor, came back to his house at Tittingham Parva. Hearing of his return, and bethinking them that he was the unmarried remainder of a hoary local family, the Memorial Committee sent him a copy of their appeal for funds. He ran his eye over it, and buried it under the pages of a book of travel he was getting ready for the press. It was not until a week later that he happened to drive down Lady Street and saw that Opie Cottage was gone. Sixty years earlier, he had been born in Opie Cottage, which his parents had rented while the family dwelling was being reroofed. He had quitted it at the age of six months, but still, he had been born there. Its removal struck him as an affront.

In the heat of the moment, he did what any English gentleman would do. He went to see his solicitor. The solicitor rashly disclosed that he was a member of the Memorial Committee. Shortly after, Mr Cutbush left the office, followed by a junior clerk staggering under three brown-paper parcels; and the three japanned deedboxes lettered ‘Cutbush’, in which for the last few centuries the family papers had reposed, stood empty except for a few strands of pink tape and some dead spiders. A man of pure passions, Aubrey Cutbush was immune from the gentility of having to appear to behave magnanimously. He got a copy of the list of subscribers to the Memorial Fund, and spent the afternoon writing to inform various local tradesmen who had contributed that he was removing his 158custom. By the time he had gone through the list, he had not only severed his relations with grocers, fishmongers, butchers and so forth, but had also cut himself off from the law, the church, medicine (including dentistry) and society, as represented in Tittingham and its environs. In fact, the only links that remained were those which tied him to the Rating Committee and to the Collector of Inland Revenue, and these fell naturally into the scheme of vendetta to which he was now devoted.