The village of Sleepy Hamlet is steeped in history and has characters that are as diverse as they are eccentric. But to help you in understanding the stories and their stars a little more, I’ve written this ‘Rogue’s Gallery’ of Sleepy Hamleters.
• Lord Hamlet--- A normally amiable old gent who’s mind tends to be three steps behind the conversation, but he can be obstinate and runs the gauntlet of every EU directive and he refuses to pay any heed to the smoking ban. His family gave their name to the village and he can trace his ancestors back to the Black Death. He spends his days making a nuisance of himself around the village and avoiding his wife, Lady Hamlet
• Lady Hamlet: She’s the old school type of Landed gentry and still lives in a time when the feudal over lordship held sway, if not only in her mind. Lord Hamlet tries to tell her she can no longer act like this but she, like many of her kind, just ignore any council that isn’t their own, instead she swans around with Jennings, her butler and lords it over the villagers, or villeins as she prefers to call them. I shall not go into what certain villagers call her
• Mrs Heppleheimer: She came over to England just before the outbreak of WW II and was employed by the present Lord Hamlet’s father as a land girl, eventually rising to the heights of head cook. She’s strong, not to be crossed and has depths and secrets that only she knows but that the village would love to find out. She still retains her Bavarian roots and is the creator of the mouth-wateringly scrumptious Anglo Bavarian fry-up; she also worships the Old Norse Gods. She lives in Fershlugginer Cottage, a house given to her by the last Lord Hamlet for ‘services rendered’. Another topic of village gossip.
• Mrs Markle: The village Postmistress, chairwoman of the Hamlet Amateur Sleuths’ Society, Tea Total and puritan. Being the village Postmistress and store owner she’s right in the thick of village life and gossip. Every situation she’s in she dominates with the possible exception of her only match in Sleepy Hamlet; that of Mrs Heppleheimer. She lives above the village stores, which is just before you go over the humped back bridge that leads on towards the neighbouring village of Little Underwood.
• Tom: Incomer, entrepreneur and landlord of the Cock & Bull pub---he’s always trying to find ways of making the village pub pay. Some of his ideas don’t fit in with these stalwart villagers and their traditions. He considers them to be a bunch of backward country eccentrics and they look upon him as a ‘townie’ and try and educate him in the ways of the Village. The Cock & Bull pub is situated on Church Street and nestles in between the Hamlet war Memorial and Hangman’s Tree
• Rev Batwing: The dotty old vicar who tries to see good in everyone. He’s quite a rarity in the Church as he actually believes in God. The Church didn’t know what to do with this ecclesiastical misfit, so they sent him where he’d do the least damage: The parish of Sleepy Hamlet. He can be seen regularly around the village with his trade mark vacant look and pleasant smile, and his ever present copy of the Bible in both hands.
• PC Wuruld: The village policeman. He has the ability of knowing you’re about to get up to something even before you do and will often book you before you’ve even done it. His big secret is that he’s the bestselling author of the Gracie Gray series of crime novels. No one in the Village knows this and he’d like to keep it that way.
• Her at No. 42: She’s the biggest enigma in Sleepy Hamlet. No one knows much about her; she won’t mix with the villagers and wants to be left alone. All they know is that she moved back to the village when her mother died and she keeps herself to herself. So rather than leave her to it, the villagers have created a whole new exotic past and present for her. Anything unexplained or salacious in nature is therefore immediately attributed to ‘Her at No. 42’
• Brin Brindly Brindleson: You never see Brin as he’s more of a conversational point than anything else. He’s a farmer and brother to Mrs....the half deaf half blind and fully dimwitted house keeper to the Rev Batwing. Brin is an eccentric even by Sleepy Hamlets standards. He manages to mix everything up and crash and burn on all his projects. He doesn’t see what he does as a failure; in fact he’s blissfully unaware of the hilarity his exploits cause in the village. It is often said that with all the competent Farmers going to the wall, how does Brin manage to survive? He is the eccentrics eccentric.
• The Hamlet WI: They run Sleepy Hamlet like the Mafia run Sicily. Cross them at your peril; many are the villagers who have, and regretted it when they woke to find a severed knitting pattern on their pillow. The ‘Godmother’, as the leader likes to be called, travels around in their stretch Morris Minor which doubles as the vehicle they use for their Jam Running scams.
• The Provisional WI: the radical breakaway splinter group of the Hamlet WI. Their identities are so well kept that not even the great PC Wuruld can say for certainty who they are. But I can reveal that they are none other than Miss Vera, the wispy, meek assistant in Mrs Markle’s Post Office and Miss Beasley her opposite in the Little Underwood Post Office. No one would ever suspect these two shrinking violets. But both were forces to be contended with and the only thing that the Hamlet WI fears.
The village has plenty of other characters, like Mrs Mulliner, Rev Batwing’s slightly deaf, short sighted and diminutive Welsh house keeper who overhears conversations and then passes on what she thought she heard, Mrs Penny, the mobile hairdresser and source of 95% of all village gossip. Then there’s the 14:25 O’Sullivan, a particularly strange, unique and all together dark and frightening breed of bus driver, hence the individualistic name on his bus. There’s also the midnight Library Service and the beast of Sleepy Hamlet plus the secret order of the third cut which is a committee of farmers who live for the day when they’ll be able to get that elusive third cut before the rains come.
There will no doubt be more characters to add as time goes by and I hope you’ll be here when they’re introduced. But for now, this is your little guide to the essentials; the rest we’ll learn together.
Happy reading
Sleepy Hamlet ©Karl Dixon 2010
