Chapter 1: Mister not My Cester

AUGUST 2010

I’m Paul Robertson, I’m seventeen, and I’m nothing special. I’m not rich. I’m not a sports hero or in the town’s brass band, and I’m not a member of The Vic. I’m just me. I do okay in school, but I’m not top of the class or anything—heaven forbid. Girls are allowed to be brains, but not lads. We have to be good at football or cricket instead. Well, it would have to be football in my case—cricket is for The Villagers, not The Townies.

Still, I do well enough in school that I’m confident I can get a place at a decent university next autumn. As long as I don’t mess up my exams, that is. Vicky, my big sister, wants me to go to Westmouth since it’s so close. She says I could live at home and save some money. But honestly, I want to get as far away from Micester as possible.

Still, that’s next year, and I don’t have to decide where I’m going until at least spring. Hell, I could even leave it until the end of next summer and take my chances with clearing. But this autumn, I’ve got to return to Micester High. Not exactly something to look forward to. Of course, I didn’t realise that someone completely unexpected was about to flip my safe, steady world upside down, now did I?

I worked part-time—weekends and the odd weeknight if they needed me—waiting tables at the restaurant in Micester Hall, the former home of Lord Liddington, which was vacated by the family in the eighties and converted into a country club and hotel, complete with a spa and golf club.

Lord Liddington was the local landowner and the man who transformed Micester from an insignificant village, much like many other small, unremarkable villages across the country, into the thriving small town it became. The story goes that the town was originally a small Roman settlement, just a stop-off point on the road from the south coast to London. That makes it at least as old as Westmouth and older than Walminster, the two largest towns in Westmouthshire.

Then, in 1848, the date is drummed into us from an early age at Micester’s primary schools, Lord Liddington opened a textile factory with his partner from Westmouth, William Phipps.

The pair transformed the village into a small town for their workers, with their new factory at its heart. They constructed houses, schools, a high street filled with shops, restaurants, pubs, and other amenities. They even built a sports ground. They did it all. And they were pretty good bosses, too, by all accounts. The workers were treated a hell of a lot better than most at that time.

Like I said, they drum all this into us at primary school. Micester’s residents are fiercely proud of the town’s history. There can’t be many towns in Britain quite like it.

Oh, and before you try and get your tongue around it, it’s pronounced Mister, as in Mr Smith. Not ‘My Cester’ or ‘Me Cester’ or something like that. I can’t tell you how much it annoys the townsfolk when outsiders get it wrong.

Vicky got me the job at The Hall a year earlier. She’s a junior chef in the restaurant. During the summer, I’d taken every shift I could—often working both lunch and dinner. My aim was to save as much money as possible to escape Micester when the time came.

Liddington-Phipps is by far the most significant influence on not just the town but also the surrounding villages. If you live in Micester, chances are you either work at the factory, are related to someone who does, or work in a business that depends on the factory. Both of my parents worked there until the accident, and I believe they expected me to walk straight onto the shop floor, too, when I left school. But I have no intention of doing that. Not me. No sir. As soon as I can, I’m out of here.

It’s weird, but despite Liddington-Phipps being a world-renowned brand, and the factory thriving as a result, the town never exceeded a population of ten thousand. In the century and a half since the factory opened, Westmouth had grown to a hundred thousand people, and Walminster even larger.

But Micester remained relatively small, and that meant that the town felt fairly close-knit, more akin to a large village than a small town. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone knows everyone’s business. That’s why you don’t get any job in the town unless you have connections or are supremely talented. Lucky for Vic, she’s supremely talented. I expected she’d be the Head Chef there one day; she really was that good.

Everyone in the town was also very familiar with the affairs of the Liddington family, who still owned the majority share of the factory after all these years.

The last weekend in August, a week before school was set to begin, there was a grand wedding at Micester Hall. Christine Liddington was marrying Jake Rogers, a minor local celebrity.

Everyone in the town was talking about it.

Micester had a semi-pro football team, Micester Town, which was very much part of the town’s identity. It was a couple of rungs down the ladder from the professional leagues, but that’s not surprising since part of the club’s constitution stated that all players had to be dyed-in-the-wool locals, and most of the players worked full-time at the factory.

They did get special privileges for being part of the team, though.

Jake Rogers had been one of only a handful of former players who were talent-spotted and snapped up by a professional club. He’d played mainly in the second tier but made it to the Premier League for a couple of seasons in the mid-nineties. Apparently, the town was buzzing about that. All the shops had posters of him in their windows, and the pubs would organise trips to watch him play. I couldn’t remember; I was just a toddler at the time.

Now, he was back as player-manager of Micester Town and had big ambitions for taking the club higher up the pyramid. How the hell he’d managed to land the Liddington widow to boot was anybody’s guess. But he had.