The Whitewood House

Gallifreyan nursery rhymes seem to be gloomy things that mourn the loss of the children. It’s all down to guilt. Children were so long ago that they’ve become the stuff of fairytale and legend.

The Drudges seem to have forgotten their place in the hierarchy. As maids, they are supposed to serve the Family, but since the House took things into its own “hands”, they behave more like prison warders. The House has decided that it knows best, rather like high street banks that forget they are the public’s servants.

After six years working in catering during the seventies, you’d think I have gone off kitchens, but I still like them a lot. They’re the heart of any home. Things, both wonderful and weird, happen in kitchens. Chefs chase junior cooks with live lobsters. The kitchen staff are at permanent war with the waiters. The waiters live on a diet of filched oysters and smoked salmon. And I can’t even tell you what I once saw in the dry food store in a seafront hotel in Southsea. Fawlty Towers only skims the surface, believe me. The things that other people have in their larders is just as fascinating as what they have on their book or video shelves. And what the Lungbarrow kitchen has in its larder is not quite so far from other kitchens as you’d like to think.

I like the fact that the Doctor is extremely cagey about admitting that he knows where he is. It puts a strain on his friendship with Chris, who behaves with utmost decency throughout. I’m all for a bit of antagonism between the regular characters. God knows, they live on top of each other enough, barrelling through harrowing situations which hardened troops would need counselling for. I love it when Barbara calls the First Doctor a stupid old man; when the Second Doctor deliberately has a row with Jamie about rescuing Victoria from the Daleks; or when Nyssa doesn’t tell the Fifth Doctor that she’s spoken to Adric in Castrovalva. You could write a whole book about Tegan’s paranoias, and the Seventh Doctor has those little disagreements with Ace in Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric. Chris Cwej is a really nice guy, but his trust of the Doctor is at odds with his training as an Adjudicator, which means he can’t help but have a highly suspicious mind.