Angola Gaffletter Chapter 4.

Chapter Four.

The Muppert Boys.

By the time Angola was thirteen and confidently rising behind the drapery counter, Sudan was already showing unmistakable signs of becoming a mechanical menace. He was bright, very bright, but completely unable to leave anything with screws alone.

He dismantled clocks, stools, door handles, and the kitchen mangle. Once, disastrously, he took apart the parlour harmonium, which never quite recovered its dignity. He didn’t do any of this out of mischief. He simply had to know how things worked.

Mr Muppert, who had lost three coat hooks and a perfectly good umbrella stand to Sudan’s curiosity, finally said, with weary authority, “This boy needs an engineer before he dismantles the house.”

So Sudan was apprenticed.

His master, Mr Havelock, was patient, practical, slightly deaf, and completely unfazed by small but worrying explosions. He took Sudan on at twelve and taught him how to repair farm machinery, maintain steam engines, fix pumps, mend tools, and occasionally invent things that probably shouldn’t have been invented.

Sudan thrived. He became the boy who could fix anything, break anything, and improve anything, sometimes all at once. He also became the boy who smelled permanently of machine oil.

He learned how gears behaved when they were sulking, how to build small contraptions that whirred and clicked, and how to avoid blowing up the workshop (though he didn’t always succeed at that last one).

Mr Havelock said, “He’ll be brilliant one day.”

Mrs Muppert said, “I hope he survives long enough.”

Sudan’s engineering apprenticeship added a new element to the Muppert household: noise. Not ordinary household noise, but the sort of clatter that suggested machinery trying to escape. Angola endured it with tight‑lipped patience, trying to ignore the hammering, sawing, and alarming rattles from the yard.

But she could not ignore the mess. Sudan’s inventions had a habit of migrating indoors. A gear would appear on the kitchen table. A spring would roll under the dresser. A mysterious metal object would sit in the parlour, quietly shedding soot.

Angola would pick up each item between two fingers and say, “Sudan, this does not belong here.”

Sudan would reply, “It’s only temporary,” which was never true.

The worst incident occurred when one of Sudan’s experimental contraptions escaped. It scuttled across the kitchen floor, leaving a trail of oil and something that might have been soot or jam. Angola froze, broom in hand, and watched it wobble under the dresser.

“Is it meant to do that?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

Sudan, delighted, said, “Yes! Well… mostly.”

Angola produced her sharp sandpaper sound. She cleaned the oil, cleaned under the dresser, cleaned the broom, and then said, “Sudan, if you must dismantle the world, kindly do it outside.”

Yet for all her exasperation, Angola was proud of him. She watched him sometimes from the drapery doorway, hammering away with cheerful determination, and thought, in her precise way, that he would one day be very useful indeed. Useful, if noisy.

His trousers remained permanently scorched, patched, and held together by hope and string. By fifteen, he was known locally as Sudan Muppert, Engineer of Nether Wintle, the boy who could mend a plough, repair a clock, and rebuild a kettle that had given up on life.

When Angola was sixteen and firmly in charge of the shop, Mauritius, the middle boy, was ready to leave school. Angola announced that under no circumstances whatsoever would she allow him anywhere near the drapery.

“He is a menace to cloth,” she said.

It was true. Mauritius was good‑natured and helpful, but perpetually adhesive. If there was jam in the house, he had touched it. If there was glue, he had stepped in it. If there was treacle, he had somehow transferred it to his elbows. One sticky handprint on a bolt of fine muslin and the shop’s reputation would be ruined.

Vera agreed.

Corning sighed.

Botswana patted Mauritius sympathetically, then wiped her hand on her skirt.

It was clear the boy needed an apprenticeship where stickiness was a requirement rather than a disaster. After a memorable incident involving a jar of marmalade and the cat, Mr Muppert made enquiries.

Mauritius was apprenticed to Mrs Spreadwell, a local jam maker with formidable forearms and strict standards. She took one look at Mauritius, sticky, smiling, and eager, and said, “I can use him.”

In the preserving rooms, Mauritius thrived. He learned how to wash fruit, stir jam without burning it, sterilise pots, and tell when a preserve was ready by the way the bubbles changed tone. He was allowed to label jars neatly (he still got sticky).

Mrs Spreadwell said, “He’s got a feel for fruit.”

Angola said, “He has a feel for everything. And it is usually all over him.”

Botswana said, “He smells like summer.”

Mauritius became known as Mauritius Muppert, Jam Boy, the lad who could make perfect gooseberry preserve and still have raspberry on his eyebrows.

Togo was the youngest of the Muppert boys. He was small, compact, portable, and often overlooked, except by Botswana, who had a soft spot for anything small enough to carry without strain.

Togo had a talent for appearing in unexpected places. He could fit under the drapery counter, behind the flour bin, or inside the large wicker laundry basket. He was quiet, observant, and possessed a solemn expression that made him look as though he were contemplating deep mysteries, when he was usually contemplating biscuits.

Angola said, “He’s too small to be useful.”

Botswana said, “He’s exactly the right size for kindness.”

Togo liked the ground. He liked stones, the way soil changed colour after rain, the sound of clicking pebbles, and the quiet draughts of cellars. He explored every under‑stair nook in the house and could retrieve lost objects from awkward corners as if he had brought them back from another world.

When the time came for an apprenticeship, Angola insisted, “He must not be put anywhere dangerous. Or sticky. Or noisy. Or involving machinery.”

The answer lay at Mr Burr’s Stone Works, a modest quarry supplying building stone to half the county. Mr Burr had noticed Togo standing at the quarry edge, watching the men cut blocks and asking thoughtful questions about seams and strata.

“Your lad sees the ground properly,” Mr Burr told Vera, and took Togo on as an apprentice.

Togo learned how to read rock, judge the sound of a hammer strike, follow a fault line, and keep a surveyor’s level steady. He grew neither noisy nor sticky; he grew steady.

He began attending night school at fourteen, walking home with pockets full of pebbles and his head full of sedimentary rock. He studied geology with total absorption. By sixteen, he could identify stone by touch alone. By eighteen, he was spoken of respectfully as a lad who might go far, not in coal, but in the growing world of modern mining engineering, where geology mattered more than muscle.

One day, though no one in Nether Wintle could yet imagine it, his path would lead him far from home, to places where the ground was red, the sky enormous, and the rocks told stories older than the village itself.