a one hundred and seventh story...'robertby'

Robert B. Robertby was a proud man: it seemed he had good reason.  Robert B. Robertby owned an estate in the country of 50 hectares with deer park.  And had a swanky apartment in the city with décor from Sotheby’s – the apartment over-looked Berkeley square.  Furthermore, his wife, Jacqueline, was a patrician beauty, would have been French royalty had the French not decided on a revolution two hundred years previous. Further still, Robert B. Robertby was the richest of his social clique, since he and Jacqueline had decided, ‘quite sensibly’ as they were quick to tell, not to have children.  ‘I don’t need anyone to send down the mine to earn me a living, I own the mine’, Robertby would joke.  The joke was lost on some, laughed at with false bonhomie by some others. 

Much of the source of Robertby’s pride came from his humble beginnings.  He used to blague that he had been ‘born in a cardboard box’, which was rum; nevertheless, he did grow up in a drab terrace house in Folkestone – today known only as home of the Channel Tunnel.  Robertby was ‘Bob’ back then to the street urchin kids, dressed meekly in their scanty post-war attire, that he would play football with on desolate cobbled streets, and run wheel-barrow races, pretend at blind man’s bluff, and so on.  ‘Bob’s’ father was a cobbler and his mother was a nurse.  ‘My father would regularly put the boot in’, Robertby quipped, before explaining that this made him a man before time – the time when most other men were still boys.

After school every day, the young ‘Bob’ would work.  He turned has hand at anything, anything except of course shoe-making and nursing.  ‘I realised from a young age that to follow in one’s parents footsteps was to risk making the same  mistakes’, Robertby often remarked to new acquaintances he assumed keen to hear his self-made story.  So, ‘Bob’ had a paper-round for a while, worked on the rapidly decaying Folkestone docks, ran the door at an amateur boxing club, pulled pints  in the local ale house, and later, had spells as a bank clerk, and as an assistant to a town lawyer.  These last two, Robertby cited as the moments ‘my mind turned to the business of success’, and success he got, whether by miserliness, or deception.  ‘Tax?’, Robertby would later quip to friends he guessed had off-shore bank accounts, ‘Tax is but a three letter word!’

It was as soon as money began to fill up Robertby’s pockets that he began to become self-conscious about being referred to as ‘Bob’, or ‘young Bob’, and so he dropped anyone who did so.  His parents were spared, they had always called him ‘Robert’, but not a single one of his former street-urchin friends, most of whom now were in the kinds of jobs ‘Bob’ had held when he was still at school.  ‘Bob? Who was I a protest singer?’, Robertby guffawed, unaware that the Bob he was referring to was christened Robert. 

The ‘B’, by the way, in Robertby’s name stood for Broadhurst, a stout, working-class English name, or so he thought – his descendants were in fact among the first American settlers and had since become Anglo-American notables.

Anyhow, Robert Robertby (he started using the B. after his first million) set out on the yeller-brick-road to riches in agricultural stocks and shares.  Agriculture in the 50s and 60s was experiencing major change and mechanisation, as all the technologies that had before been directed at killing, maiming and generally ruining the planet and the lives of many of its two-legged inhabitants, now were diverted to the industrial murder of many of the planet’s four legged-inhabitants, as well as towards corrupting natural soils everywhere in the name of progress.

Robertby was certainly one to buy into the idea of progress without even a millisecond of thought.  After all, had someone with his meagre background not done so, life would have ended in the midst and in debt.  And pretty soon he was making unimaginable sums of money by comparison with his parents insider trading on various pieces of farm machinery from automatic asparagus harvesters, to tractors, to laboratory refined pesticides.

When Robertby reached the tender age of 23 he owned a 5 bedroom house with 3 acres, an Aston Martin, a succession of girlfriends and an ego that was growing somewhat exponentially.  And things kept on getting better for Robert Robertby, and so he believed.  At 26 he had his first million, and a new middle name, at 30 he was a millionaire several times over, and had begun to move in London circles, even met the Beatles!  ‘Money, that’s what I want’, Robertby told Paul McCartney in the Starr Club one evening, and McCartney, naturally with eyebrows raised, said ‘we’ve just recorded a song about it’.  John sang it.  George wanted more of it.  Ringo played drums.

Jacqueline Chercheurdor met Robert B. Robertby at a weekend party for the rich and famous, stupid and richly famous, and rich and stupidly famous on Carnaby Street in July 1967.  She was won over by Robertby’s brazen charm, and by then, deep, deep pockets.  Robertby was now involved in the burgeoning film industry, as a financier, and had a tough renown.  ‘Jacqueline thought I had balls of brass’, Robertby would recall, ‘until she discovered that they were the same material as my wrist-watch, and my chain’.  Gold.

Jacqueline and Robertby married a year on from their first meeting, the ceremony held at Robertby’s recently acquired apartment over-looking Berkley square.  Robertby’s parents came, and nearly died of embarrassment – Robertby’s mother fainted in the faux-Egyptian toilet and had to be revived by Mick Jagger, at which point, she fainted again. And gradually over the succeeding years, Robertby’s apartment was filled by Jacqueline with Ming Dynasty bric-a-bric, and so forth.

But, the gravy train has to run out of track somewhere, sometime.  And it was an incident on Robert B. Robertby’s aforementioned 50 hectare country estate that began the decline and fall.  One afternoon, Robertby, by now at the peak of his wealth, invited none other than Michele Ferrero and family around for afternoon tea.  ‘We won’t be having any of those damned chocolates mind you!’, Robertby had confided in a friend, and in fairness Robertby’s girth suggested he didn’t need another cocoa and sugar based confection for the remainder of his life.

So the Ferreros arrived, then with a mere 11.3 billion dollars to their name, and while the adults talked in the Regency conservatory, the house-keeper took the Ferrero children to go see the deers in the deer park.  The house-keeper and children had been gone for nearly four and half hours before either the Robertbys or the Ferreros realised the house-keeper and Ferrero children had not returned – dusk was beginning to fall, and a lot of expensive champagne had been consumed (although no chocolates).  Groggily, Robert B. Robertby issued a search party, while the adults resumed their social time, apparently unconcerned.  

At 9pm the butler, a tall, erect and serious septuagenarian, who secretly despised Robertby, walked slowly into the Regency conservatory and asked with extreme decorum whether he could step outside with Robertby for a moment, please sir.

Outside in the marble festooned hallway the butler broke the news to Robertby that a Red deer stag had mauled to death both Ferrero children and Robertby’s house-keeper (whose name Robertby kept forgetting) in her attempts to save them both.  The recent and sudden rise in air temperature, as spring had turned very rapidly to summer, had bought about a disastrous change in the behaviour of the adult male stag, and caused its levels of testosterone to go haywire.  Robertby’s reaction? ‘Bloody children’.

What he had not counted on was that Michel Ferrero was standing in the doorway at that very instant …

… The rest, as they say, is history.  Robert B. Robertby ended up back in Folkestone, and died even more destitute than his parents, wifeless, friendless, and childless, when ironically to have spawned a rich son, as his parents had done, might have saved him.

Indeed, you can find Robert B. Robertby’s tombstone in the graveyard at Holy Trinity Benefice, Folkestone.  On the grey stone is inscribed his epitaph.  A more imaginative soul might have come up with something wry and witty, such as ‘the only human known to have actually succumbed to death by chocolate’, or ‘killed by the sperm of a Cervus elaphus’, or ‘here lies Robert B. Robertby, born a Bob, raised a Robert, had an answer to everyone including Shakespeare, and yet died again a Bob.’  However, as you will see for yourself, if you brush away the poison ivy, and ignore the yellow BMX sticker some heartless teen has stuck there, Robert B. Robertby’s gravestone simply says ‘deceased’ – there are no jokes in death.  And under the sod, the intrepid among you will find a once filthy rich sod, now simply a filthy sod, with not a single penny in his eye sockets.