About 20 minutes later Penny heard the small door open again. Frantically she began banging on the van door to let them know she was there. Footsteps approached the van, maddeningly slow, a measured walking pace, not the rush Penny expected her frantic banging to produce. Then the door opened and an elderly man (Penny guessed his age to be about 70), dressed as a butler, opened the van doors. He stood there calmly, with a look of professional poise.
"There was no need to make such a racket" He told her "I was coming to get you anyway. My apologies for the delay, but I was preparing the master's breakfast when the chauffeur told me you had arrived, and I'm afraid that the master's breakfast is more important than you are. Now please follow me"
Such was the butler's air of authority that Penny automatically followed him without question.
The van was indeed in a garage, a large spacious garage more the size of a barn than a garage. There were several cars parked alongside the van. Penny recognised a Rolls Royce and a stretch Limo, but there were others that she did not recognise, including one that was obviously a racing car.
The Butler led her through a door along a corridor, and up a flight of stairs. It was a long flight of stairs, at least four stories high, possibly five. At intervals there were doors off the stairs, but Penny did not think to count them. There was no carpet on the stairs, and both the stairs and walls were painted plain white. Bare and basic. Penny had never been in a rich man's house before, but the bareness of the stairs and corridor, coupled with the fact that the man leading her was obviously a butler, led her to believe that these were the service stairs, used only by the staff.
The stairs ended in an equally bare corridor. The slope of the ceiling told Penny that this was in the roof of the building. Some way along the corridor the butler opened a door and told Penny "This is your room." Confused, Penny entered the room and the butler said "I will be back to fetch you when the master or mistress are ready to see you." Then he left, shutting the door behind himself.
Penny looked round the room. The ceiling was slanted, confirming what the corridor had told her, this floor was directly under the roof of the building. The room was as undecorated as the stairs and the corridor. Plain whitewashed walls and floor. In the room was a narrow wardrobe, a hard wooden chair, and a bed. The room was so small that these practically took up the entire floor space. The wardrobe was empty, except for a few old fashioned wooden hangers and two modern wire ones. The bed was narrow and cheap looking. There was an old stained mattress on it, but no sheets. Where the pillow should have been was a small wooden box, about the size of a pillow. It took Penny a while to realise that the box was the pillow - a wooden pillow! On the end of the bed were, neatly folded, two tatty looking hessian sacks. When Penny examined them she discovered that the sides had been split and the sacks opened up, so that they each formed a strip of hessian material about two and a half foot wide and five and a half foot long. To her horror, Penny realised that these were the sheets.
The only other item in the room was a bucket. Slightly rusty inside, the bucked had been placed under the bed. Penny did not touch it, it was obviously used as a toilet by whoever lived in that room.
There was one small window at the end of the room. It had bars on it, rusty iron bars. Looking out of the window and down Penny saw the roof of what she assumed was the garage. Beyond the garage was open farmland, she could see sheep in the field closest to the house, and cows in a field further away. Straining her head round towards the front of the house Penny could see that a long gravel drive connected the garage to the road, and the road looked unmade, like a seldom used country road, or possibly a farm track. Looking in the other direction Penny saw the edge of the garden. It looked like it was a well kept formal garden, but from her window Penny could not see enough of it to be certain.
Penny sat down in the wooden chair to wait and began to wonder who lived in an awful room like this. It was small, tatty, depressing, and cold, very cold. Her bladder was full, she needed a toilet, so it was not long before she got up to try and find one. To her horror the only thing she found was that the door was locked - she had been locked in. She sat back down and tried to ignore the pressure on her bladder, but could not. Eventually she had to drag the bucket out from under the bed and urinate in it.
Sitting back down Penny began to hope that whoever lived in this room would not mind her using their rusty bucket. Then she remembered something the butler had said; "This is your room." Horror hit her like a fist. Her family were poor, she was used to living in poverty, but never in a place this bad. A cold small room with a bed that had a very old, tatty, stained mattress, no sheets, a wooden pillow and old sacks for blankets, and a rusty bucket for a toilet. Surely no one could expect her to live in a room like this! She got up and tried the door again, but it was still locked.
Sitting back down on the wooden chair, Penny felt entirely miserable. She had no idea where she was, why she was there, or what was happening, but the one thing that she did know was that she did not like it. She did not like it at all.
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