Whit’s End

This is the ‘never before told story’ of one woman’s attempt to restore her family claim to British castles and her rightful place on the throne of England. In the Autumn of 2016, Betty ‘Whit’ Whitington Slaymaker, ventured into a British landscape filled with the fortresses and manors that were once ruled by her ancestors. She traveled from  Shrewsbury to Edinburgh and surveyed  a scene that filled her with wonder.

“I wonder what they did for a bathroom in these old castles?” she asked at Shrewsbury Castle.

“I wonder how they lived without plumbing?” she gasped at Whittington.

At Ludlow the queries grew in number: “I wonder how they survived without a gas stove? A decent washing machine? A telephone? A newspaper? An effective hearing aid?”

In Edinburgh, Whit observed that, “The seawater might add to the taste of a good Scotch, but had to be tough on the finger nails and dentures.”

At Holyrood and Edinburgh Whit’s intent became clear and difficult for me to abate and conceal from the gendarmerie. Or call them the Bobbies when in Britain.

“When I shouted, ‘I’ve got dibs on this!’ I meant it,” Whit proclaimed boldly during an interrogation. Sergeant Devon Walpole met his match when this matriarch of the Hanover Whittington clan stepped into his West Mercia Constabulary in Shrewsbury. Not since Queen Elizabeth (the first one, not this second one) has England seen a more formidable adversary than ‘Whit.’ Open the pages of this thriller, discover your roots and find The Whitington Five outwitting the English.

Like us on Facebook, see us on Instagram, go to our website, hang with us on Snapchat, look for us on Linked In, subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow our blog, listen to our podcast, eat our food, drink our ale, visit our sponsors, use our products. Read this book. Just don’t ask for an autograph.

 

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Wanted

By the West Mercia Constabulary

 

£5 Reward

“The Whitington Five”

Whit

 

The Accomplices:

Contact Sergeant Devon Walpole with information pertaining to the arrest and conviction of the above.

 

 

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Whit’s End

By Dr. Stephen S. Smith

 

Edited by Nancy (Slaymaker) Smith
Illustrations by Bob Steckel

 

Published by Rushing Waters Press

Supported by a grant from the Whittington Slaymaker Trust
Betty (Whitington) Slaymaker, Chair

 

 

© 2020 by Dr. Stephen S Smith

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author.

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Whit’s End

 

Dr. Steve Smith, Author

A flagrant and frequent violator of the English language, Smith’s works are often found in bird cages and rabbit dens.  A known pedantic, he has served time in our nation’s schools far longer than considered healthy. Previous works include Toilets of Sheboygan County; a collection of useless poetry titled simply, A Collection of Useless Poetry and a series of essays espousing the need to adhere to school district policies. His epic, A Guide to Fire Drills, was a must read for teachers in his middle school after it burned to the ground.

 

Nancy Slaymaker Smith, Editor

This Whitington descendant is a successful Director of a Northwoods Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce. Her depth of knowledge and skills in the world of Economic Development have been a real asset to Wisconsin. Her accomplishments are many, none more important than her role as parent of an elusive, globe trotting son whose identity has been cloaked in secrecy for job related reasons. If we reveal his name…. Well, never mind.  Suffice it to say Doc is eternally grateful that Nancy shares a life together.

 

The Smiths live a reclusive life on the banks of the Embarrass River, surrounded by turkeys, deer, eagles, hawks, marmots, skunk, chipmunks, otter, mink, squirrels, raccoon, hedgehog, possum, bobcats, coyotes, wolves, mice, vols, moles, fox and bear. But, not one badger. Many of these animals have been given nicknames. None have appeared on Smith’s dinner table. The Smiths some times see their mailman Pete.

 

The Smith’s golden retriever, Murphy, was a wonderful comfort dog with an advanced degree in Psychology and the Manipulation of Human Beings. Murphy was easily intimidated by many of the various critters found roaming his territory which accounted for his limited desire to leave his mark on anything other than an old Ash tree stump that failed to survive the invasion of the emerald ash borer.  Perhaps the tree did not survive the fact that it was the only place in the yard Murphy was proud to call his own.

Murphy, RIP 2007-2020.

 

 

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WHIT’S END

 

By Dr. Stephen S. Smith

 

This Book is Dedicated to Betty ‘Whit’ Whitington Slaymaker

Without whom there would be no book and no daughters Dana, Susan and Nancy

And to Robert Bruce Slaymaker, husband and father.

“Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down!”

 

 

 

 

 

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This page was left blank in the original (hardcopy) version of this book so that the Foreword Page could be placed on an odd numbered page. If you own a hardcopy you may note that title pages in the volume are almost always found to the right as you leaf through this book. Rule number 47b found in the deliberately unknown Reginald Clackborne’s fictional Guide to Publishing a Well-Mannered Literary Piece Within the Bounds of Reason and Renown require this format. I sometimes ignored Clackborne’s Rule and placed chapter headers to the left on even numbered pages of the tome. This option is permitted under rules established in Priscilla Prigmore’s 1946 edition titled simply: Classic Content and the Proper Placement of Materials in a Post War American Publication, With Consideration of Formal Literary Mechanisms and Informal Needs.

 

Doctor Smith,

I have the original hardcopy of Whit’s End and I can’t believe you left entire pages blank to simply follow some protocol designed in a different era of literary history, a rule that has no practical application in the present tense. Goodness me. You wasted a tree with all these blank pages. You could have, at the very least, posted photographs of family or places important to our family history, perhaps a photo of my family summer home or the castle at Darbon Purfoy.

– Lady Etheline Durstwoodie of Kilby Snedrow

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Dear Doctor Smith,

Can I call you that? I loved all the blank pages. I don’t know why Lady Etheline has her knockers all in a binch. I meant to say ‘knickers’ all in  a ‘bunch.’ The blank pages remind me of James Joyce’s great work, Ulysses. I am drawn to blank pages like a moth to a lamp post. My goodness. How they thrill me. They remind me of a blizzard in the winter of 1944. My family lived to the north of Edmonton, in Alberta. My father Alton had just returned from the Great War. Oh. Never mind. He was not my father after all. My sister tells me to hush up before I embarrass myself. Well. Look at this. This page is no longer blank. There go my thoughts of the blizzard of 1956.

–Edith Wenzel, Vancouver BC

 

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Dear Dr. Smith,

Are you daft man? This is a digital book appearing online… on the internet…via cyberspace! You don’t have to leave pages blank when you upload a digital book online. Wake up to the new world man! Your audience is not going to be turning pages from right to left. We will be scrolling down the page, Gramps! On our Kindle, our Ipads, and laptops! Comprende? You can ignore Clackborne’s dreary presentation, as well as Prigmore’s opus. God forbid. How they ever let her graduate from Cambridge is beyond me! If you wish to learn more about publishing books online, I suggest you read Lenton Delso’s fascinating Why Prigmore’s Classic Content and the Proper Placement of Materials in a Post War American Publication, With Consideration of Formal Literary Mechanisms and Informal Needs, Fails to Meet the Mark in the Twenty First Century of EBook Commerce and Other Archaic Atrocities. That said, I do love your work Old Man. 

-Vernon Tuskwater, Kilby Wigmore Duxton, UK

 

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FOREWORD

Well. Here is a bit of bad news. We purposely designed the previous pages so that this FOREWORD would fall on an odd numbered page, facing the reader as he or she turned the pages and well, it really doesn’t matter in a digital format. Does it? I mean Mr. Tuskwater has made that abundantly clear. There is no turning of the pages from right to left as there would be with a hard cover or paperback book. Everything is scroll down, eat a bon bon and scroll down some more. But here you are stuck with a digital book written for publication as a hardcopy, a paperback book meant for a night stand and suitable place on a shelf, perhaps a shelf in the “Little Library” in your community.

We caught a bad break when heading into publication. The gentleman we had hoped would provide a FOREWORD for this tome was hospitalized following the tragic collapse of an igloo in the northern tundra of the Yukon. He was there creating a sweat lodge experience for a Kutchin Inuit friend who escaped that disastrous moment when the heat inside the sweat lodge dislodged the ice of the igloo. Not a good moment. A GoFundMe has been started to buy an ice machine to make repairs to the igloo.

We then found a woman who sold accessories in a trendy boutique in Clinton Iowa and she agreed to read a draft of this book and write something nice about it. She disappeared the night before police raided the home of her boyfriend and sadly, our one copy of this book, went with her. She is rumored to be in Costa Rica or parts of her may be scattered over the Midwest. We aren’t certain. We do hope to recover the book or at least entice her to read the book and secure a FOREWORD that we can later use.

Failing that, we found a retired minister in Shelbyville Alabama who agreed to enter the text of this book into his computer and scan it for obscenities. We are grateful that he can report that after we removed the word ‘dang’ and two references to the posterior of a human being, this book is free of obscenities or as he termed them, ‘bad words.’ So, with that good news we can report that this book is certifiably rated ‘FF’ for Family Friendly.

If you would like to write a FOREWORD for this family classic please enter our contest as posted on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat and you may soon find your name in print on something other than your paycheck, tax returns or driver license.

So, to be blunt about it… I am afraid we have wasted another page.

 

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We grew tired of leaving pages blank in the hard copy of this book and decided to use this space as a way of making some loose change so we can buy Christmas presents this year.

 

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS