A Successful Family

Su Li was twenty-two and a high flying pharmacist who came from a poverty stricken, tiny hamlet in a remote part of China whose forty-three other inhabitants were all relatives of hers by blood or by marriage. They spoke a millennia old dialect somewhat different from but mutually intelligible to the dialects spoken in the nearby villages, the nearest of which was a half day’s walk away. The dialects spoken in all the nearby villages were mutually intelligible, but again all slightly different from each other. Her family were all subsistence farmers who grew fruit and vegetables for the family to eat on rented land. Their dream was to keep a pig and a pair of ducks, but since the landlord took most of what they grew as rent they knew there would never be enough left over after they had eaten to exchange at the next village for even a hen. Ducks and a pig were no more than a pipe dream. Li had believed that her job as a pharmacist would eventually provide enough money to enable them to buy some animals, but the landlord had doubled the rent knowing that she would never see her family starve. Li had been educated by a scholarship provided courtesy of a visiting linguist who’d discovered her intelligence when she’d been but a child. She wasn’t concerned regarding how clever others considered her to be, and since pharmacy had provided nothing her family hadn’t had before she thought rather poorly of education as a whole. She just wanted to be a wife and mum and was happiest cultivating fruit and vegetables with her family and enjoying their company.

At a conference that Li had been forced to attend by her employers: the state, she’d met Charles Sidworth, a thirty-five year old, extremely wealthy Englishman who had studied many backwoods Chinese dialects including hers. Charles owned a European drug company with extensive interests in the far east. Initially the Su family grew some rare plants that Charles was interested in as the raw materials to produce a range of new drugs for his laboratory to investigate. Exporting the plants from China was no problem and though importing them into the UK was subject to stringent regulations Charles was familiar with the procedure since it was something he handled dozens of times a year. Charles had few family, none who cared about him, and due to shyness and extreme reticence he knew he was unlikely to find a friend back home never mind a wife. The couple spent hours discussing Chinese plants and medicines and soon became fond of each other. From there their relationship deepened rapidly. Eventually Charles offered Li the opportunity to be what she wanted to be: his wife and the mother of his children.

Their mutual poor circumstances had led to their discussions concerning a mutual solution for all that both cared about. The arrangement that Charles proposed was Li’s entire extended family came to the UK to live as his own extended family on the fifteen thousand acre Shropshire estate he owned which they could cultivate in any way they chose in exchange for propagating and looking after the small numbers of plants he was interested in. It was an extremely attractive deal to both sides for the Su family were poverty stricken, landless and abused by the local landowner as poorly paid agricultural workers and it had long been only Li’s income that had kept them alive, and Charles’ family wished nothing to do with him due to his social awkwardness and unacceptability, whereas the Su family all treated him with the considerable respect they believed was due to a patriarch. That he treated them all with courtesy and respect too merely elevated their already high opinions of him.

Li had managed to arrange transport for her entire family to travel to a city for medical screening for an infectious disease that was causing official concern in case it turned out to presage another Covid situation. At the city airport her family boarded a chartered Japanese aircraft which took them to Tokyo. From there a British Airways 747 had flown them three-quarters of the way to London Heathrow before their landlord became aware that the family had left their hovels and the land was now un husbanded which would make him penniless. It was another two days before the local authorities finally became aware the Su family had left not just their homes but China too, and a week before the Chinese government insisted the family were repatriated immediately. The row went on for years, but it went nowhere and eventually died, for once the Japanese plane had left Chinese air space the Chinese authorities would have been stymied even had they known the Su family were intending to leave permanently.

Due to Charles’ considerable influence the UK, residency permits were easily acquired as were the subsequent UK citizenships. In order to simplify family matters the entire Su family took the surname Sidworth by simply adding it to their names, so Su Li became Su Li Sidworth. However, after having lived in England for some eighteen months the Sidworth family’s troubles with the UK authorities concerning the education of the children and the adult family members’ lack of tax returns went on for several years, but due to Charles’ perception like the Chinese the authorities had long been stymied too. In fact the children were academically years ahead of most UK children being eager to learn and having been home schooled by experts since their arrival in Shropshire. The education authorities were insistent that the children were all tested in order, they said, to see what they were capable of. In fact as both Li and Charles were aware they wished the children to demonstrate their educational inadequacy so that they could get a magistrates’ ruling that the children had to be educated at a local authority school.

The authorities had been stunned when Li and Charles had agreed immediately and asked for a date when the children could be tested under local authority supervision but at home. The authorities had protested saying it would take some time, maybe two or three months, to organise. Charles had asked why it would take so long and had laught when told that the authority would need to find a disinterested bilingual person to translate the standard tests and then mark them. They had been seriously put out when Charles had told them that was ridiculous when the children were all perfectly capable of reading any test in English and writing their answers in English too. He said both he and his wife were aware that like any other children for who English was not their first language the children had to be given a fifteen percent leeway when taking tests to determine educational levels in English, and as was usual he wanted photocopies of the children’s scripts to check the local authority paid marker had been scrupulously fair because he didn’t trust them.

When asked why he’d replied because he opined that the matter had nothing to do with education and everything to do with politics, and as a result he’d placed the matter in the hands of his solicitor. He’d added that the national media were interested in the matter too. The media were delighted when some of the children scored more than a hundred percent on some of the tests once their fifteen percent leeway had been added. The local education authority were seen to be victimising a decent family for no justifyable reason. They were believed to be bullies acting from nothing other than spite, officiousness and racism. Charles’ legal team won the case and the authorities were fined a considerable amount of money which the media were delighted to announce that the children’s parents had deposited in the pre existing trust accounts that Charles had set up for them as soon as they had arrived in the UK. That all of the children intended to study for a degree with the open university from home and after that pursue the lifestyle of their family as self sufficient small scale farmers again delighted the media and irritated the education authorities but they were too frightened of another beating in a public courtroom to say anything about it.

Too, the only taxes due had been due as a result of Charles’ earnings from his investments and from his company and all had been declared and the taxes paid by his accountants. The taxation authorities first claimed that Charles’ employees were neither paying tax nor national insurance. When told that was because they were not employees and were not paid anything they accused Charles of modern slavery. Charles’ response was to suggest the tax folk looked at the legal names of those involved for they were all members of his family and close relatives of his wife by blood or married to a blood relative of hers. He suggested if they wished to make either of their accusations against him stick they would have to make them against every landed family in the UK starting with the royal family and working their way down via the entire aristocracy. None of the family worked other than as fruit and vegetable growers for the family’s sole use, though they had branched out to become keepers of a wide variety of livestock again purely for their own use. The possession of a small number of cows, pigs, sheep and goats in addition to ducks, hens and geese was to the older family members the currency by which they measured true wealth. That the hundreds of doves that lived in the centuries old dovecote and the fish in the lake were a readily available food source was a wonder to them. When they added a couple of hives of bees and a dozen rabbits to keep in a barn they couldn’t imagine a better life.

At a family council it was the considered opinion, since Charles’ investments and earnings created far more income than they required for them all to live well and they saw little point in working purely to earn money they had no use for, that growing food to sell for others to eat was a futile endeavour. It was rare any of them left the estate, for there was no need. The family ran the house and the immediate gardens themselves. The cooking was mostly done by the older women who would have bitterly resented any attempt to take what gave their lives value in their own eyes off them. There were no staff in the house, for all cleaning and everything else required too was done by the family. Charles spent most of his free time tending to what he considered to be exotic vegetables with his father in law. The farmland that was mostly rented out to local farmers was no longer managed by Charles, but by his sisters in law. Even the children agreed that everything they wanted was right there at home. The announcement of Li’s first pregnancy was cause for a family celebration, and the birth of their daughter Char Li Sidworth made everyone’s life perfect, though Li wanted a son to name Charlie Sidworth.

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