[CaberTosser]

In the 1990’s I had a service call at an ‘old-money’ home in the Mount Royal neighbourhood, the client was a very old woman. To conduct my repair I needed the water shut off to the house and in the unfinished basement I could trace the old galvanized steel water line back to a small room best described as a pantry or a closet of some form, it was only about 36” x 48”. The door was locked though so I had to ask the client for access. The woman went into a panic upon my request and in no way, shape or form did she want to let me in that tiny little closet to shut off the water. I had to verbally describe to her how to close the valve from outside the house, she didn’t even want me inside the home when she made access to that room! At least the arthritic old girl managed to get the water shut off. To this day I wonder what was in there, was it shelves full of cash? Her deceased husbands remains?

Another regular client in an old Mt Royal home had an interesting backstory. She was as old as the hills and I noticed her name in an article in the Herald after she had passed away (I just looked her up and apparently she was not as old as I thought when she passed, I guess her dementia and my relative youth at the time made her seem a decade or two older than she was). The article noted that she grew up as a wealthy socialite in New York City and her father was a trusted friend of Czar Nicholas of Russia, he must have been a rather close friend as the Czar had gifted him one of those famous Faberge jewelled eggs that are worth so much money these days. I just looked up her name and found some reference that noted rather than the Czar giving her father this priceless jewelled egg it was instead Prince Edward (King Edward VIII). Either way she was supposed to have possessed one of these priceless works of art and her daughter figured that a charlatan who befriended her had absconded with the thing, the persons identity was known but proving anything seemed problematic.

If it was a gift from King Edward one wonders what happened in Windsor Castle, first world royalty problems and all. King: “Dearest, it’s my friends birthday and I haven’t had a chance to shop for a gift” Queen: “Grab that Faberge Egg off the mantle, it doesn’t match my color scheme in that room anyways. I never liked that pesky thing”