Alberta Saxby

Alberta Saxby is the main villain of the children's book *Awful Auntie* by David Walliams.

## Her Story

Alberta Saxby was the oldest Saxby child, consisting of herself and twin brothers Herbert and Chester (who were twelve years her junior).  As the oldest son (he was the older twin), Herbert was supposed to have the title of Lord Saxby when his father passed away, but this did not sit well with Alberta, so one night, she smuggled him out of the house, put him in a box, and sent him afloat in a river, thinking that the river would swallow him up.

Fortunately, Herbert was not swallowed up, and floated until he was found and taken to an orphanage.  Unfortunately, the orphanage was one of fear, run by an old man who whipped the boys with his belt.  Herbert ran away and became a chimney sweep, while his master called him “Soot”.  He ended up back in Saxby Hall a decade later, but Alberta recognized him, and when he went up the chimney to clean it, she lit a fire below.  Soot was quickly incinerated, and Alberta let one of the servants take the blame.

Growing up, Alberta was beastly to Chester.  She’d torment him in various ways, like giving him a poisonous tarantula for Christmas, giving him rocks disguised as rock cakes, leaving him dangling on the washing line, chopping down a tree while he’s climbing it, playing hide-and-seek with him (she’d let him hide and then she’d go on holiday), shoving him into a lake while he’s feeding ducks, putting dynamite in his cake, throwing him across the room, cutting the brake cables on his bike, disguising worms as “special spaghetti” and force-feeding them to him, throwing ice-covered cricket balls at him during a snowball fight, locking him in a wardrobe and then pushing it down a flight of stairs, putting earwigs in his ears, and burying him up to his neck in sand and leaving him at the tide’s mercy.

Nevertheless, Chester was never mean back to Alberta.  When he inherited Saxby Hall, he gave her the family’s troves of silver and jewels, only for her to gamble it all away in a game of tiddlywinks in the casinos of Monte Carlo.  Undaunted (and unashamed), she pinched Chester’s chequebook, forged his signature, and stole his money from his bank account, only to lose that all as well in days.  This plunged the family into a debt that could not be recovered from, and Chester was forced to sell everything he could to auction houses to keep the family home.  He was also forced to lay off all his servants, but Gibbons, the old butler (who was just short of a century old) was deaf and blind and couldn’t hear Chester telling him to leave.

Alberta is also obsessed with tiddlywinks, and would always force Chester to play it with her.  Alberta is not only a bad loser, but also a cheat, who would make up moves like “Whipple-scrimp” (she would eat Chester’s squidger), “Gnash-gnosh” (she would bite Chester’s hand when he tried to play), “Knicker-knocker-glory” (she would hide all of Chester’s winks in her knickers), “Boom-shack-a-lack” (she would fire her winks into the pot with a rifle), “Winkferno” (she would burn Chester’s winks), “Knee-thumper” (when it was Chester’s turn, she would bang the table with her knee to make the table shake), “Snatcheroo” (she would have a highly trained bird of prey-whom you’ll hear more about later-snatch Chester’s wink when it was in mid-flight), “Sticky-wink” (she would glue Chester’s winks to the table), “Gigantopot” (while Chester wasn’t looking, she would replace the pot with one too tall to fire any winks in), and “Poot” (she would fart on Chester’s squidger so he couldn’t use it for a short while).  Chester bought her a Tiddlywinks rulebook, but she would never even open it.  It still comes in useful, though; Chester states in his will that he wants his daughter, Stella, to have Saxby Manor, and he doesn’t trust Alberta, thinking she will just gamble it away.  (Unbeknownst to him, however, she actually has something much worse in mind for it.)  He hides the will in the rulebook, thinking she’ll never find it there.

When war erupted in Europe, Chester joined the army and got a chestful of medals for his bravery.  Alberta joined as well (which, as only men were allowed to partake in war, isn’t historically accurate), but she fought on the German side (because she preferred their uniforms).  Having stolen rare birds’ eggs as a child, she stole the egg of the Great Bavarian Mountain Owl, sat on it until it hatched, and named the chick, Wagner (after her favorite composer).  When the war ended, Alberta, who had been fighting for the losing side and did not want to be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, stole a Zeppelin and tried to escape, but the spike on her *Pickelhaube* (the German’s spiked helmet) poked a hole in the gas cell and sent the Zeppelin flying right into the ocean!  Alberta swam to shore, and adopted Wagner as her pet, teaching him tricks like fetching her slippers, flying a loop-the-loop, aerial reconnaissance, dive-bombing children’s kites, stealing old ladies’ knickers, dropping stink bombs at the summer fete, delivering a letter within a hundred-mile radius, duetting with her on German opera arias (which, as they’re horrible singers, is painful to listen to), using a special owl urinal when peeing (which is unrealistic as birds urinate differently from mammals), swooping on kittens and swallowing them, and making an apple strudel.  They were on the covers of magazines, and they always appear together.

One day, Chester and his family were going to the bank again so Chester could charm the manager into letting them keep Saxby Hall.  That morning, Alberta had made a pot of tea and said she wanted to stay home.  Stella found the tea odd-tasting, so while no one was looking, she poured it into a plant pot.  Little did she or her parents know, however, that Alberta had actually laced the tea with poison from seeds from her Lurking-Death Plant, one of many deadly plants she grows!  During the ride, Stella and her parents passed out, causing their Rolls-Royce to crash!  Stella survived the crash, but her parents weren’t so lucky.

In the present day, Alberta comes to Stella, who is in a lot of bandages.  She claims that Stella has been asleep for a month, but Stella has no memory of the accident.  She demands to know what happened, but Alberta refuses to answer her and instead challenges her to a game of tiddlywinks.  She goes first and awards 1000007 points to herself when her wink goes into the pot, and then she declares herself the winner after remembering that Stella is bandaged up.  Upon her niece’s insistence, Alberta ultimately tells the story (her own twisted version, of course) of the accident.  After some banter, she asks for the deeds, but Stella refuses to reveal where they are. She gives Stella a bell to ring if Stella needs her or Wagner, but Stella loudly states that she refuses to eat any more mashed-up creepy crawlies from Wagner.  The startled owl accident accidentally knocks over a photo of Stella’s parents’ wedding.  Alberta crunches it up, puts the bell in Stella’s mouth, and leaves.

Wanting to escape her wicked aunt (especially after hearing her twisted versions of fairy tales), Stella escapes her bandages and uses paper to get the key from the other side of the door.  As she goes down the stairs (avoiding a run-in with Gibbon), she hears Alberta searching Chester’s study for the deeds.  Suddenly, the phone rings, and Alberta, picking it up and finding that it’s the headmistress of Stella’s school, lies that Stella is still in a coma.  Stella creeps to the door, pulls out a spare key (that Alberta hasn’t found out about and hidden), and is just about to leave when she realizes that she is being watched by Wagner, who squawks and alerts Alberta.  Stella opens the door and runs out, but Alberta sends Wagner after her.  After finding the gates locked and being unable to find another way out, Stella is grabbed by Wagner and brought back to her aunt, who locks her in the cellar and then makes some more efforts to get her to tell her where the deeds are.

In the cellar, she finds Soot, who tells her his story (the parts that he can remember) and then helps her up the coal chute.  When they go to the wrecked Rolls-Royce, Stella slowly recalls the events of the awful day of the crash and realizes what must have happened, so she and Soot decide to call the police.  They sneak past Alberta and into Chester’s study.  Unbeknownst to them, though, Alberta, who is outside finishing her snow-owl, overhears the conversation in the garage, so she cuts the telephone line, pretends to be the operator and then the police, and disguises herself as a detective named Detective Strauss (after her second favorite composer).  She then disconnects her motorcycle from the sidecar to make her ruse seem authentic and drives over to Saxby Hall.  She tries to convince Stella that the whole event was an accident, but Stella does not believe this.  Alberta tells Stella more lies about the “accident,” which keeps baffling Stella.  When Stella starts talking about them, Alberta asks Stella if she knows where the deeds are.  Stella claims not to, but glances over to the shelf holding the Tiddlywinks Rulebook, alerting Alberta, who quickly goes to the shelves to start looking.  When Stella (who hasn’t learned the truth yet) tries to stop her, Alberta sends Stella to get sherry.

Upon finding the deeds, Alberta comes out to Stella, who drops a glass of sherry that she’s carrying.  After watching her try (in vain) to find any evidence, Alberta brings out the deeds, tries to disguise them as a statement of Stella withdrawing her allegation, and asks Stella to sign it.  Stella asks to read it, but Alberta tries to stop this by “reading” the statement herself, only to blow her cover by mentioning the Lurching-Death Plant, which Stella never mentioned.  Her ruse slipping, Alberta tries to get Stella to just sign the “statement,” but her sweat causes her fake mustache to fall, and when she tries to fix it, she puts it the wrong way round.  Ultimately, she drops all pretenses and reveals herself and everything that happened, including that Chester’s will stated that Stella needed to be alive to sign over the deeds and that if she died, Saxby Hall would be sold and all of the money would be given to the poor.  Stella stands her ground and refuses, but Alberta decides to use her own personal invention: the Owl-Rack, a device that she invented and once used on Wagner to make him tall enough to win a contest of “Tallest Owl” in a beauty pageant for owls.  Alberta stretches Stella on the device, and when Stella still refuses to comply, Alberta leaves her niece with no food or water.

Soot returns and frees Stella, and the pair then pull a series of pranks on her in an attempt to send her screaming right out of Saxby Hall.  They put ants in her knicker drawer, flood her carpet with marbles, replace all her tobacco with gunpowder, mix the bubbliest bubble bath with toothpaste, put black boot polish in her bar of soap, and put a shard of glass from a cracked window in the Rolls-Royce in the toilet so it shoots back up at her when she uses it.  Unfortunately, these tricks succeed only in putting Alberta on the warpath, and after torturing Stella on the Owl-Rack again (where Stella has positioned herself), she starts looking for Stella’s accomplice.  Fortunately, Soot is invisible to grown-ups, and Alberta can’t find him.  He pushes a cupboard on Alberta, trapping her inside and giving Stella a chance to flee.  They rush to the Rolls-Royce, and despite its bad condition, Soot’s protests, and Stella’s inability to drive, the pair manages to drive out, with Soot working the pedals.  However, Alberta (having gotten out of the cupboard) chases after them on her motorcycle.  The iron gates prove tough for our heroes to smash through, but they go in reverse and drive around, with Alberta in hot pursuit.  But disaster strikes when Alberta sends Wagner to block Stella’s view, sending the girl onto the frozen lake.  The Rolls-Royce dies and falls through the ice, and Soot leaves Stella to save herself.  Stella manages to climb onto the roof as the Rolls-Royce sinks into the lake, but is trapped.  Alberta promises to save her if Stella signs the deed to her, and (under Soot’s insistence) Stella reluctantly agrees, whereupon Alberta sends Wagner to rescue her.

At the dressing room, Alberta wraps Stella in a blanket, feeds her soup, and gives her the deeds to sign, but Stella’s hand is shaking too much from the cold for her to hold the quill properly, so ultimately, Alberta just puts it into Stella’s hand, places it on the paper, and moves the paper around until it has Stella’s signature.  After a little victory dance, Alberta reveals that she plans to burn Saxby Hall to the ground to make room for the world’s largest owl museum!  One of the exhibits she plans is a room of stuffed owls-with Wagner at the center!  What’s worse, she doesn’t plan to wait for him to die of natural causes; she plans to shoot him while he’s in his prime!  In growing horror, Stella tries to sneak away, but is stopped by Alberta, who reveals that she plans to kill Stella!

As the evil woman reveals, the snow-owl is designed to topple over and crush Stella to death.  Alberta plans to immediately call the police to report Stella missing, but is certain that the police won’t find her until spring, by which time the snow-owl will have melted.  She mockingly gives Stella a head start, but between the snow’s depth and her lack of strength, Stella is unable to escape.  Fortunately, Wagner (who heard what Alberta said about stuffing him) flies at his owner and tries to make her stop.  Unfortunately, Alberta still makes progress in toppling the snow-owl.  As luck will have it, though, Gibbon is sliding on a tray in the snow and giving Dom Pérignon to an imaginary man.  He slams right into Stella and saves her from the snow-owl (but, as usual, is completely oblivious).  Stella bolts to the Hall and bolts the door shut.

Unfortunately, Alberta is now in a rage and races after Stella!  She demands that Stella let her in, and when her request is refused, she grabs a shovel and breaks the door down!  Stella tries to escape up a chimney, but Alberta, undaunted, reveals everything to Stella (including how Herbert disappeared and died) and says she plans to do the same to Stella.  She grabs a match and tries to light a fire, but the smoke causes Stella to cough, splutter, lose her grip, and fall.  As luck will have it, so much soot fall that it completely puts out the fire, much to Alberta’s chagrin and frustration.  Upon regaining her grip, Stella clambers up the chimney and onto the house’s roof, but Alberta, refusing to give up, uses a ladder to climb to the roof and continues to go after her.  During the chase, she slips, grabs the guttering, and eventually guilt trips Stella into saving her, only to try and fling her off the roof, but that attempt is thwarted when Stella grabs her ankles.  Declaring that “if [she] can’t have Saxby Hall, then no one can!” Alberta lets go of the guttering and sends them both tumbling down!

Fortunately, Wagner saves Stella, while Alberta falls to the ground.  Unfortunately, Alberta survives the fall and starts going after Stella with a flail.  Just as she nears Stella, however, a parliament of owls under Wagner’s command grab the evil woman, carry her to the sky, and drop her.  This time, she does not survive the fall.

## Personality

Alberta is shown to be a greedy sociopath with no regards to who she hurt. She hated her brothers because they meant that she would not inherit Saxby Hall. Her habit of stealing rare birds' eggs as a child implies that she may have had a mean streak even before her brothers' birth.

She is shown to have a layer of cunningness, disguising her murder as an accident and making a disguise to trick Stella.

## Appearance

Alberta is typically seen in hunter's gear, with a tweed jacket, a deer-stalker hat, plus fours, steel-toe-capped boots, an owl pendant, a thick leather glove, and a monocle. She also has red hair. In addition, Alberta is very fat, as she only ever eats desserts.

## Abilities

Alberta is shown to be very strong, breaking a door down with only a shovel.