Travelling Hopefully

16

Travelling Hopefully

December 12 Not. (But somewhat later in the month): Expectably Oncle Albert and Tante Louise between them put on la grande bouffe de Noël 2017, over which I draw a veil. Except to note that Bean Minor and Colas both ate so much that their faces were positively shiny.

    The big surprise or perhaps shock of the festive season was the arrival of a parcel from Miss Pinkerton. Flat, looked like a book… If it was a putrid piece of Eng. Lit. it was going straight in the bin, unless Mireille should claim it.

    No. Another diary!!

    Plus a little covering note to say that she knew how much all we dear girls had enjoyed the first one so here was a new one with all her fondest wishes etcetera…

    Well honestly I don’t think I’ll have time for writing much in the new year because there’s lots of swot to do and of course I could never, even if I started legitimately on Jan. 1, keep to the pages allotted. Oh well. It may come in handy.

December 13 Not. VERY much later. Well it was noses to the grindstone all right, but at long last it was the end of the 2017/2018 academic year, hooray! Or almost: we’d had our exams. Bean, Mireille and I were all warmly invited to some odd celebration that goes on at Oxford around that time of year, featuring, according to Egg, “lashings of ye good olde punting on the Isis for the energetic (the Thames if one is going to be beyond the well-known P.), or cream cakes and possible strawberries for the not, and mandatory floral dresses for all young lady visitors. Hats optional.”

    Right, I’ll wear my Junior Drones gear with my Worcester Rowing Eight blazer!

    Mireille’s reaction was a horrified: “You can’t do that!”

    To which I replied: “Watch me.”

    Egg met us at the Oxford station. “Hullo, ’ullo, ’ullo!” he said, grinning all over his face. “Flossie and Crumpy both owe me ten quid. Spiffing, Mel, old chap!”

    “How are you Egg, old fellow? Couldn’t let y’down, y’know!” I replied jauntily, tipping the boater to him.

    “Oh, abso-bally-lutely top-hole, thanks! In the pink. –Lovely to see you, Mireille,” he smiled, firmly taking her case off her. “Have a good trip?”

    “Yes, thank you, Egg,” she said, very flushed. “The train is vairy efficient.”

    He looked in a startled way at the unexciting purlieus of the fast-emptying local station. “Er…”

    “No! The Channel Tunnel train!” I choked.

    “Oh! So you decided not to fly?”

    “No; well we calculated the amount of time we’d waste having to turn up hours in advance and then waiting to get through interminable queues at your end, not to say having to get from the dashed airport to within shouting distance of the Oxford train line, and gave it away. And as Dad seems to be sending me regular conscience money these days we had plenty to spend.”

    “Good show! But where’s the Bean? –Lost him en route, did you?” he said with a wink at Mireille, as he led the way out.

    “No! Of course we didn’t lose him, Egg!” she gasped.

    “English joke,” I explained. “He’s coming but he had to go down to Bordeaux.”

    “Hey?”

    “There’s a chap in his class whose father’s a wine-shipper there. At about that point we stopped listening, didn’t we, Mireille?”—She nodded, giggling.—“Yes. But his claim is he can easily catch X, Y, and Z and be over here in plenty of time for the cream cakes.”

    “Also for the young lady visitors!” added Mireille with a laugh.

    “Oh, right. In that case he may turn up. But—uh—what about Whatsername?” he asked cautiously. “Um, the one who’s a friend of another chap—or perhaps the same chap—in his class, and studying to be a lady vet.”

    “We think it’s still on, but it’s only a term-time thing, Egg.”

    “All is explained!” he said with his pleasant laugh. “Well, here’s the car.”

    We eyed it dubiously.

    “It’s Mum’s old car,” he explained.

    Er…

    “Brightened up a bit.”

    Well quite. Mrs O.’s perfectly ordinary little runabout was now a very shiny black with huge, um flashes? Those things that look like lightning bolts, in red and yellow, all along its sides.

    “There’s a local chap in the garage that services it who was very keen when it needed a bit of sprucing up. Seemed a pity to stop him, really.”

    Yes. Well it’ll be the only ageing runabout, nice middle-class ladies for the use of, to be done up like that in the entire country, no question.

    “You’ll never lose it in a carpark, Egg, that’s for sure!” I choked hysterically.

    “Right! Well possibly a bit anachronistic with the good old cream bags and boater, but too bally bad, eh?”

    Agreeing fervently with him, we got in and were driven off on a tour of Oxford.

    … Old stone buildings. Yes, well.

December 16 Not. Well it more or less kept fine and Bean did manage to get there, and so a jolly old Oxonian time was had by all. We did do a bit of punting, yes. At least, the experts did. Mireille and I kept our heads well down, so to speak, tho admiring the prowess of the said experts. Not to mention that of several lady punters. Gosh, so they let girls do that at Oxford these days?

    Of course we had to see and admire everyone’s studies. Um, not all that different from the spartan room Alysse and I had shared at Merrifield, actually, as she admitted with a giggle. Flossie’s room was infested with two bimbos, one a redhead, one a brunette, but he brutally kicked them out. They merely giggled and wiggled as they went. I’d have been hopping mad and given him What For.

    “All are not as militant as thou, oh leguminous sibling,” he sighed. “Did you want them infesting a punt with us?”

    “No, but they are human beings, for Heaven’s sake, Flossie!”

    “Oh I sincerely doubt that,” he drawled. “I say, chaps, shall I wear my Cambridge half-blue blazer today, or the green Aussie cricketing one?”

    Crumpy grinned. “Depends whether the Aussie team is actually infesting the country playing Tests at the moment, old man!”

    “Good point. Is it?”

    No-one knew, so he decided to burst upon the jolly old Oxonian scene as a Cambridge half-blue. And so off we set for another round of punting, laden down with goodies from his College kitchen which, or so he declared, had been producing not only cream cakes but miraculous meringues for well over a century.

    The morning and the lunch were good but the afternoon risked being rendered hideous by some serious ROWING, so we steered the punts into a backwater and stayed there. Idly reading the papers, chatting, and sipping the bubbly which was apparently courtesy of both Uncle Flossie and Mr Lamont. Well Cheers!

    As we returned the punts to their spot much later a Hearty bounced up to us and said breathlessly: “Hey, that was a great finish, wasn’t it?”

    “You’ve lost me there, I’m afraid, Hartshorne,” replied Flossie with horrible politeness.

    “We finished our jolly old champers, old chap, did you mean that?” added the Egg.

    “Or the spiffing cream cakes?” Crumpy contributed.

    “Hah, hah,” the said hearty Hartshorne replied uneasily. “No, the rowing, of course. Great finish: I dare say they’ll be talking about it for generations to come!”

    “How long is an Oxford generation?” wondered the Bean, definitely at his best, probably the number of meringues he’d consumed had gone to his head.

    “On average? Three years, old Bean,” the Egg replied cordially.

    We all looked hard at Hartshorne…

    “You lot are always trying to be funny,” he said feebly. “You thought it was a great finish, didn’t you?” he added, looking at me.

    Eh?

    “He thinks you’re One of Us, old girl. That is, one of His,” Flossie explained. “I don’t think it’s the pale pink silk shirt—Les Puces, was it? A real find,” he noted. “Or the loosely-tied, flowing way Egg persuaded you to wear that bright pink polka-dotted neck scarf—totally Twenties, old man, well done.”

    At this the Egg bowed and I for one nearly lost it.

    “No,” Flossie pursued relentlessly, “I think it may just possibly be the spiffing Worcester Rowing Eight blazer. When was it you were Up, again, Mel? Thirty-one, was it?”

    “No, class of thirty-three.”

    “Oh; I stand corrected.”

    The unfortunate Hartshorne was now a glowing cherry shade, even brighter than my scarf or, indeed, the pink trims on my Worcester Rowing Eight blazer. “You’re not funny, Nightingale!”

    And with that he turned on his heel and mercifully departed.

    Just in time, because I then had an immense giggling fit and accepted the congratulations of the entire party on my sartorial choice.

    “Don’t think I’ll ask what in God’s name made him imagine you chaps would have watched it, whatever it was,” the Bean decided.

    “No. I think he mistakes you entirely. Does he belong to your College, Flossie?” asked Mireille.

    “Sadly, yes,” he sighed, taking her arm. “Come on, I expect you girls would like to freshen up, and then perhaps we might adjourn to a pub for a little refreshment and think about dinner, eh?”

    “All vote Aye?” asked the Egg, grinning.

    The Ayes had it.

    Next day featured the huge treat of the Master’s garden party! Well it was at one of the colleges, they weren’t all at the same one, very confusing. But anyway more cream cakes and possible strawberries were to be on offer and besides, it was a very traditional thing to do, and—for the Bean’s benefit—there’d be lots of girls in flimsy floral frocks, old man, and in short, it was what one came to Oxford for! Egg assured us.

    Oh was it? I’d thought it was to get the piece of paper, silly me.

    I managed to get Crumpy aside for a spot of interrogation that morning.

    “Crumpy, is Egg a bit fed up with Oxford?”

    “Well not with its selection of blonde bimbos!” he replied with an uneasy laugh.

    “Not that. Is he?”

    He wriggled. “Um… Think he’s finding his course a bit too, um, theoretical, as it were. Um, not practical enough.”

    “Well he would choose economics. I dare say some of them know enough to have worked out that if they charge foreign students megabucks and the locals half megabucks they’re going to keep their bally colleges running, but that’d be as practical as they get, wouldn't it?”

    “Mm,” he agreed glumly. “And Egg’s always been a very practical chap. You know: likes to understand how things work, get things in motion, set things up properly and see they roll along okay—that sort of thing.”

    Exactly.

    “Yes, well if the economists could do that, Crumpy, the country would be in fine fettle, it’d still be in the EU, and the big cities wouldn’t be full of horrible slums and massive unemployment!”

    “Well, quite,” he agreed sadly.

    I bit my lip. “Oh Lor, Crumpy!”

    “Mm. Well I think he’s decided to stick it out, doesn’t want to let the family down. But he’s definitely been making noises about business management quals.—not sure if he means an M.B.A., but that sort of thing. And, um, something about hospitality management. Says there’s courses on that as well, these days, and maybe I ought to think about it, too.”

    “Y— Well, I s’pose one day he’ll be managing the Ovenden Stables, but why hospitality?” I fumbled.

    Crumpy shifted from foot to foot. “Got really keen on the idea of the clubs, old girl. You know: Lur Clurb,” he said in bad French, “and Duh Club,” he said in mock bad English.

    “Oncle Albert’s clubs? I thought that was, um, well, just a passing fancy. Kind of a flash in the pan,” I croaked. “Probably inspired by drinking too much unaccustomed strong coffee too late at night.”

    “No, he’s really keen.”

    Crumbs.

    “Um, think he’s in touch with that American chappie, actually,” the Crumpet offered.

    My jaw sagged. “What?”

    “Um, yes. Carter Something, that it?”

    “Carter Bachelier,” I said numbly.

    “Yes. Your Oncle Albert put them in touch, apparently. Egg said at one point the chap claims there are much better management courses over there.”

    “I can’t see the Egg in the States, Crumpy,” I croaked.

    “Um, if he makes up his mind to a thing, y’know… Can’t see him liking it, exactly, tho.”

    “So—uh—” Help. “The last I heard Carter was still looking for backers.”

    “Was he? Dare say. Well think they exchange emails about, um, what stuff to offer and how the rooms should look and, um, advertising and so forth. Said at one stage that for an American the Carter chappie has a jolly good grasp of your conventional English gentlemen’s club look: old leather, panelling, so forth. Well if they can do it, it’d be a success, I should think, Mel. That place Dad goes to in London won’t hold a candle to it. Hasn’t even got a smoking-room.”

    Er—these days wouldn’t there be fire regulations in England? Not to say regulations about no smoking in indoor venues? Never mind, let it pass.

    “So does Egg envisage managing one of the clubs himself, or what?” I fumbled.

    “Not sure. Might just be interested in setting them up… But he does seem pretty keen on the management stuff. Started talking about, um, night classes, was it? Not quite that, don’t think. Stuff you can do online.”

    “I see. Um, if he does go in for something like that would you want to join him, Crumpy?”

    “Well yes. Been thinking about it. Don’t fancy being manager, tho’ I could help with the sums. More front-of-house sort of thing, y’know?”

    Right: Egg as the power behind the scenes, Crumpy as the smiling public face of the place. Actually that’d probably work really well.

    “That sounds great, actually,” I admitted.

    He brightened. “Must say I fancy it! Well—plan for two years down the track, eh?”

    Somehow my thoughts had drifted off in the direction of Carter Bachelier. “What? Oh: when we’ve all finished our degrees, yes. What’d that be? Um…”

    “Mid-2020,” he said happily.

    “Right. Well two years’ more solid slog, then?”

    “Uh-huh. –What about yourself, Mel? How’s your course?”

    I made a face. “Not as good as I hoped it was going to be. And I have to admit the Brain did warn me, when I opted for more literary swot. It’s toe the accepted academic line, whether it’s today’s latest fad or yesterday’s or the nineteenth century’s, depending on the prof concerned, or die the death.”

    “Yeah. Flossie thinks so, too: partly why he’s opted for law. Alysse seems to be jolly happy with her course, tho.”

    “I know: she writes me reams about it.”

    “Mm. –Do you think she’d be content to settle for a goop like me when she’s finished? I mean, obviously slated for a doctorate, probably end up as a don herself.”

    “You’re not a goop! You’re just good at different things from her.”

    “Yes well, I like the maths, but like Dad says, pretty impossible to make a living at it. And I’d hate to be a schoolteacher. I mean, imposing discipline on a rowdy crowd of fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds that are only taking maths because they have to? It’s not me.”

    “No, well, university exercises the brain and I suppose,” I said with a sigh that hadn’t been meant to be in there, “that’s what we need, at this stage.”

    He nodded. “Flossie said that, too, just the other day. Oh well. S’pose one can’t really foresee the future… But I must say I don’t think I’d fancy settling down with anyone else.”

    Er—oh! Only with Alysse!

    “No, of course not!” I said, smiling warmly. “I think you suit each other very well.”

December 21 Not. Carrying straight on. Frightfully relieved, Crumpy took my arm and, reminding me that it was getting on for the time for the threatened, pardon me, promised garden party, steered me off so as I could change into an appropriate floral frock.

    Gulp. He wasn’t joking.

    It was pretty frightful, tho there were strawberries: one plus. Almost every English person one was introduced to mentioned Wimbledon in that connection, sigh, boredom… The Egg seemed to enjoy it, however, and the four blonde bimbos who endeavoured to attach themselves to him obviously enjoyed it like billy-o but not so much when he eventually shook them off. Flossie, on the other hand, devoted himself to Mireille. Er… Was that good or bad? Help.

    Bean disappeared with a floral frock at one point in the proceedings. Helpfully the Egg explained: “That was Somerville’s rapacious Amanda Huntingdon-Wright. Brilliantly known in these haunts of intellectual excellence as Amanda Hunting-Down-Mr-Right.”

    We duly choked and he grinned madly and apologised for the absence of anything drinkable. Tho noting that at least we’d been spared what the previous Master’s wife had been used to provide for her guests’ delectation, to wit, homemade lemonade. She’d been a vegetarian as well, evidently.

    It being England it then started to drizzle and consternation reigned as well as the natural precipitation, bimbos in flimsy frocks dashing off madly… So we retreated with no regrets.

    We’d got as far as the foot of the Egg’s staircase (they have those in Oxford colleges) when a surprised voice said: “Mel! It is you, isn’t it?”

    And I turned to face… Er, a girl of about my own age and height, light brown wavy hair in an untidy bob, ancient jeans, leaking-biro ink on the right hand and on the tired grey Tee…

    “I’m Carrie-Ann,” she said in a strangled voice. “Um, we met at a putrid swimming-pool, summer before last. You’ve probably forgott—”

    “No! Of course I remember, Carrie-Ann! On the outskirts of Bexhill-on-Sea! So you made it to Oxford!”

    “Yeah, I got that scholarship. Um, you, too?”

    “Not exactly: I’m at the Sorbonne—staying with our cousins in Paris. Just over here for a break, catching up with friends.”

    “Right.” She was now looking askance at the outfits. “Don’t tell me you went to the putrid garden party!”

    The Egg was watching us smilingly. “Of course we did! A truly genuine gruesome Oxonian experience!”

    She gave a loud, surprised laugh. “Got it!”

    “I’m Egg Ovenden,” he went on. “Come on up to my room, Carrie-Ann, we’ll have a cup of something bracing.”

    She hesitated, very flushed. “I don’t want to intrude.”

    “You’re not intruding!” he said with his pleasant laugh. “Come on, let’s get out of this drizzle.”

    “Yes, it’d be terrible if our bimbo-like floral garments were ruined,” I agreed, taking her arm. “Come on!”

    And with that we all headed up Egg’s staircase.

    And up the staircase…

    And up the staircase…

    Well yes, ancient Parisian buildings such as the one on the corner of the Passage Jacob also feature interminable stairs and no lift, but wouldn’t you think that all those brilliant brains at the University of Oxford would have worked out some way to put in lifts to save time and trouble? Not to say provide Wheelchair Access, distinctly lacking in what we’d seen so far of the great Oxonian Establishment.

    Once we’d crammed into Egg’s spartan quarters and had introductions all round, he made “something bracing”, which turned out to be mugs of instant coffee, well sugared, without milk because there wasn’t any, and brightened up amazingly with a drop or two of whisky. Golly.

    “Brilliant, Egg!” I congratulated him.

    “’Tis good, isn’t it?” Crumpy agreed. “You can hardly taste the brown dust at all!”

    Exactly. Medal for the Egg!

    It turned out, Carrie-Ann having revealed she thought she’d seen Egg in lectures, that they were doing almost identical subjects, which seemed to please both of them. Good sign? Certainly Carrie-Ann would be far, far more suitable for him than any of those blonde bimbos. And it was pretty obvious that she liked him. Well, hard not to. So fingers crossed…

    We’d arranged to meet Mr Lamont for dinner, as he was keen to catch up with all our doings, but there was time before that for me to have a look at Carrie-Ann’s room, so off we went to do that and have, as Flossie put it, grinning: “The traditional girls’ chin-wag.”

    So we hiked up more flights of stairs to her room… Well it’d be one way of keeping fit while you had your nose to the grindstone the rest of the year, true.

    Yes well it was remarkably like that room Alysse and I had shared at Merrifield, funnily enough. Quite a lot of books, nearly all second-hand. Tho she said it was hard to find good sources here: Oxford went in for putrid so-called “antiquarian bookshops.” A surprise was her ukelele: it was completely Twenties! Totally in period for the Junior Drones: hurray!

    “I suppose,” she said after the extensive catching up, “that your friends are all very, um, sociable.”

    “Well Egg and Flossie are very gregarious,” I admitted, “and Crumpy just goes along with them, really. But they do seem to be getting a fair amount of swot done. Alysse is very serious about hers, she’s aiming at a First.”

    “Yes. I liked her.”

    “Good! She is nice. Um, that putrid floral frock she had on for the garden party is one of mine. Bought with some of Dad’s conscience money. Well so was Mireille’s, actually.”

    “I see,” she said in some relief.

    “Now you’ve met them I’m quite sure Egg will ask you if you’d like to join the Junior Drones!” I added with a laugh.

    She went very pink. “I can’t afford that gear they go round in, tho.”

    “Nor could we. Most of it was out of Egg’s parents’ attic. And one of Flossie’s blazers was dug up by his uncle: it belonged to some ancestor.”

    “My family doesn’t have anything like that,” she said on a wistful note,

    “Don’t worry! Egg and Crumpy will see you right!”

    After a moment she admitted: “I must say I would like to cock a snook at all the silly sporty people who take the Oxford crap seriously.”

    “The Hearties: right!” Grinning, I recounted our glorious encounter with the Hearty who’d assumed we’d watched the rowing race, and she dissolved in giggles.

    So that was all right. I always knew Carrie-Ann was the salt of the earth!

December 24 Not. Continuing. Catching up with Carrie-Ann was the highlight of our trip to Oxford, really. Tho of course it was good to see the Junior Drones again. And dear Mr Lamont. Well a fair bit of arm squeezing and a bit of bum patting went on, but he means nothing by it, and one would have to be p.c. (horrid expression) to the point of mania to take it seriously. And as long the world is composed of two sexes, it seems awfully silly to pretend it isn’t.

    So life rolled on, Bean Minor spending his hols with us and shooting up horribly fast, oh, dear, and another academic year went by, noses to the grindstone all round, not to say rather busy activities at the Passage Jacob.

    Plus catching up, so to speak, with Raymond Martineau and Carter Bachelier. The latter seemed even keener on yours truly than he was on the clubs, for which he’d almost sourced sufficient backers, tho he and Oncle Albert couldn’t decide which to fix up first, or to do both, which would probably be the best, publicity-wise, double openings, kind of thing. The Egg kept in regular touch with both of them and seemed keener than ever, good show!

    And there has really been no time for anything much except swot.

December 25 Not. MUCH later. By Christmas 2019 Mireille, Bean and I were in the third year of our courses and in the thick of it. Egg wrote that he and Flossie were both going to his parents’ place for Christmas but then it’d be noses to the grindstone for them, too. He was determined to get his degree for his parents’ sake but he’d been doing some business management and hospitality reading as well, and was hoping to enrol for something solid in that line as soon as his exams were over. Probably do it online, work for his dad at the stables meanwhile.

    And the word was, as he was sure she’d be too modest to tell me herself, that Carrie-Ann was slated for a First! After that—well, probably the Civil Service, preferably the FCO; she was more than bright enough, but, he worried, would the bally interviewers make allowance for the fact that she couldn’t afford decent clothes or a fancy hairdo?

    Oh, Lor’. Good point.

    Bean wanted some solid working experience after his quals., so he was planning to go and slave for Oncle Fernand at Château LeBec, having bitten on the bullet and crawled to Grannie, to the extent of lugging poor Bean Minor off there for his previous summer’s hols. Well part of them. Only a sadist would have forced the poor boy to stay there for the duration.

    … And what of my Colonel, in all this?

    What indeed. I’d be twenty next March but that was probably still too young for him. We exchanged regular emails, tho he was very busy at work, and last summer he’d been able to join up with me and Bean to collect Bean Minor from school. Just as well the unfortunate lad had had the treat of staying with him in London for a week before the horrors of Château LeBec.

    Well I’m not saying John didn’t seem keen, a girl cannot mistake the signs when a chap is, but he was only too clearly keeping it firmly platonic. So I just kept on biding my time.

    And tho I’m fond of both Raimond and Carter they don’t count, I could never in a million years live their sorts of lives. And frankly, nice chaps tho they both are, they’d bore me to death if I had to live with either of them for as much as a month. Oh well, nose to the grindstone, get exams over first, I can’t concentrate on anything else, really, but then I must break it off with both of them, it isn’t fair to them.

    So it’s still John Raice for me and ever will be. Tho the waiting is starting to get distinctly tarsome.

    … Oh dear, whenever I use the word I think of his cottage with his Lucia books and him with his silly broken leg! Sometimes it all seems very small and far away. And sometimes it seems like it was yesterday and nothing has separated us. Only unfortunately, Life Has.

    Bother.

Next chapter:

https://theeggandfriends-anovel.blogspot.com/2025/11/plans-of-mice-and-men.html