Village Cricket

3

Village Cricket

January 14 Not. Punting having just about exhausted the repertoire of things to do round the Egg’s way, and Mr O., who thinks he’s funny (a not uncommon syndrome amongst those of the older generation who bother to take notice of their offspring at all), having ordered us on pain on death not to dare to go anywhere near the horses in those outfits, we’d scare the living daylights out of them (his vocab being about as original as that of most of his generation), the Crumpet, who’d been listening to local gossip, to wit the loquacious Mrs Terry who helps Mrs O. with the housework (local surname, no relation to Ellen as far as can be ascertained), proposed a trip to watch the upcoming village cricket match.

    To which the goggling-eyed Egg croaked: “Why, old man?”

    And Flossie noted: “Crumpet, my dear old thing, village cricket is composed of badly-dressed Hearties missing small red balls with inadequate sticks of willow; you are losing it, one fears.”

    And even the Bean contributed: “There’s a frightfully good loony-bin over near Lower Bumbleton, so rumour has it; one could always enrol him in that.”

    And I agreed: “‘Tit will-ow, tit will-ow, tit will-ow,’” which seemed witty and appropriate at the time but Flossie merely looked down his nose tho I think Egg was trying not to laugh.

    “Well, um,” poor Crumpy faltered, “something to do? I mean, we could wear the gear, you chaps!” He looked at us with pathetic hope.

    Flossie looked down his nose again—or still, he is of course taller than the Crumpet—and drawled: “One is wearing it, Crumpet of my heart, oh Crumpet my love, what a lovely Crumpet you are, tra-la.”

    “No, I mean to the cricket! I mean, you know, chaps, boaters on the village green and all that!” he offered eagerly.

    At which a thoughtful silence fell.

    At last Egg said: “I say, chaps, a small crumb of inspiration may just have pierced the jolly old fog or miasma that permeates what passes for the Crumpetly brain.”

    “It’s an idea,” Bean admitted.

    “But is it a good idea?” asked Flossie sourly—miffed because of Egg’s last brilliant speech, clearly.

    “Er… well not positively stinking,” Egg conceded.

    “It’d be something to do,” offered Bean Minor.

    As I knew perfectly well that (a) he was secretly rather keen on the putrid game, and (b) he’d never have the guts to get down there by himself if the big boys didn’t want to and (c) he’d never have the guts to wear the gear if he did go by himself, I merely looked at him tolerantly and said: “Almost verging on the semi-brilliant, darling Bean Minor, for one of your tender years, but do Chelas have a vote?”

    “Auxiliaries don’t either,” drawled Flossie, this time directing the nose look-down at me.

    “True, but as I can’t throw straight let alone tell a Corker from a Googlie, and on the other hand there is a shop which sells delicious ices with real summer fruit in them in Egg’s village, I’d abstain anyway.”

    Unfortunately nobody corrected my terminology to “Yorker”, tho Bean Minor’s lips moved silently, so that one was a fizzer, bother.

    And Crumpy admitted: “Ooh, yes! I’d forgotten about those ices! Come on, you chaps! Let’s!”

    “Well there’s nothing else to do,” the Egg admitted. “Mum’s car’s in for servicing this weekend, but the Heap’s available, I suppose we might as well. But if anyone has to have the Chela on his knee it’s not going to be me, chaps, I can tell you that free, gratis and for nada, and ditto for Sister Bean, she weighs a ton.”

    Crumpy brightened, oh dear! “You can sit on my knee, Sister Bean!” he offered eagerly.

    “Now see what you benighted asses have let me in for!” I complained but nobody listened and we piled into the Heap. According to Egg it originally belonged to his grandfather in his far-off youth and for all he knew it could have been his great-grandfather’s. It’s a very old Rover. Not a Range Rover, no, they have got one of those as well, his Dad often drives it up to the gallops which is what they call the stretch of upper or higher downland that they make the horses run on and that is the extent of my knowledge of the higher Equestrian Art. A Rover is an ancient car with rounded edges in a putrid shade of dead brown—mournful autumn leaves that have lain soggily in the woods for three weeks in the rain come to mind—and even darker brown slightly cracked real leather upholstery with an odd smell, plus in this case plenty of shiny new seatbelts since Mr O. decided that if Horrible Hearty Henry and the Egg were going to immolate themselves they might as well do it legally. And Mrs O., for once not being vague, had burst into tears at the discovery that it didn’t have any.

    Nobody else was volunteering so I had to go on Crumpy’s knee in the front, whilst Bean Minor, being the smallest, was crammed in between Bean and Flossie in the back, and Egg was appointed driver since he knew its gears or possibly absence thereof. Fortunately one of the stable lads appeared just as we were about to take off and bellowed: “OY! ALAN! That thing’ll need FILLING UP before ya come back!”

    “Bugger,” he said, ceasing to try and rev the thing up. “Anybody got any spare cash?”

    Nobody had much, even the Crumpet, whose male parent is rolling in it—something obscure in the City for which he hasn’t yet been prosecuted but it’s been a near-run thing more than once, kind of thing. Flossie admitted that he did own a credit card, a present from Uncle Flossie, of course, but the Beak had confiscated it as unfitted for the scholarly or in pupilari status. The Beak being their actual Head, certain people merely swallowed and nobody passed a remark.

    Gallantly Bean Minor offered his last 50 P that he’d been going to put towards the next Dorm Feast. (They’re very Trad. at Marbledown, and keep up these strange old customs, not to say nomenclature.)

    “Er—no, thanks awfully, old chap,” said the Egg on what for him was definitely a weak note. “I’ll have to con it out of Mum. Hold on.”

    We held on.

    He returned waving a handful of notes triumphantly and sank into his seat, panting.

    “Good—mood!” he panted. “Colonel Thing rang, coming over—dinner party!” He panted again.

    “Oh, good,” I said, then involuntarily going rather pink.

    “Bless my ears and whiskers, has that benighted girl-child still got a crush on the gallant Colonel Thing?” groaned Flossie.

    “I have not!”

    “Yes, you have,” they all said except the Crumpet, who’d gone remarkably quiet. Tho the dratted boy’s hard-on, which I could, owing to my unfortunate position, feel all too clearly, did not abate.

    “One fails to understand why, the fellow’s at least a hundred and two,” noted Egg, grinding its gears. He reversed with a sort of screech, I mean the Heap produced it not him personally.

    “We’re going backwards!” gasped Bean Minor.

    “For Christmas,” murmured Flossie impenetrably. (He gets a lot of weird sayings off Uncle Flossie, who is a hundred and two, unlike my lovely Colonel!) “First he backs up, then he immolates that stable lad, then he finally gets it into the right gear and points it in a forwards-ly direction. Either that or we’re all flattened against the garage wall,” he noted fairly.

    “Like flies to village boys,” agreed the Bean—they’ve been making them do English Poetry at Marbledown.

    “I thought it was ‘to wanton boys’,” noted the Crumpet hoarsely.

    “Eh?” croaked Flossie.

    “Something nigh-bardic and metrical that you slept through, I think, Flossie, my unlyrical old potater,” explained Egg, graunching the thing’s gears again and jolting forwards. “Shit! Uh—well, I think it’s in gear. Here goes nothing.”

    And with that, bar the extra jolting and a bit of jumping, we really were off.

    No he isn’t a particularly bad driver for a male of his age, he often drives his mum’s car without mishap and can handle the Range Rover perfectly smoothly and even knows what the mysterious EXTRA GEAR is all about. It’s the Heap. It hates being driven, is the only conclusion, and would prefer to be honourably out to grass, like Lady Aurelia, who for a horse is lovely, I must admit. Pale grey with some spots and very, very kind big brown eyes that always look as if they know some delicious faraway secret that only horses can know.

    At the village garage the mechanic emerged from the inner regions grinning and wiping his hands down his traditional filthy jeans and offered cheerily to give that bloody thing a good tune-up but Egg replied: “Thanks awfully, Steve, but it’ll behave like a lamb for you and start bucking and farting on the way home and that’ll be it, I,T, it’s honestly not worth the dough. Just fill it—er—with enough petrol to get back and forth a couple of times, I think’d be the go, we need to save some dough for those real fruit ice creams. –They are still selling them, are they?” he added in alarm.

    “They were yesterday,” Steve conceded, grinning more than ever as he took in the outfits. “What are you lot done up as, today?”

    “We’re a club!” chirped the unnecessary, indeed egregious Bean Minor. “We’re the Junior Drones, see! I’m Bean Minor, ’cos I’m not an old bean!”

    “Good one,” muttered Flossie, wincing slightly.

    The genial Steve merely replied kindly: “That right? Hey, that you, Mel?” he added, peering in at my humble self. “What’s that you’re sitting on?”

    “Hullo, Steve. It’s a Crumpet,” I explained, “and today I’m Sister Bean.”

    “Right; ’cos you’re not an old bean, either,” he acknowledged—he’s not slow, it’s a myth that the working class have to be, tho unfortunately one that bloody schools like Merrifield and Marbledown do their best to perpetuate.

    He operated expertly with the petrol hose thing; he likes doing it, we’ve discovered, and anxious lady do-gooders from the village—there’s quite a few of them—who’ve told Egg that an able-bodied big lad like him shouldn’t make “that poor young man” fill up his tank for him when it’s supposed to be self-serve have failed to grasp that point, because to do-gooders anyone working-class is definitely not a person let alone an individual with his own tastes and opinions, likes and dislikes.

    On the green various white-clad or semi-white figures could be discerned but nothing was actually happening so we adjourned to the “Old Village Gelateria” I kid you not, and all had two scoops because Egg didn’t think it’d run to triple-headers. I had real strawberry because I can never resist it and chocolate (they use real chocolate, too, they melt it, I asked them), Bean Minor had real raspberry and chocolate, Bean had chocolate and chocolate, he has no soul, Flossie had raspberry and lemon, well it takes all sorts, and Egg had strawberry and raspberry, deciding he'd “con some pocket money out of Colonel Thing, who usually coughs up handsomely,” and come back at an early date for one with chocolate. Which the proprietor, not Italian or anything like it, but a Mr Damian Terry, the brother-in-law of Mrs Terry who helps Mrs O., assured him there would be. But the fresh raspberries were almost over, tho they might get in some frozen ones, the flavour had been so popular this year.

    Meanwhile Crumpy had been dithering, he always does. “I’d better have that, then, and chocolate, thanks,” he finally decided.

    Certain eyes were rolled: he always does, if they’re on offer. Tho admittedly no-one’s is as good as Mr Terry’s.

    After that we went over to the green and sat down on several handy deckchairs which had probably been put out for the thousands of affluent middle-aged ladies who infest the place but as they hadn’t turned up yet hard cheese, as the Egg didn’t fail to note. And our miraculous cream flannels were definitely worthier of preserving than their foul floral frocks.

    “Putrid floral frocks,” I corrected him.

    “I stand corrected,” he said gallantly. “Thank you, oh lucid and perceptive Sister Bean. Putrid is what those floral frocks are. Distinctly putrid.”

    “Too abso-bally-lutely right, my good Sister in Junior Droneshood,” sighed Flossie, leaning back and closing his eyes. “Lovely day,” he sighed. “Pity there has to be cricket infesting it, really.”

    “Hear, hear,” everyone except my idiot siblings agreed.

    “It makes a pretty picture, tho,” ventured the misguided Bean.

    Flossie opened one eye and peered at him incredulously. “What? That, dear old Bean?”

    He had a point. “That” was a stout gent in tired grey flannels and colourful braces, currently shaking a cricket bat at a scared-looking customer in a white shirt which didn’t quite meet his cream slacks when he moved, a Mistake, one felt, and a strange cap.

    “It is wearing almost definite cricketing footwear, old chap,” murmured Egg.

    “Oh, please!” Flossie shut his eye again.

    “The braces are what one might call madly gay were it not for the benighted popular vernacular of these benighted modern times,” I noted.

    Egg took another look. “Well said, Sister Bean, have a gorilla. They are definitely madly gay and I for one refuse to consider their being anything else.”

    “Besides,” added the Crumpet brilliantly, “who wants to conform with boring old cricket whites? Good for him, I say!”

    Egg, Bean and I gaped incredulously as this brilliant statement proceeded from his hitherto distinctly non-brilliant mouth while Bean Minor looked disconcerted, not knowing whether to approve or disapprove of this slur on the Game. Flossie didn’t stir.

    After a stunned moment Egg noted: “My esteemed colleague, with whom I have the inestimable honour of being a fellow-member of the Junior Drones, has a dashed good point or indeed spike, prong, barb or tapered end, there. One may award the gent in Q. a certain modified approval, then.”

    “Plus the braces, Egg!” I urged unwisely.

    “What is this fixation with gentlemanly elasticized nether-garment hoister-uppers, oh otherwise verging-on-admirable Sister Bean?” he sighed.

    “She says she’s the wrong shape for them!” piped the unnecessary and totally redundant little Bean Minor, drat him.

    Blast! I’d gone as pink as the traditional peony, in fact Grannie’s flower garden at the Château LeBec’s got some of the beastly things that are positively puce and that is what my cheeks felt like.

    At this Egg choked: “By Jove! The humble Chela has a point there, in fact there are two of ’em!” and broke down in horrible sniggers, what time Flossie opened his eyes with a sort of gulp and said: “Well said, very insignificant Bean Minissimus!” and also broke down in sniggers, and even the faithless Crumpet went very red and gave a guffaw. Bean just went very red, not out of sibling solidarity but because the relationship to something that shape was totally shaming, he’s that sort of idiot. Bean Minor merely looked pleased that the big boys had taken up his innocent poi— Damn. Had been pleased with what he said. And it’s not my fault, the blasted things just grew, and they are nothing—nothing—like putrid Melissa Canning-Foulkes’s, so there!

    And if anyone dares to say to me sweetly: “Oh, is Mel short for Melissa, then, dear?” once again I WILL KILL THEM! –It’s Mélisande, Grannie’s choice what else, Mum wasn’t that interested and Dad was as usual utterly elsewhere, buried in the Later Middle Ages. Of course the stupid English at putrid School pronounce it relentlessly “Melly-sand”, revolting. At least Mélisande is mildly bearable but as they all get it relentlessly wrong I’ve given up. But I can tell you, French with Mlle Duffaut is a blessed relief even tho she does teach at a snail’s pace and the stuff we have to read and translate is puerile. Tho I have to admit quite a little earner and now I do half the School’s French prep. for them. And would have been loaded these hols. only I spent it all on a real Swiss Army knife that I’d been saving up for for ages. Well, it’s only got half a dozen blades but it’s pretty good all the same. And Mr O. actually said the thing for taking stones out of horses’ hoofs is real!

    So I managed to say loftily: “Only the puerile find what is merely basic biology amusing, and they do it out of the sort of embarrassment that they’re too immature to control. Excuse me, I think that gent with the odd bluish cap might be in need of my trusty Swiss Army knife.”

    And got up and walked away from the pack of idiots. They’re all grindingly jealous of my knife, of course, serve them right for not having the strength of mind to save their money instead of chucking it away on chocolate (Bean), French novels that he imagines are rude and that he has to read with a dictionary (Flossie), trips to the cinema to goggle at the latest over-lipsticked Hollywood bimbos, I forget the latest one’s name, there’s scores of them (Egg), idiot Playboy-type mags that he imagines are daring (Crumpet), and two replacement pairs of woollen School socks because some swine nicked his and he’s become so imbued with the Public School Ethic (Marbledown sub-section), that the poor little fellow didn’t dare to report it officially (B. Minor). And at that he didn’t have enough for two so I had to subsidise the second pair.

    “’Scuse me,” I said to the chap with the odd pale bluish cap that had a distinct look of being left out in the rain for an aeon, holding it out to him, “would this Swiss Army knife be of any use?”

    At which the gent in Q. looked at me with what even I couldn’t convince myself wasn’t amused interest of the sort that recognises one is gazetted jail-bait but wouldn’t mind a little taste if Things were Otherwise, notably the law of England, and said in the sort of voice one doesn’t actually expect to issue forth from a typical player of village cricket, serve me right for thinking in clichés: “Oh, ra-ther. Thanks very much. These fellows had to replace their bails with homemade ones at the end of last season and they’ve swelled in the damp or something, and they don’t fit.”

    And he crinkled up his rather nice heavily-fringed blue eyes at me in what even at my tender age I was in no doubt he was perfectly well aware was a devastatingly attractive way—well I have known one, Flossie Nightingale, for years, after all—and accepted the knife and operated delicately on the bails.

    “They weren’t that bad,” said a pathetic Sidekick with “Sidekick” written all over him. Plus a fishlike stare and a distinct falling-off below the lower lip if you know what I mean. Thinning hair that would have done a mouse proud, colour-wise. Droopy shoulders, ugh! The sort that make you pray he won’t turn round because you’re quite sure the bum will be even droopier, UGH!

    Whereas I’d have taken a very large bet that Mr Bluish Cap’s, at the moment pretty bally good in what look like Designer Jeans, would be gorgeous, and if anyone is so benighted as not to know what I mean, watch the episode of that Totally Classic Star Trek the Next Gen. where Capt. Picard relentlessly pronounced wrong by the Yanks is stripped and tortured by a totally weird Alien Being who looks remarkably (according to Egg, who has a collection of these epics) like a fellow Thespian of the same vintage from his RSC days. In-im-it-a-ble. Flawless. Not pouty, not droopy, definitely not even verging towards the pear-shaped… All those Hollywood muscle boys that stuff themselves with steroids are just laughable in comparison, them and their sun-lamped fake tans. Helluva pity he couldn’t have stayed that age forever. At his peak. Well, the bum certainly was.

    A Thort arises: I wish Miss Stinkerton joy of this passage should she ask to read what the dear girls have written.

    “They were shocking, dear fellow,” drawled Mr Bluish Cap, sounding horribly like Flossie himself, help! “Thanks awfully for the knife,” he added, handing it back. “Come down ready for the fray, have you?” He looked me up and down and grinned.

January 21 Not. And continuing straight on: Resisting that impulse to pull my delish blue and black striped blazer tightly closed over my faultless cream shirt, I replied: “Oh, absolutely, don’tcha know. Tho we didn’t bother with the jolly old wicker hamper and the champers, we don’t think we’ll stick it out that long.”

    “Very wise,” he returned, grinning again. Perfect teeth. At a guess twice my age. Bother.

    Sidekick meanwhile was peering at me, rather, and I didn’t think it was because i can’t wear braces, and now he said: “Haven’t we seen you before, dear?”

    “I don’t think I’ve seen you,” I replied, just managing not to be rude.

    “Well you must have seen Dan!” he said with a silly laugh, looking up admiringly at Mr Bluish Cap’s chiselled features and the softly waving glossy brown hair just peeping from under the cap.

    For Heaven’s sake! I’d have remembered something that dishy! “No, ’fraid not.”

    Mysteriously Sidekick returned to this: “Rambles Round Britain? Rambles Round The Continent?”

    Er…

    “Dan Britten’s Britain!” he urged, getting quite excited, dear me.

    Er…

    “Liam, I don’t think she watches much telly,” said Mr Bluish Cap kindly.

    “No, I don’t. The girls at School are usually glued to something mindlessly putrid starring bimbos similar to themselves, it’s a waste of time.”

    “But you must’ve seen the latest series! Dan Britten Chats With—!” Sidekick urged misguidedly.

    “Um, sorry. It does ring a sort of a bell but if it’s a telly show, like I said I don’t bother with it.”

    “But it’s not a girly thing at all!”

    “Isn’t it? They only give us so many hours to watch, you see, and it’s always their choice because they’re in the majority,” I spelled out for the creature, as he seemed so agitated.

    “Oh. The funny thing is I was sure we’d met…” He peered at me.

    Light began very dimly to dawn. Of course I’ve got Dad’s peculiar eyes as I may have mentioned but otherwise I do look a bit like Mum. And she’s always going on other people’s crap on the idiot box, she says she has to keep her image before the Public.

    I wasn’t going to admit to being the intrepidly adventurous Lady Patrizia Fullarton-Browne née Claveringham’s daughter, however, I’d had more than enough of that to last me seventy lifetimes, so I just said: “A couple of my relatives look a bit like me, you’ve probably met one of them. Glad my knife was of help. Good luck with the game.” And with one last look at the lovely Mr Bluish Cap, Britten or not, I walked away from them.

    Of course when I sat down in my deckchair again the dratted boys let the silence lengthen…

    Finally Bean said: “Was that strangely familiar figure in dubious Cambridge headgear?”

    “What?” I returned blankly, I have known him all my life.

    “My dear esteemed Sister Bean, companion of regrettable incidents of my misspent youth and intrepid lender of irreplaceable Swiss Army knives,” sighed Flossie, “was that person wearing a Cambridge cap or not?”

    “He’s a lot taller than me, Flossie, I couldn’t really see, but it was a dingy pale blue and it had that left-out-in-the-rain look, does that help?”

    “He is a lot taller than her, you know,” murmured Egg.

    “True,” Flossie allowed. “And only Hearties, cads and bounders rush round breathlessly identifying one’s caps, after all, so let’s leave that one, shall we? Added to which, that dashed navy blazer he’s got on is verging on the Oxford shade, and those pristine jeans are dashed well inhuman. Besides, if he’s the frightful bounder I rather think he may be, he doubtless has no right at all to a varsity blazer of any description, let alone a cap.”

    “Is he a bounder?” asked Bean dubiously.

    “Oh, my poor deluded old Bean! I feel a dose of something terrifically antennae-strengthening is indicated for you! Sal volatile or at the very least a restorative tomato J.! The poisonous—no, to borrow or indeed co-opt an excellent adjectival expression from our esteemed Sister Bean—the putrid fellow is the complete bounder!” With which Flossie shuddered all over. Quite a feat, semi-supine in an ancient deckchair.

    “I hate tomato juice!” said Bean crossly. “Well I thought it looked like him but you said what on earth would he be doing down here at a hairy rural sporting contest on a hairy rural green?”

    “Presenting the cups,” decided the Crumpet out of the blue.

    We all stared at him.

    “Well they must have them! At least for the winners!” he protested.

    “Egg, one feels it is the esteemed and invaluable Chairperson’s rôle to enlighten us all on that sticky point of local hairy green parliamentary procedure,” Flossie decided.

    “Hear, hear,” I agreed.

    “My esteemed colleague and fellow Junior Drone Sister Bean concurs,” he noted.

    Egg took a deep breath. “Crumpet, old horse, much tho we love you and respect the words that drop from your cherry-likes in general, perhaps at this juncture someone ought to soothe your fevered ivory brow—Sister Bean for preference, she can give it the good old womanly touch, don’tcha know.”

    “Here, hear,” said the treacherous Bean immediately with a smothered snicker.

    “What?” fumbled poor Crumpy.

    “One match. Two teams. One winner. One cup,” said Egg.

    “Many thanks, revered Chairperson, for that succinct and telling statement. Vote of thanks for the esteemed Chairperson!” called Flossie.

    “Hear, hear!” Bean, Bean Minor and I all cried, rapping our knuckles on the wooden bits of our deckchairs. “Hear, hear!”

    Possibly little Bean Minor then went a bit far, crying: “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb! Rhubarb and custard!” but as we all knew he’d been listening to Mr O.’s ancient in fact decrepitous tapes of The Goon Show we merely gazed upon him forgivingly.

    “I see,” fumbled the Crumpet. “One cup. Right. Well, is he?”

    Er…

    “Is that bounderish chap Dan Britten here to present the cup, if it is him?” he pursued.

    “Very clear, Crumpet,” said Flossie faintly.

    “I thought it was. Endless circumlocution can get rather face-stiffening, not to say boring, after a while, Flossie,” I noted.

    Oh dear, Crumpy brightened horribly and offered: “I say, Sister Bean, I’d feel ever so much betterer if you did soothe my ivory brow, y’know.”

    “Two nil to the Crumpet,” noted Egg detachedly. “I don’t know if it’s become sparkling clear—she won’t, Crumpet, just pop back into your burrow, there’s a good little fellow—as I was saying, Sister Bean, I don’t know if it’s become sparkling clear but we rather suspect that that bounder you favoured with your prized Swiss Army implement is the too well-known and highly publicised telly figure Dan Britten.”

    “Well Sidekick called him that, or at least he called him Dan and went on about Dan Britten Rambling Round Britain or something putrid, so probably he is. What’s he known for?”

    “Endless self-promoting so-called documentaries of himself standing in hairy green parts of the demi-Paradise with the occasional condescending glance at the hairier parts of Europe well within distance of decent hotels.”

    “Yes, and Mum was on the new frightful chat show thingummy of his only last month!” Bean contributed.

    “That’ll be why Sidekick thought I looked familiar,” I admitted. “So um, is he a biologist?”

    “No!” they all chorused, even Bean Minor.

    “Oh. Well, what is he?”

    “A putrid self-promoter,” the Bean explained laboriously.

    “I see.”

    “And an absolute bounder!” little Bean Minor contributed eagerly. “Trisha—you know, chaps, she’s Mum’s Sidekick,” he explained illuminatingly, “she rang up School and said not to watch it. I mean, at first they thought it was an emergency and Matron shot in to hold my hand, only it wasn’t of course, she only wanted to warn me not to watch it, she said he’s a horrid man and guess what! She said he put his hand on Mum’s B,U,M!”

    There was a kind of tingling silence as this final putrid phrase proceeded from the innocent one’s mouth, so I admitted: “Trisha does say B,U,M, she’s like that, alas. It does sound fairly verisimilitudinous, chaps, I’d say.”

    “Yes, but of course by then,” Bean added, “we’d all watched it. –They came and got me, too, I think they thought Mum had been eaten by a lion or something.”

    “A mangy motheaten stuffed one borrowed off the Science Museum because they’re quids in with them after D. Attenborough’s free publicity all over the giant plasma screens of the world, set up in a Beeb studio with lifelike back projections and potted plants plus a dead branch decorated with amazing Beeb spines and twisted paper leaves so that it looks exactly almost like a Thorn Tree out of Darkest Africa, does not eat people,” I noted.

    “No, ’course not,” Bean Minor agreed. “They don’t know that at School, tho. Any time one of us gets a phone call they assume a lion has eaten Mum.”

    “Help, should I not ring you, then?” I gasped. “I could text you instead.”

    “No, only total nerds text,” stated Bean sternly. “Let them panic, that’s their problem, we know it won’t be Mum getting eaten or falling out of a balloon or anything.”

    “Chased by a wild bull elephant,” I murmured.

    “That one looked quite real,” Flossie admitted.

    “Well yes, the chasing was, the poor camera crew barely escaped with their lives. Did you see his ears flapping?”

    “Ah… Just slip that one by me again would you, Sister Bean, I may have missed a nuance or two. –Ears?” he prompted.

    “Oh! African elephants’ big ears start to flap when they’re annoyed, and he was furious. –He was a huge bull elephant,” I explained. “Mum dragged us all to the studio to see a bit they were trying out or cutting up or something—she was having a mumsy fit, totally putrid—and Josh, he’s the cameraman that they make do all the dangerous stuff, he said the creature had balls like footballs, so he must have been.”

    “Er—yes, right, male elephant,” Flossie conceded. “It would. So where was your mum during this ear-flapping?”

    “Kew,” said little Bean Minor succinctly and everyone, even Crumpy, who was still looking dished because I hadn’t wanted to soothe his ivory brow, broke down in helpless sniggers.

    Bean Minor beamed upon us, bless him, but said to me on an anxious note: “So you will still phone us, won’t you, Mel?”

    “Sister Bean,” I corrected sternly. “Yes, ’course. Just don’t let on Mum’s never in danger, or her income will dry up and she’ll have to get rid of the flat and find some way of nicking our school fees and we’ll have to go and live with Grannie permanently.”

    “Gosh! I won’t breathe a word! Junior Drones’ honour!” he gasped.

    “Good.”

    “Just by the way, and stop me if it’s too impossibly impertinent an enquiry,” murmured Flossie, “but I’ve always wondered: who does pay your school fees, old Bean?”

    “I don’t know,” he replied simply.

    Flossie choked, as there was no doubt at all that this was Gospel, but looked at me. “Sister Bean, may I respectfully refer the question to your more enlightened cerebellum?”

    “I’m not supposed to know this,” I warned.

    “Of course not,” Flossie agreed warmly. “Do go on.”

    I made a face. “Well it’s putrid Grandfather.”

    There was a puzzled silence.

    Then Crumpet offered: “Thought your dad’s dad was long gone, old girl?”

    “Yes, he is. Or was, does one say? I never know. Um, yes. Dead as a doornail, Crumpy. And he didn’t have anything to leave. Um, no, not him.”

    This time there was a stunned silence.

    Finally Flossie croaked: “Hubbel?”

    “Yes.”

    “It can’t be!” cried Egg. “Uncle Flossie says he’s mean as sin! They put the fees up at the Club, only ten quid a year more, and he resigned!”

    “Yes. I mean, he is mean as sin and he hates Dad and he’s furious with Mum for marrying him and flaunting herself all over the media and smirching the family name. And he is paying our school fees.”

    “Why?” whispered Flossie.

    “I don’t know for sure but I think Grannie used some sort of blackmail on him.”

    “That does sound like Grannie,” Bean assured them. “It does seem likely, Mel, I mean Sister Bean.”

    “Er… Can we get this straight, Sister Bean?” ventured Egg. “That is Gran-nie, your French grandmother?”

    “Yes. The one that was married to him and refuses absolutely to call herself Lady Hubbel and has gone back to France and her maiden name except she calls herself Madame LeBec, not Mademoiselle. Mum’s mum. Yes.”

    “O-kay. Vote for medal for Gran-nie?” he said.

    We all shot up our hands.

    “The Ayes have it,” he said weakly. “Do you mind awfully if I tell Uncle Flossie?”

    “He won’t believe it!” warned Flossie with a grin.

    “He will if he ever met Grannie in the Old Days. Did he?” I asked.

    They didn’t know. Egg began to count on his fingers but as it was a very warm day, really, gave it up, deciding: “Oh well, water under bridges and all that jazz. Jolly good show: at least some of the old bastard’s moolah is doing somebody some relative good.”

    “All things are relative,” Flossie agreed. “I say, you chaps, is something starting out there?”

    We all looked at the green. Oh yes, figures in very dubious cricketing gear were setting themselves out.

    “Like prawns on a green baize chessboard,” sighed Flossie.

    “You mean pawns, old fellow,” the innocent Crumpet corrected him confidently.

    He moaned and fell back in his deckchair, a hand to his fevered brow.

    Egg’s shoulders shook. “Look again, oh Crumpy o’ mine,” he suggested.

    Puzzled, Crumpy stared hard at the green…

    “I say, they’re not very good, are they?” he said as one pounded down the stretch, there came a loud CLACK!, a mysterious cricket shout arose hoarsely from the throat of the one smothered in gloves and pads at the back, and the batter trudged off the field.

    “No; they seem to give up easily,” I agreed.

    “I’ll say! So it is that Dan Britten chap, then!” he said brightly.

    At this Egg gave a positive wail and fell back in his deckchair, what time Bean collapsed in helpless sniggers.

    “And I expect he will present the cup, after all!” the Inedible Crumpet concluded.

    “Crumpy, darling,” I said quickly, “if I give you some bent euros and a very old Pfennig that dates back to Grannie’s heyday, horrid thought, would you be an absolute dear and see if you can get me a drink at that tea tent over there that’s labelled tea tent? ’Cos I’m sort of dying of thirst.”

    “Of course! Don’t worry, I’ve got a few shekels in reserve!” he replied happily, lumbering to his feet and bumbling off.

    “He always does have something in reserve, one has noticed,” Flossie noted limply. “That rumour that Lamont Senior’s grandmother was a Rothschild may have some truth in it after all. It’s banking genes, I think.”

    “No, his mother,” I said.

    “Er—grandmother was the rumour I heard.”

    “No. Mr Lamont’s mother, the Crumpet’s grandmother, was a Rothschild. Grannie knew her.”

    Gosh, that silenced him!

    And we all stared mindlessly at the hairy baize green and the motley prawns…

January 28 Not. It’s not (or scarcely) cricket: After a very long time, when I’d long since drunk my lovely bottle of spring water procured by the faithful Crumpy, there seemed to be some sort of different movement on the field and Egg produced: “I say, is that side all out?”

    We peered at the scoreboard but as its numbers were very, very worn and it was right at the other side of the green it didn’t tell us anything significant even if any of us was any good at reading cricket scores which we aren’t.

    But Bean Minor chirped happily: “Yes, ’course! It’s a two-innings match, you know, so now the other side will have their turn!”

    “What?” groaned Egg. Flossie merely groaned and readjusted his boater over his face: he’d long since given up the effort of watching.

    “Um, yes,” the misguided boy said on an uncertain note. “They do, y’know.”

    “What about lunch?” replied Egg aggrievedly.

    “They always have it in the middle.”

    “Bean Minor, what are you burbling about?” he enquired dangerously. “This is the middle, if it’s only two innings!”

    “Um, no!” the unfortunate boy gasped. “Two each, Egg, you must know that!”

    “No,” he said definitely.

    “I thought everyone knew that,” he said, disconcerted.

    “He was probably coxing for the School’s sixth coxed fours team at the time, Bean Minor,” I explained helpfully.

    “Seventh,” said Flossie sepulchrally from under the hat.

    “They’ve only got six,” said poor Bean Minor blankly.

    “I rest my case,” he said from under the hat.

    The Crumpet looked at his watch. “It’s nearly twelve-thirty; I think they’ll break for lunch at one, old chaps. But it’s not free, y’know: I asked the tea lady in the tent. If you’re not on the team you have to pay.”

    “What?” gasped Egg, bolt upright in horror.

    “Yes. Frightfully sorry, old man,” he faltered as the thought dawned dimly somewhere at the back of those misty recesses that just maybe he should have brought the point up before.

    “Crumpet, have you got any more reserve moolah?” asked Flossie without much hope, sitting up and straightening the hat.

    “Um, no, frightfully sorry, old chap, I mean, that bottle of water for Sister Bean used up my last… Um, sorry. Ten P any good to you?” he ended feebly.

    “It was lovely water, Crumpy, I’m ever so grateful!” I assured him.

    “Oh, jolly good show!” he beamed. –Was the Crumpet, I asked myself as a certain measure of dismay made itself felt, starting to, er, absorb this Junior Drones ethos through the pores, as it were? Oh dear. Because that had sounded almost like his native woodnotes wild.

    “Home, James, then,” said Egg grimly.

    “It is your home ground, good old Egg, if anyone should know whether the old nosebags are free it’s you,” Flossie pointed out.

    “I’ve never been at the match at lunchtime before, you oik! And I warn you, Mum was displaying all the signs of being about to go into a vague fit this morning,” he warned.

    “She was going on about dyes, rather,” Bean allowed. “But I thought it was just usual.”

    Treating this with the ignore it deserved, Egg dragged himself to his feet—it was a fair way up, he’d topped six foot by then. “Forward the Buffs,” he sighed.

    That was it for village cricket, then. And we trudged off towards the Heap.

    “Um, Egg, if your Mum was going into a vague fit would she have invited my lovely Colonel to a dinner party, tho?” I ventured foolishly as he unlocked the horrible Heap’s doors.

    “Yes. And don’t expect there to be any lunch, either!”

    Ouch! I subsided.

    We got into the car. Nobody else volunteered so I had to go on Crumpy’s lap again, bother.

    Egg started up. It screeched and burped, but began to roll slowly forward.

    “And he’s not your lovely Colonel, Sister Bean,” he sighed. “The man is old enough to be your great-grandfather!”

    “Pooh.”

    “They have ages, I think,” offered the misguided Bean. “You know, for ranks: to be a major you have to be such and such. I should think to be a colonel you’d have to be forty.”

    “Pooh.”

    “Give it up, Sister Bean, you deluded girl-child,” drawled Flossie.

    “Well don’t you know? Haven’t there been Nightingales in the Army—and the Navy, come to think of it—since that huge elaborate thing of Henry VIIl’s that sank?” I replied.

    “Much earlier: boring Nightingales went to the Crusades.”

    “So?”

    “Mm? Oh, the age of colonels? No idea, I never listen to boring ‘Whatever happened to him’ military gossip or indeed Royal Naval gossip.”

    “Then there’s no proof of his age at all,” I noted.

    “The silvering temples might be a fair indication to one not blinded by his manly, er, what is it the chap’s got, Egg?” Flossie asked in bewilderment.

    “Don’t ask me, old man, I’m not a besotted schoolgirl. Sister Bean, old chap, this can’t go on and if the mooning over Colonel Thing doesn’t stop, your blazer buttons will have to be torn off and you will be drummed out of the Junior Drones,” he said sternly.

    “Pooh!”

    “I don’t think he’s ever noticed she’s alive,” noted Bean. “So I wouldn’t worry about it.”

    “Oh, it’s not worry, dear old Bean, we don’t care if she moons over fifty septuagenarians, it’s the hearing about him that’s wearing,” Egg explained heavily.

    “Hear, hear,” sighed Flossie.

    Graunch!

    “Oh, Lor’! Sorry,” groaned Egg. “I’d get out and kick it if I thought it’d do any good.”

    “Maybe we should all have accepted your dad’s offer of the hacks and ridden down,” offered the misguided Crumpet. “Tho we’d have had to change, of course.”

    “Crumpy, have you ever seen Sister Bean on a horse?” gasped Egg.

    “Um… No, but—”

    “They’re too high, Crumpy,” I explained.

    “She panics; I think Dad must’ve forgotten,” Egg admitted. “Actually I don’t think he saw the last panic—no, that’s right, he went off on the downs with the string, and we put her up on the Slug—that’s the big brown horsey, Crumpy,” he added kindly.

    “Must’ve been the year I couldn’t come because Dad dragged me off to Bermuda.”

    “Oh, yes. Well, riding the Slug is like riding a sofa, but she panicked nevertheless.”

    “It was too high, Crumpy,” I explained.

    “He,” sighed Egg. “The Slug is a gelding. Male horse. Neutered, true, but not an it. –N.B. absolutely G., Crumpet.’

    “Oh. Right.”

    Silence fell and we jolted on homewards.

    I don’t know what the others were thinking, but I just sat there trying to ignore the jolting and dratted Crumpet’s hard-on and thinking dreamily of my lovely Colonel… Give it up? They’re potty! Nothing venture, nothing win!

Next chapter:

https://theeggandfriends-anovel.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-colonel-to-dinner.html