Introducing The Egg And Friends

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Introducing The Egg And Friends

January 1 Not. I’m only writing in this putrid Diary because the Brain has decreed that all us girls need something to occupy our minds during the (usual) freezing cold, pouring wet English winter months, well I ask you, we’re incarcerated at Merrifield all year anyway so what’s the diff?

    School is so putrid and boring that there’s nothing to say about it except that it is. Miss Stinkerton, absolutely the Brain’s most devoted follower and Sycophant, convinced that they’re BFFs, tho one sincerely doubts that the Brain reciprocates, thought the idea of keeping a diary was so charming—what does she imagine we are, putrid Bridget Joneses or something? Then she suggested several topics that we like might to write on if we didn’t fancy keeping a diary, e.g. “My Year At Merrifield” (ye gods!) or “My Holiday Experiences” (she’d have a fit if some of them wrote those down, I can tell you, well putrid Melissa Canning-Foulkes for a start) or for “you older girls”, “How the Government is Managing Brexit In the Wake of the Referendum” (that one’d scorch the paper, Miss Stinkerton, are you deaf as well as blind?) and so forth. Babs Rowntree, who is so putridly hearty as to practically bounce herself offscreen, so to speak, asked what about “My Favourite Sport”, which of course she approved whole-heartedly. Pity the aforesaid M. C.-F. hasn’t got the guts to write about her favourite sport. Or in fact the grasp of English syntax, tho she’s got the vocabulary for her subject, I’ll grant her that.

    Anyway School is so boring and as we’re not even allowed to go to the village in this weather and the alternative on Sunday afternoons is the torture of watching mindless crap on the idiot box with the putrid bimbos who only like watching inane clones of themselves I thought I might as well write something. Only what?

Later. I’ve fallen back on “My Holiday Experiences” kind of faute de mieux. As usual Mum was off doing her Nature Photography thing. What she actually does, that the adoring Great British Public doesn’t know about, is slather herself with makeup and anti-Environmental hairspray and stand in the middle of the Environment praising Nature with her horrendously expensive camera in her hand what time three hundred TV crew types that one has to pretend aren’t there when viewing the subsequent highly coloured epic hop round filming and directing and sound-recording &c. The G.B.P. adore her because of course she’s Lady Patrizia Fullarton-Browne, née Claveringham, and affects to love them in spite of it, and makes a point of not talking down, and being frightfully jolly and up for anything. Whereas in the background five hundred anxious syndicates at Lloyds are re-counting their moolah and crossing their fingers that she’s not going to fall down a crevasse or be eaten by tigers or ferocious South American Bugs or something, unaware that her producers would never let her get near a tiger or a bug and the deepest rainforest scenes with her in them are all filmed at Kew. And when she went on that perilous solo journey with her camera across deepest Tajikistan on the oldest railway in the world and all those frightful buses and trucks she had six, I kid you not, six personal bodyguards armed to the teeth. Plus of course the entire entourage of three hundred TV crew types following in a fleet of SUVs in order to hop round filming and directing and sound-recording &c. (The “Patrizia” is because Grannie’s French and potty, not necessarily in that order.)

    Anyway as I say Mum was off on one of her Nature things and of course Dad was busy writing the Definitive Economic History of the Later Middle Ages whilst ignoring anything faintly smacking of disastrous modern history that might be going on around him, as usual, and the College doesn’t like extraneous daughters camping in its fellows’ sets, so I couldn’t stay with him. So as usual Michael, aka the Bean, Tommy, aka Bean Minor, and me, aka Sister Bean, went to stay with Egg’s lot. Well, we have known them forever and they don’t mind who or what he invites to stay for the hols. (Last summer, this was, shortly after the Bloody Tory Foot-in-Mouth Disaster—aka Brexit Referendum, if that needed saying.)

    So I had better explain why the handles. Nothing to do with putrid Twitface or any of that puerile social media rubbish designed for cretins with a craving to be noticed and loved and “Friended” (not a word) by their cretinous peers.

    It was the previous term and that year the boys had all been shoved into something that their School calls the Remove, where they put ageing types with insufficient School Spirit that look as if they’re not going to do the School credit in the Sixth next year and have no interest in being frightful Hearties and kicking inflatable toys around in the mud. Or in summer straining their hearts out on the river, which has always been a traditional Thing at Marbledown which by reputation is as putrid as Merrifield, tho that does not seem possible. Leading inevitably to shining laurels at boring Henley, you see. And they put your name on an oar-shaped, I kid you not, wooden plaque thing in the Hall.

    Well Egg’s Uncle Flossie, who is not bad as uncles go, had given him a whole ancient set of P.G. Wodehouse epics that date back to the original Penguins and had belonged to his (Uncle Flossie’s) uncle, and quite possibly to his uncle, actually. And Egg promptly became addicted, the more so because of the name, which by a pure coincidence matched one of the ones Bertie W. was always encountering at the Drones Club: his surname being Ovenden, the frightfully literate types at Marbledown had of course dubbed him “Egg” from practically day One. And so he and the cronies read the all the vols. and promptly formed the Junior Drones. (One does not add “Club” in this instance, tho I’m not sure why. Probably something to do with their loathing for all the official Clubs the Hearties and the Swots have at Marbledown. Boxing Club and Chess Club and Computer Sci. Club and crap.) Thus my (slightly) older sibling Michael became the Bean, which I must say suits him to a Tee, and their old friend Lucius (poor chap) Lamont had to be the Crumpet because believe you me that is what he looks like. Pudgy-faced, well pudgy all over, actually, and the features sort of squashed into the bargain. Tho absolutely no pugilistic ambitions, if he had had of course he would not have been anointed a Junior Drone. Subsequently “Crumpy”, which suits him even better, but that was an accident or osmosis or something. Egg’s cousin Jimmy Nightingale was allowed to join because Uncle Flossie is of course his uncle too and he is the current Flossie. There have been generations of them at Marbledown but absolutely none of them have their names on plaques or boards or oars of any sort, gilded or not, otherwise they would have blackballed him. Except there wasn’t a PGW moniker that suited him so he is just Flossie still.

    At first there was a move to exclude me entirely but Flossie pointed out that that would be discrimination on the grounds of gender and did they want to be positively Victorian? The Bean tried to point out that girls were nuisances, but that didn’t count and of course our much younger sibling, poor little Bean Minor, ci-devant “Tommy”, not really a member but sort of an intern, agreed with him, but interns don’t get a vote. So it was agreed that I could be Sister Bean, Egg proposing the name and Flossie seconding it—he’s an expert on Parliamentary procedure because of Uncle Flossie being in it, for his sins, tho not a supporter of the frightful current régime and in fact veering so far to the left that one wonders why he bothers to call himself a Tory at all, he was anti-Brexit and is all for more investment in the NHS and increasing the dole and much better child benefits for mothers and financial support for students and increasing taxes for those with incomes, he won’t call it “earning”, he said in the House, bless him, over two hundred thousand a year. Personally I would make it over one hundred thousand but at least his heart’s in the right place. But of course the Tories shouted him down. That would mean they’d all have to pay the extra tax, wouldn’t it?

    It was agreed that the Junior Drones would not have anything cretinous like badges or embroidered insignia on the breast pocket of the blazer, which poor little Bean Minor was in favour of, and certainly not anything as beyond the Pale as a website, but that the Egg would print us all cards. Reading for instance:

Egg Ovenden

Hon. Chairperson

Junior Drones

 

Flossie Nightingale

Hon. Sec.

Junior Drones

 

Sister Bean Fullarton-Browne

Hon. Auxiliary

Junior Drones

    So he acquired some card stock and printed them on his dad’s printer during a weekend off the leash at home. I did point out that it was the 21st century and wasn’t “Auxiliary” pejorative not to say verging on discriminatory but was told severely that as I wasn’t at Marbledown it was an honour to be in the club at all and if I didn’t want to spend the next hols. doing girly shopping like Egg’s frightful sister Pammy always did when she was at home (the self-elected nickname being indicative, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the name Pamela, but that is the sort of sickening female she is) I had better shut up. So I shut up.

    After that when Bean Minor got “Chela” (it’s out of Kipling’s Kim, an earlier Junior Drones’ favourite) he didn’t dare to object, poor darling. It’s better than “Acolyte”, which is what it means, more or less, or “Tenderfoot”, the Crumpet’s suggestion, which was of course howled down as far too Baden-P. and Hearty.

    One had of course to have a dress code. Which became slightly urgent as we assembled for the hols. and the Bean’s choice of impossibly Street-Cred garments was revealed, to wit one super-dingy grey Thing on the upper body—if the word “droopy” had not yet been invented this would have been its hour—skin-tight but wrinkled black jeans and two-inch-soled Named sneakers. One couldn’t blame Flossie for whispering: “What is it? Get it out of my sight!”

    We were a bit limited by the available modern garments in the Ovendens’ house, which is a large, shabby thing in the country, where Egg’s dad trains Flat racers and his older brother, Horrible Hearty Henry, falls off them during said training with amazing regularity and is not allowed to ride them at more than a mild canter. And even at that you can see the stable lads all cringing. His mum is a vaguely genial artistic type who does fabric printing, so there’s always plenty of fabric floating around but hardly what PGW would have recognised, so that was out for the Junior Drones. However there is an attic and Mrs O. said vaguely Of course, dears, help yourselves, so we did. Totally PGW cream flannels! Deliciously horrible blazers, totally in period, to go with them! I was deputed to unpick the frightful logos, pardon me, insignia on the pockets, but was discovered to be so cackhanded that Egg, who is very deft, perhaps having inherited it from his artistic mum, sat down and helped, and forcibly roped in Bean Minor.

    Meanwhile the others had discovered the Shoes! And were excitedly scouring the house for respectively the right polish for cream and tan pointed things smothered in tiny punched holes, or alternately the sort of whitener they used in the Old Days for genuine tennis shoes. Any and all forms of Sneaker being of course beyond the pale. There wasn’t anything so we had to get down to the local village.

    It’s one of those nightmarish places of the sort that appeared relentlessly on that putrid television series Midsummer Murders, except that in this one it rains a lot, not like in the series, but it is equally full of over-restored cottages (with giant extensions at the back for the so-called conservatories and huge shiny kitchens), and beautifully mown bright green greens and intensely flourishing cottage gardens put in by experts from the neighbouring town at the cost of only an arm and two legs. I kid you not: the firm is called Boothby Landscaping & Gardening Pride, Boothby being the name of the noxious proprietor, a smarmy type; the middle-aged ladies who infest the village all adore him.

    However, fortunately Mr and Mrs Patel who run The Village Store are very sympathetic people and co-operated with great interest in the quest for the right polishing and whitening stuff and Mr Patel told us a long story about his grandfather who had the exact pair of cream and tan shoes back in the Old Days. This was after Partition but we didn’t gather whether the shoes had been bought back in India or here in England.

    Mrs Patel then rushed out the back and came back with a plastic container of totally yummy round sweets that she called Coconut Ladoos, tho I’m not sure if that’s the correct spelling. She said they’re made from semolina as well as the coconut, plus condensed milk, but I can tell you they’re nothing like the putrid semolina we have with monotonous regularity at School and the boys say Marbledown’s is even worse, tho I find that very hard to believe. She wouldn’t let us pay, very embarrassing, so we retreated with very red cheeks all round and fervent thanks for all their help and the container of gorgeous sweets. Yum!

    It’s not as if they haven’t got kids of their own, because they have. They’re all very bright. Rishi, the eldest son, is a qualified barrister and doing very well for himself, he started off with a scholarship and topped his class at school, and is in a very prestigious set of chambers in London; Malcolm, the second son, did spectacularly well at LSE and is with the FCO; and Lily, their only daughter, has just got a First at Cambridge in some sort of chemistry and has embarked on a Ph.D. in something totally abstruse. But although Rishi is married there are no grandchildren as yet, so perhaps they’re starting to feel sentimental. Egg’s mum reckons the “granny and grandpa hormones” do strike when one reaches a certain age so I said had hers and she laughed and said Not yet but doubtless it would come, and hadn’t I noticed that Ian (Mr O.) was getting positively doting and was always patting little Bean Minor on the head and slipping him peppermints, and that whereas in the past he wouldn’t have kids anywhere near the horses, the other day he’d voluntarily put their neighbour’s little girl up on Lady Aurelia (admittedly now out to grass but in her day a many-time winner of Classic races)? Which it was hard to know what to say in reply to, so I just said feebly: “I see,” and she laughed again and said Give it another forty years and I would.

    So finally we all ended up in cream flannels. Egg, Flossie and Bean, being already tall, all found a pair that were just right, and Mrs Ovenden rallied round magnificently and took up a rather rotund pair for Crumpet, a slimmer pair for me, and the smallest pair for Bean Minor, also putting tucks or something at the waist for him, tho they were still loose, but anyway we had found a stack of fabulous old belts and ties so we all used those to keep them up, according to taste. Bean Minor scored a wonderful tie, nobody knew what it was if anything, but rather wide diagonal orange, black and yellow stripes, to die for! Mr O. choked when he saw Flossie’s choice of tie-belt and said that if there were any Old Etonians in the neighbourhood they’d probably have a fit. The only Old Aforesaid we could think of was Mum’s brother Jimmy (our only real uncle, tho we’ve got lots of distant cousins twice removed etcetera on the LeBec (or Grannie) side who get the avuncular moniker). But Uncle Jimmy was safely off in Portugal with his large sea-going yacht, same as most summers, so that was okay.

    The Crumpet had a real belt, surprisingly enough there was one long enough to go round him, kind of elastic striped in red and black, and a scarlet blazer to match. I must say the result was spiffing, tho there was no old shirt that fitted him so he had to wear a plain white school one, a bit of an anticlimax but never mind, Mrs O. came to the rescue with a red and black sort of batik-y piece of left-over fabric that made the perfect cravat! Plus a pair of very white tennis shoes. He wanted to buy a pair of red shoelaces but Egg squashed him: very non-PGW, so he didn’t.

    Bean was rather severe in a dark blue blazer—Mr O. choked again but Mrs O. just said soothingly: “Never mind, Ian, they’ve unpicked the crest and all those awful affluent retirees who’ve flooded into the village wouldn’t recognise it unless it had been on the television for three years running right under their noses,” which he had to admit was true. The Beanly belt was pale blue and black elastic stripes, and he had a cream silk shirt and a real cravat, well maybe it was a lady’s scarf but anyway it looked good, the most discreet navy with minutely thin white stripes through it. Plus a pair of the cream and tan shoes and his own navy socks. Even as a sister I had to concede he looked good.

    Flossie’s outfit was complete with a rather green blazer and Mr O. went into a sniggering fit and said he was almost sure that was a long-ago souvenir by one of his uncles or great-uncles of a visiting Aussie cricket team, but Flossie just looked lofty and said it didn’t have a kangaroo on the pocket. (This was true: whatever it had had, had been unpicked.) He didn’t have a cravat, but a rolled silk scarf knotted somewhat jauntily, possibly not in period as it was abstract blue, green and turquoise shapes but never mind, being rolled up you couldn’t tell. With his thick, very fair hair which the dashed boy knows is one of his greatest assets it all looked awfully good, I have to admit. He had scored the best cream silk shirt but that is Flossie for you. None of the cream and tan shoes fitted him, hah, hah, so it had to be tennis shoes.

    Egg was doing the Junior Drones proud with his choice of blazer, the most completely putrid thing one could imagine, totally in period, horrible vertical stripes in brown, black and maroon! Plus a pair of the cream and tan shoes.

   Well one couldn’t entirely blame poor Mr and Mrs O. for gasping and crying respectively “What?” and: “Alan, darling,” (that being the Egg’s name—not the darling bit, of course) “how can you? Totally tasteless!” The more so because of the pale pink shirt and the orange cravat with black spots. Not to say the Old Marbledownian tie used as a belt which, or so he said, was doing it a favour.

    The Egg of course merely looked down his nose (he’s shot up so much in the last couple of years that he’s overtopped both his Olds, unfortunately for them), and said in his best Bertie Wooster voice: “That’s the point, old things.”

    After which little Bean Minor and me could only be an anticlimax but we were doing our best, with sparkling whitened tennis shoes, me in a striped blue and black blazer, a to-die for cream silk shirt and of course the flannels, plus a bright pink silk scarf with white polka dots worn cravat-wise that I’d had to fight Egg for. The bright emerald and white striped tie-belt struck a merry note, I thought, but Mrs O. winced a bit as it glimmered at her. Bean Minor totally adorable, bless him, in his cream slacks, a genuine tiny blazer that Mr O. thought must have once been someone’s at a prep. school—a putrid one, where they dressed little boys in bright yellow and black stripes: he looked like a little Busy Bee—plus an extraordinary pale blue pleated shirt that some benighted child must have once had forced on him or possibly her, it might have been a blouse, with a very long pointed collar, and a genuine pale grey silk cravat that no-one had the heart to tell him had probably once been worn to Ascot or somewhere equally U and putrid. Mr O. smiled like anything and patted him on the head so I had to concede that Mrs O. was right and the grandpa hormones had struck, all right.

    After that we all assumed our straw boaters—Mr O. collapsing in helpless guffaws, he hadn’t been expecting that final touch—and sallied forth.

Next chapter:

https://theeggandfriends-anovel.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-junior-drones-sally-forth.html