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The Junior Drones Sally Forth
January 5 Not. I seem to have written over several so-called days in this putrid diary well too bad.
Of course there is nowhere much to sally forth to round the Ovendens’ neck of the woods so, Mrs O. having kindly packed us up a picnic, which Egg was careful to oversee in case the vagueness overcame her in the matter of not enough H.-B. eggs for all, or too many Marmite sandwiches and no ham, kind of thing (tho the time she’d got really vague and gave us a bottle of champers wasn’t half bad), as I say, we sallied forth to the so-called river (more like a watery slug, just as well) for a punting party. Merrifield School is totally left out in the aqueous stakes, stuck in what used to be the middle of the countryside but now has expanded village on three sides, but Marbledown School has carefully hogged a great posish on a river. And I will say this for the Marbledown Powers That Be, they do provide punts for the boys and they all learn to wield a punt pole. Badly in the case of the majority—however. Fortunately Egg and Flossie both have Sense, and so any would-be hilarity on the part of blasted male siblings, to wit Bean and Bean Minor, was swiftly squashed.
And dear old Crumpet handed me tenderly into a punt, oh, lawks.
“Um, thanks, Crumpy,” I said lamely.
“What did you do that for?” asked Bean in some would have said justifiable amazement. “She’s been getting in and out of punts since Junior School!”
Well almost: he is a year, make that eleven months older than me and yes, I was a total accident and that trip to take colour snaps of irreplaceable Native orchids in a Belizean swamp had to be postponed. Which made the Book late. And something about the Christmas trade tho I thought it comes round once a year. However. So when Bean started at Marbledown Junior I wouldn’t yet have been at Merrifield. But actually I didn’t start until the Fourth Form, having initially been sent to a French day school ordained by Grannie, with the mistake of it not being under her eye but under the trusting Tante Émilie’s in Paris. When I did start at Merrifield, and they found I was sailing through French and History, I was bumped up a year. (I don’t think they know Grannie’s French and that if we haven’t been foisted on obliging friends like Egg’s family we’ve been relentlessly sent to her at the Château LeBec for our hols. ever since before we could stagger. They do know who Dad is, tho unaware that I was merely reading his book collection, he’s never bothered to teach any of us anything.) So now I’m technically in the same year as Bean, and he is very sour about it. Not that a girls’ school could possibly count.
But, the cream of the jest if one’s mind tends that way, is that because top-class science, computer science and maths teachers are thinnish on the ground at Merrifield, ditto for French and German at Marbledown, not to say highly optional Arabic, Japanese and Mandarin at both establishments, anyone who wants to take those will end up in a combined class! Flossie and Egg both have to do Modern Languages, tho it’s only Flossie who’s opted for Arabic as well. Flossie actually prefers Classics and they have an excellent old crusty port-drinking character for that at Marbledown. Alysse Johns, who is frightfully clever and slated for Oxbridge and Firsts and goodness knows what (I don’t know what, actually: what the Hell do you do with a Classics degree these days?) was already going to him this last year tho she’s only in my form. Uncle Flossie thinks Flossie ought to join the FCO and his father, who is in the Diplomatic, unfortunately agrees with him, so that is why Flossie has already had to start learning Arabic tho actually he does find it interesting but it’s hard to fit everything in.
Still, as I’m not a Maths, Science or Heaven forbid Computer Science or Classics bod I don’t have to be buried in Marbledown classrooms for hours of the day in rooms smelling of Boy. I think they make them change their socks and wash before they come over to Merrifield, one mercy. And naturally one ignores the puerile complaints about smothering fogs of bath powder and hairspray, &c.
Bother, I was going to describe the punting expedition.
Well it was much like all punting expeditions, the big boys had to be in charge of the poles, good show, I have no ambition whatsoever to indulge in the idiotic practice of standing up in a great long flat boat and trying to push it along with a long stick. Doubtless invented by brainiacs at Oxbridge in their leisure time in between producing unlikely demi-semi-Mediaeval epics full of revolting fairies and elves and wizards and similar gremlins and crap. Only someone brought up on 19th-century bowdlerised English fairy tales and educated on ghastly Spenser’s ghastly Misspelled Fairy Queen plus frightful Anglo-Saxon and confined all his life to an ivory tower with no contact whatsoever with real life or, I’m quite sure, real women, could possibly have written it.
Naturally poor old Crumpet had let himself be bullied out of handling the pole so rather unfortunately he sat and looked at me in what I slowly began to realise with a sort of sinking feeling that was not due to Egg’s rotten pole handling or the lack of lunch was a sort of moony way. Help.
In the other punt Flossie was of course handling the pole. Bean Minor was merely allowed to watch humbly, and Bean had been promised he could do it after lunch, the poor simpleton eagerly accepting: he has certainly not got either Dad’s brain or Mum’s nous, no-one wants to punt when their stomach’s full of hard-boiled eggs, fruit-cake, and giant juicy ham sandwiches!
… And in this case, as it turned out, bottles of, take your pick, Coke or spring water. I had the latter, I’ve grown out of the infantile taste for over-sweet, over-caffeinated brown dye with highly toxic pressure-forced CO2 content that has been known to choke the over-eager to death no kidding. Dear old Crumpy had the Coke, tho; he is really very sweet but one does not want to be mooned at by an earnest bumbling Crumpet one has known all one’s life.
After the feast the misguided Bean suggested a punt race! How did I ever come to be related to that? But as I’ve got Dad’s eyes, weirdly light hazelish-greyish, I doubt there could have been any slip-ups, especially as Mum is not keen on the whole maternity bit and poor little Bean Minor was an even greater accident than me, consequent on a bottle of superb Château LeBec 1986 from the Château LeBec’s cellars donated by misguided Grannie in one of her madder fits—neither Mum nor Dad has anything approaching a palate and they scoffed the lot with some unspeakable supermarket cheddar and crackers.
Naturally Bean was immediately squashed by Egg and Flossie, in fact the latter told him he was too bally puerile for words, serve him right. So we were all able to lie back and digest, as for once it was a warm, sunny day and not raining or blowing a gale. After a little Bean Minor got bored and said he was going to look for tiddlers but everybody ignored him, so he wandered off. Crumpy then suggested that Flossie might like to read us his translation of a bit of an Arabic poem but the translator and Egg both sat up and goggled at him and Egg croaked: “Have you lost it, Crumpet of my heart?” And Flossie drawled: “Abso-bloody-lutely not, old chum.” So the poor thing subsided, very red about the squashed ears.
After quite some time of just digesting and contemplating and waving the odd midge or gnat away we became vaguely aware of a sort of plaintive chant in the distance.
And Egg sat up, yawning, and discovered: “I say, you chaps, one of the punts is missing.”
Bean shot to his feet, gasping: “Bloody Bean Minor’s taken it!”
At around which point we became aware that that vague noise in the distance was probably Bean Minor bleating: “Help, help! I’m stuck!”
“I say, he’s stuck,” said Flossie very, very mildly.
“One feels it’s up to you, old Bean,” said Egg affably. “He is your sibling, an I mistake not. Meanwhile, I have a couple of small miniatures here, and it’s dashed well the time to break them out, don’t you feel?”
“Good Egg! Hear, hear!” Flossie agreed.
“Carried unanimously,” I agreed. “Go on, Bean, leap in and rescue him.”
“Um, how?” he bleated.
The Crumpet lumbered to his feet. “You chaps are frightfully mean, y’know. Come on, Bean, we’ll take the other punt and throw him a line.”
And off they went.
“Is there a line?” murmured Flossie, yawning.
“No idea, old chap,” replied Egg cordially. “What’s your fancy? Cognac, Bacardi, Scotch?”
“Ah… When you say Scotch, a myriad of sins may lurk thereunder. What sort of Scotch, dare one ask?”
“Black Label,” he replied succinctly.
“Jolly good. Pass it over, there’s a good chap.”
Egg duly passed it over, noting: “That leaves the Cognac for me. You can have the Bacardi, Sister Bean. One hears that the distaff side always favours that.”
“What about poor Crumpet?” I foolishly replied.
He raised his eyebrows. “Donate it to the poor old dear, by all means, if so be the charitable fancy takes you.”
“I don’t see why you two can’t share yours,” I noted sourly.
“No? Well, never mind,” he replied kindly. “Spring water, old man?” he offered Flossie. “Sorry there isn’t any soda, but this is mildly effervescent.”
“Oh? One can only die trying.” He poured Black Label and then sparkling spring water into a mug. “Bung frightfully ho! –Not bad,” he decided.
“Down the hatch,” the Egg agreed, sipping neat Cognac. He swallowed, and looked dubiously at the bottle. “I suppose one can’t expect Napoleon,” he murmured.
I gave in and tried some Bacardi. Not bad, if you like neat white rum.
“I say, don’t the distaff side usually anoint that with Coke?” murmured Flossie.
“Don’t ask me.” I tried a bit more, it definitely grows on one.
By the time a rather damp-around-the-edges Crumpy returned in triumph with a very wet Bean Minor and an almost as wet Bean there was half an inch left in Egg’s bottle, about a quarter of an inch in Flossie’s, and three-quarters of an inch in mine, so we generously poured them all into a mug and awarded it to the Crumpet.
He lapped it up like a lamb what time Egg’s and Flossie’s eyes began to assume a bulge-like character.
“I say, you chaps, I feel distinctly weak,” concluded Flossie faintly.
“That’ll be all that grog you’ve been knocking back!” cried the Bean aggrievedly. “Why didn’t you save some for me?”
“You rushed off into the sunset,” explained Egg, yawning.
“So did Crumpet!”
“Heroically, tho,” Flossie explained. “Just don’t be a bally pain, Bean. Did you rescue the punt pole, at least?”
“Yes!” he snapped.
“Crumpet did, actually,” Bean Minor put in, in rather a small voice.
“Benighted clots do not speak,” Egg warned him.
He gulped, and subsided.
“Added to which you could have ruined that lovely blazer,” I noted.
“Had you not providentially left it behind with us,” added Flossie.
“Yes, but what if he’d been wearing it?” I replied darkly.
“Ah. What, indeed?”
“I think the colours would have run,” the Crumpet offered unexpectedly.
“Abso-bally-lutely, old chum!” the Egg agreed. “Have a statue of Queen Victoria.”
“Mixed eras,” murmured Flossie, lying down again. “Bit like old Crumpy’s drink, really.”
“Yes; but Bertie would have adopted it like a shot,” I assured him, also lying down again.
The Egg lay down again. “Sister Bean has a point. Full of white rum tho she is.”
“I vote we adopt it!” said the Crumpet eagerly.
“Carried,” Egg agreed.
“Good,” he said. “I say, is there anything more to eat?”
“Well—apples, Mum must’ve thought she was doing us good or something,” Egg admitted.
“They’ll do!” The Crumpet took an apple. Nobody else ventured, in fact it was such a pleasant afternoon, really, that one closed one’s eyes…
Well that was our punting expedition. And as Mrs O. said when we returned to the house rather late in the afternoon and she surveyed Bean’s and Bean Minor’s somewhat damp cream bags, “Well, what’s a bit of water between friends?” And she’d take them down to the dry-cleaner in the village and they’d be good as new. And we’d better all change before dinner because it would be a terrible pity to get gravy or strawberry stains on our finery. And some nice hot showers wouldn’t come amiss but of course a bath, Tommy dear, if you’d rather.
To which the misguided young sibling in Q. replied gravely: “It’s ‘Bean Minor’, Mrs Ovenden, actually. And one always has a shower at School, y’know.”
At which the Bean seized his ear and marched him off to it. Which really when one comes to think about it was the only useful act he did all hols., but that is the Bean for you and ever was.
After which it was ascertained that the gravy would be with a substantial roast—cheers all round and remarks about putrid toad-in the-hole not being fit nourishment for human beings and a reminder of the Great Toad-in-The-Hole Strike at Marbledown which has gone down in History but unfortunately does not seem to have stopped the Powers That B. from ordering it up once a week. And the strawberries would be in the Eton Mess, dears, she knew we all li— Cries of “Hear, hear! Jolly good show!” And “Three cheers for the Mater! Hip, hip—” Well you get the picture. Which is certainly an example of why it is always so good to stay with the Egg’s family for the hols. And Grannie’s clafoutis aux cerises does not come near it, so sucks to the Frogs, what? Abso-bally-lutely!
… And, thank God, Crumpy did not manage to get me alone in a punt!
Next chapter:
https://theeggandfriends-anovel.blogspot.com/2025/12/village-cricket.html
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