WAR AND UNDERWEAR

The Crown and Anchor and the village of Swanspottle along with an array of characters appear from time to time in my warblings...

The day that Eunice McMudd's knickers fell down in the lounge bar of the Crown and Anchor would have been lost to memory had not war broken out at exactly the same moment.

The Reverend Willy Maximus was there and partly responsible for the knickers incident because it was he who was sitting next to Eunice at the bar, but he could claim no part in the war because that was between the Women's Institutes of Swanspottle and Girdling over the serious matter of the proper consistency of gooseberry jam.

It started when Henrietta Blackboil decided to join in the fun.

For the uninitiated, Henrietta Blackboil was a reprobate of the worst order, used the foulest language for most of the time, and farted far too frequently for a woman of a certain age, not that she would ever admit to any age. Henrietta was universally loathed, and if asked she would admit to even loathing herself.

Her liver had disintegrated in the dim distant past and nobody was at all certain what kept her alive. Medical science had still to advance to the point of comprehending the incomprehensible. Maybe, it was occasionally mooted, it had been pickled beyond the point of non-functioning and therefore managed to do something other than kill her.

But all this is besides the point.

The actual point arose in the Crown and Anchor on a Thursday evening when the Women's Institute met and arranged future programmes over glasses of water that had been lightly visited by cheap red wine and sold, by the Greek landlord, as cocktails. It was decided they would have a jam-making competition, and Henrietta signed up there and then (and being Henrietta, nobody dared object) because she needed a hobby.

On Friday of that same week Henrietta called on her equally reprehensible friend, one Griselda Entwhistle, of whom much has been said elsewhere,* in need of a recipe because she had no idea whatsoever how to produce any kind of jam.

“I need pissin' help, hag!” she screeched in a voice loud enough to be heard seven cottages away.

“Go and get some gooseberries, crone,” suggested Griselda, “and leave me in peace or I'll cast such a spell over you that you'd quake to think about!”

“Piss off!” growled Henrietta, but went off in search of wild gooseberries anyway.

It so happened that there had been a fruit orchard once upon a time on land that was now derelict and never visited on account of toxins that had been dribbled there from the waste pipes of the Crown and Anchor and consequently avoided by all who respected their own health.

However, Henrietta Blackboil had never given any kind of consideration when it came to her health, yet she had survived well into her eighties and besides a non-functioning liver she was hale and hearty and full of venom.

To cut a long story short, she created several jars of gooseberry jam and took them with her to the competition between the two adjacent villages.

The Chief Judge was the rector of St Cockleshy Church of the Virgin in Girdling, and the time came for him to sample Henrietta's strange-looking confection.

He opened the jar and fumes came out, fumes which hung visibly in the air and started to cause the chandelier over the altar of Girdling's Church of the Virgin (where the competition was being held) to corrode in full view of the ladies of both Women's Institutes.

“This is disqualified!” barked the Rector. “It's toxic!

“Piss off!” shrieked Henrietta.

“Watch your foul mouth!” ordered the Rector, shocked.

And war was declared. Weapons were brought in from the army camp at Gungleham, a nuclear alert was broadcast on the BBC, and the ladies of both women's institutes dressed in combat gear and set about each other with a will.

Rockets were launched at midnight and explosions rocked the two villages.

Gunfire rattled, but Eunice McMudd barely heard it as the Reverend Willy Maximus interfered with her underwear with quivering fingers in a sudden burst of uncontrollable passion.

“Oh Eunice, I'm yours forever...” he declared in his best pulpit hiss.

A small nuclear device rolled into the tap room through the door and lay quivering inches away from his loosened dog-collar.

“I'm not that keen on gooseberry jam anyway,” sighed Eunice, “Are you?”

But the Reverend Willy Maximum had his head plunged between her ample bosoms and so his reply was inaudible to all as her knickers fell to the floor and the small nuclear device twitched.

* Spellbound by Peter Rogerson , Lulu.com