CHAPTER ONE:- GRISELDA MAKES A DECISION

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

In which Griselda decides to become a student...

lifehold

In her darkest hour, and that was an unusually dark piece of time to be trapped in, Griselda Entwhistle decided to forgo the pleasure of the flesh and become a Priestess. It was a sudden decision like most of her decisions are sudden, a whim sprung from annoyance. In all honesty at her age there weren't so many pleasures involved in the humdrum of existence and anyway the local Priest had upset her by suggesting she was in league with the devil, and she wanted to get back at him. And, she thought with her usual visceral cunning, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. It didn't actually mean very much, but thinking it made her happy.

It wasn't the devil part of his diagnosis she objected to but the definite article. I mean, she mused one evening when the only programme on the television worth watching (to her mind) concerned the mating habits of the meerkat, I mean, there's just got to be more than one devil and how does Mr Prissy know which devil I may or may not be in league with, and anyway, what does he mean by being in league?

She knew enough about life to know there are ways and means and enough more to know that short-cuts can go in quite the wrong direction all by themselves and quite unintentionally, so she decided that a course of study might be appropriate. It would put her in touch with modern thinking and anyway there just might be some nubile young male students (Police Constable Lockemup or a clone of that excellent gentleman came to mind) worth studying alongside.

Anyway for whatever reason she suddenly and out of the blue quite fancied enjoying the student life. She'd only been a student, once, a long time ago when the main obstacle to learning had been a tall and willowy creature with a penchant for corporal punishment, and she'd been a child herself and had fortunately (or unfortunately) been the one selected by that same willowy creature to administer that same corporal punishment on the willowy backside. It might have seemed (and been) a reversal of roles, but her eccentric teacher had enjoyed it, which made everyone happy and gave Mrs Willowy a healthy flush several times every day and the young Griselda a strong right arm.

So she decided that becoming a student would be well on the way to becoming a priestess, and becoming a priestess would be equally well on the way to sorting out the Right Reverend Ian Nigel Thybottom who, it was said, had peculiar sexual tendencies when the moon was either new or full or somewhere in between. But there was one thing he would never want and that was to share his priestly home with a priestess of any flavour let alone one that tasted and smelt of witch. It would be anathema to his soul and without a doubt a few minutes contemplating the very possibility of that kind of situation would drive him as far from Swanspottle as a reverend gentleman could go.

Becoming a modern and thrusting student would be easy. It would prove to be no handicap that she was a woman well advanced in her years because Griselda Entwhistle had one quality that most other people don't have: she was a witch. And what a witch! She had discovered that if she uttered a satanic name as a kind of entreaty when she wanted something unnatural to happen then time after time after time it did happen. And this was a trick she had long used in order to get out of tight corners or squeeze a last bottle of milk stout out of the Greek landlord of her local hostelry after closing time.

“By the devil, admit me to Priestess college and make it so I don't stick out like a sore thumb wrapped in a dirty old rag!” she growled. And there and then occurred a most wonderful transformation. The years seemed to fade from her face like wrinkles might be Photo-shopped out of the image of a vain celebrity, her long black skirts and accompanying cardigan (equally black) didn't actually disappear altogether but morphed into a fetching little tartan miniskirt and open-necked top. She had long enjoyed her own reflection if it was both young and wrapped in something small and tartan, and life had also made her aware of the incomprehensible effect that a firm pair of breasts had on the opposite sex,

She examined her reflection in the mirror and cackled to herself. “Henrietta wouldn't know me!” she chortled.

Henrietta Blackboil had been a friend until the time she'd made it to Downing Street as Prime Minister of the country, but they saw precious little of each other these days because she had been obliged to change that same friend into a puling infant, and conversation with one so young would have been too limited for one of Griselda's years. She liked intellectual conversation, like “bah humbug, ya scumbag!”, a philosophy hardly appropriate for tender young ears.

“By th' devil, make it longer!” she chortled,meaning the tiny skirt that barely covered her nice new thighs.

She watched in the mirror until the offending garment had grown long enough for her critical eye to accept, and then “stop right there!” she screeched. It remained at an appropriate length for her personal satisfaction, though she had rather liked her appearance when it had been on the micro side of mini. There was, she thought, something particularly fetching about the Royal Stewart tartan when it was draped in barely adequate quantities over her nubile and very new backside, and she resolved, there and then, to get underclothes in a similar pattern.

“Tartan knickers...” she crooned. “I could become a lap-dancer or something in the personal service trade, like modern students, in order to finance my college career! I could even become an escort and take posh gentlemen for dinner before allowing them naughties on the side if their wallets were fat enough!!”

She paused for a moment and almost dribbled at the prospect of enacting her thoughts in the real world. The trouble with me is I was born too soon, she thought. I should have been born eighteen years ago, but with brain filled with all the mischief that I know now!

She posed and preened a few times in front of the mirror, flicked a strand of hair and watched the way it bobbled around, young and alive and vibrant, and almost dribbled again.

“Now for the finer details of the flesh, so to speak,” she whispered to herself as she eyed with sudden disapproval the remnants of her previous angular nose that had hooked out of her face like an obscene protrusion in a cartoon effigy, the shadow of her actual bony chin and its warts, the echo of her sunken eyes, bright but simultaneously pale, and her crinkled hair that was no longer grey and was almost antiseptically clean but which looked anything but, and which no comb or brush had visited for practically ages. “I'm still hideous,” she murmured, approvingly. “I like hideous, but hideous might just stick out if I go to college and learn godliness. No, I'd better do something about hideous at least for the time being.”

“Tidy me up, then, and make me more desirable than a young tart on Page Three of the rudest newspaper ever printed,” she murmured, and wriggled and giggled as slight adjustments were made to her appearance until a glance in the mirror told her that she was just about the most perfect example of young feminine sexuality ever seen on planet Earth.

“That'll do!” she squawked. “I don't want to be molested before I get to wherever I'm going!” she added.

She was about to fantasise about her wonderful pneumatic body, newly rejuvenated and perfected with the assistance of whatever dark power it was that looked over her, when a letter popped through her letterbox. This, in itself, was an unusual occurrence because she hardly ever had any mail on account of only having the one friend, and that friend, as has already been noted, was now extremely young and sucking on plastic teats with a doting foster mother drooling over her. Anyway, few postmen or postwomen popped letters through her letterbox. It had a reputation and they usually contrived to “lose” all but the most obviously important mail somewhere down the lane.

This time the mail didn't look so much as important as very important, and she was tempted to dribble as she fingered it. Dribbling was what she found herself doing when in her guise as an old witch-like woman, and she considered such behaviour highly inappropriate to one as apparently young as she.

So she opened the important looking letter and it informed her that her application for a place on the Divinity course at Scrumblenose University had been accepted and that next week, on Monday, she would be inducted along with several other students all wishing to study ancient lore in order to become respected members of the most corrupt institution on Earth. It wasn't worded exactly like that, but that was what it meant all right. Griselda was good at reading between lines.

She liked the sound of it, though. She had long respected corrupt institutions: after all, was it not too long since she'd been Prime Minister of her own country, and sorted out a great number of wrongs with her eagle-eyed attention to detail? She rather looked forward to this one, then!

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