CHAPTER FIFTEEN: MORNING ASSEMBLY, DAY ONE

The good professor Stroggleoff has met his match here, then....

Professor Stroggleoff somehow managed to make his bushy eyebrows knit together and his lips form a lipless snarl as he stood on the platform in the University hall and surveyed the latest intake of students. To his eyes they were a sordid enough looking bunch, but the woman sitting almost hidden by a pillar at the very back of the room was more sordid than the rest put together. Before dotting a single i or crossing even one t she had put the reputation of his University at risk, and that was, from his perspective, the most heinous of crimes that anyone in the history of the universe could commit. Added to the fact that he knew she had the sort of powers he thought ought to be reserved for himself, something needed to be done, and done fast

“There's a scumbag in here!” he hissed after an unbelievable silence as he stared at every single face in turn, and so sibilant was the sound of his barely audible words that everyone shivered and tried to sink out of sight, hopefully into a hole in the floor (though holes never appear in floors when we want them, and one didn't appear from nowhere then either). But the sense of danger in the air was almost tangible, and everyone could feel it.

“There's a cretinous lump of solidified diarrhoea sitting on her chair in this very hall,” hissed the Professor, and by those words he caused every male there present to breathe a sigh of relief.

“And I'm going to tell you who it is!” snapped the Professor. “I'm going to name the wretched creature before I expel her from these halls for being too stupid to deserve her place at this noble and ancient place of learning!! I'm going to draw your attention to her wretchedness, I'm going to make her squirm in her seat, and then I'm going to hand her over to the forces of law and order who are waiting outside this very college for my signal!”

The lone figure behind a pillar at the back of the hall started shaking. She shook and vibrated to such an extent that she risked instigating a general collapse in the fabric of the building. Her knees joined in, creating an almost syncopated rhythm that was not quite in time with the thrashing of her heart inside her chest. But it wasn't fear that drove those extremes of movement, it was something else.

“I'm going to have her out here, on this stage, and I'm going to thrash her!” continued the Professor. “I'm going to conjure a bouquet of bristling birch twigs into my hand and I'm going to lay it across her scrawny back until she begs for mercy! I'm going to thrash her like nobody was ever thrashed before, and when I finish because I'm too knackered to carry on I'm going to have a nice refreshing and fortified pint of coffee, and then I'm going to start thrashing all over again! The screams of the offensive scumbag will echo through all the corridors and halls of this place, and will go beyond the walls and into the very fields and woodlands until they reach the actual borders of outer space itself, and they will warn one and all, every single potential scumbag, that it's much better to not be a scumbag but to live a decent and honourable life, behaving in a most godly way and being ever so humble, especially in this hallowed house of learning, so help me!”

The figure half-hidden by the column swallowed in a gulping sort of way, but she was ready. This might prove to be a test, but then, she rather liked tests. They renewed her faith in herself when everything went right. They amused her on the rare occasion when something went awry, and she was easily up to that.

“Griselda Entwhistle, Scumbag extraordinaire, come here!” screeched Professor Stroggleoff.

The figure at the back, still half-hidden by an ancient column that reached to the vaulted ceiling and no doubt did important work, like supporting it, stood up, and every eye in the place turned to take her in. And then there was a mass gasp as they saw the manner of woman that was being referred to as a scumbag.

Because Griselda Entwhistle was a frail old creature, a tiny, fragile and truly ancient woman whose capacious skirts no doubt concealed a pair of scrawny legs on the point of terminal collapse and in whom all traces of her gender had clearly long since withered away. And as she slowly, painfully slowly, made her way to the front of the hallway, using a gnarled old cane for support and gasping at the pain each footstep obviously caused her, the slowly rising rumble of sympathy began to fill the hall like the buzzing of so many bees.

For a few moments the Professor was puzzled. Then he saw, clear as day, what the daft old witch was up to, and he held up one hand. By this time she had managed to hobble half way to the front of the hall and the bees had become a veritable swarm, an audible wall of confusion permeating the fabric of the ancient building.

“Stop!” he barked, and held up one hand. “Stop, I order you, Entwhistle, or your punishment will be all the more dire!”

The shambling old figure paused, and its weak and watery eyes stared up at the professor from under a tatty shawl that appeared, it seemed, from nowhere �" though nobody actually noticed. They were all taken up by the pathos of the scene.

“Yes, sir...” whispered Griselda Entwhistle in a voice that shook with every conceivable weakness. A sigh rose in the hall, a barely audible but none-the-less palpable sigh. Every eye was turned towards the drama being enacted, and their professor was turning, in their minds, from an academic nobody into a monster.

She stood there, the total image of all that is pathetic in the world. From somewhere a hiss indicated that in her enfeebled state she had passed wind, but nobody thought any the less of her for that. It was, they thought if they heard it, what you might expect a truly old and decrepit woman to do.

“Did you cause the death, the death mark you, of a young woman in the village of Knockersby?” demanded Professor Stroggleoff, searching for a return of his authority.

She stood there, the very image of a mortal who could no more cause the death of a young woman than she could fly to the moon.

“Knockersby, sir?” she quailed, and half the room quailed with her. The other half merely fought to hold back the tears they knew must surely be on the way.

“The village down the lane!” he snapped. “Now did you or did you not cause the death, the very real and final and fatal death, mark you, of a young woman in that village last night?”

She paused as if to think, but those nearest to her observed she seemed to be muttering. They assumed, quite naturally, that she was fighting for words in a hostile environment, and completely failed to associate the pathetic mumblings of a woman too old to be alive with the much younger woman who flung the door to the hall open and stood there, brazen, bright and very, very alive.

“I've come to thank my saviour!” said the young woman, ignoring what was going on and not humbly, not quietly, not in any way falsely but with the brightness and confidence of grateful youth oozing from every pore of her body.

Then she saw Griselda Entwhistle standing alone in the middle of the room and she ran up to her, squeezing along a row of open-mouthed students, and flung her arms around the old woman in an embrace that might have squeezed the ancient life out of her had she not been Griselda Entwhistle and as strong as an ox.

“Thank you, my dear old lady, thank you!” she almost wept. “You saved my life, you surely did!”

A few years seemed to slip from Griselda's shoulders, her shawl faded, unnoticed, to nothing, her long black skirt shortened by about a foot, and she smiled at the young woman.

“My dear Miss Nickerless … or can I call you Sally? It was nothing, I can assure you. Absolutely nothing! As long as you're alive and well, that's all that matters to me!”

Sally Nickerless turned and faced the totally confused assembly of new students on their first day at Scrumblenose University.

“This kind old lady gave me the kiss of life and stopped me from dying,” she said, “and I'm so happy to be able to thank her!”

First one, then all, of the students started applauding, ever louder, and Griselda, somewhat awkwardly, took a bow and absolutely nobody asked how come a tattered old woman with a stoop had become, with not a soul noticing how or when, a mini-skirted little nymph with a more than adequate bosom and legs to die for.

Professor Stroggleoff gazed in disbelief and then flung the bouquet of vicious-looking birch twigs that had somehow appeared in his hands onto the stage floor and stomped out.

“I give up!” he was heard to mutter before he was gone.