GRISELDA AT HOME

Introducing (or re-introducing for those who have travelled down the years with me) one Griselda Entwhistle, witch extraordinaire...

“It’s hard to believe,” grinned Griselda Entwhistle to herself, “but here we are well into the twenty-first century and yet I can quite clearly remember the nineteenth!”

She was servicing her number one broomstick, and when she did things like that she found her mind going back over an extraordinarily long life. Along with other modes of transport, broomsticks require servicing every so often or they might become unreliable, and Griselda knew that there’s nothing more unnerving than being aloft and zooming at ten thousand feet (where you really ought to be huddling close to yourself on account of the fact that at that height it tends to get chilly) when something goes wrong to the besom end of your broomstick because of poor servicing.

You see, if had happened before. But that was a long time ago and she preferred not to remember it. So she didn’t.

Especially not now. Not while she was fiddling deep in the twigs of her number one broomstick. She needed to concentrate or she might forget something vital.

Then there was a knock at the front door, and she groaned. Her hands were all sticky and it wasn’t perspiration but a glutinous ooze that somehow caused her broomstick to balance perfectly when she was shivering with either cold or nervous exhaustion and occasionally romantic excess, and she had to go to the door. She didn’t get enough visitors to ignore any of them.

“Well, well,” she sniggered when she opened the door, “if it isn’t Mr Bumptious Tiddles, known locally as Bumpy and the sole member of the Parish Council. The village of Swanspottle consisted of little more than a semi-derelict church, a disgusting pub called the Crowne and Anchor and a single row of cottages, many of which had been vaporised by a recent unidentified flying object, a disaster that had gone virtually unnoticed by the wider world but caused a sudden reduction in the size of the Parish Council, one that would be impossible to replace due to the shrunken population of the village.

“Can I come in?” asked Bumpy, anxiously looking around him.

“Why? Is someone following you?” asked Griselda mischievously.

“No, but it’s cold out here,” replied the irate parish councillor.

“Then why are you still standing out there, letting a chill wind blow through my cottage?” snapped Griselda unreasonably.

I might have been expecting her to be like this, thought Bumptious as he pushed past her into her cottage and sat on the largest of the two easy chairs that faced her fireplace in which a cheerless log was dribbling a smidgen of smoke up the chimney.

“So what’s got up your nose?” asked Griselda, “it’s not like you to come calling on old women like me.”

“Things are going wrong in the world, and you’re quite famous for your, how shall I put it, political past,” muttered the councillor, sounding reluctant to award her with anything like the fame she deserved.*

“Well, I was Prime Minister,” she grinned.

“And an honoured one at that,” sighed the Councillor, still sounding as if he begrudged the words. “And I fear that you might be needed again,” Bumptious Tiddles forced the words out through gritted teeth.

“I might?” grinned Griselda with a huge question mark in her voice.

“The UFO that crashed into the road not a dozen doors away from the little cottage you so proudly call home...” began Bumpy, trying not to sound as officious as he usually sounded. This was not the time, the place and certainly not the listener for pomp and officiousness. He knew that much with the same clarity as he knew his own name.

“I remember it well,” nodded Griselda, “I had to issue a word of command or it may well have dented my own roof...”

“A word of command?” stammered Bumpy.

“The less you know the less reason I will have to kill you,” joked Griselda, knowing that Bumpy would take her words far more seriously than they were meant.

“Kill me?” stammered the Parish Councillor.

“Just my way of putting you at ease, Bumpy,” assured Griselda. “Let me see, you were talking about the UFO that shook the ground round here?”

“It wasn’t a UFO,” spat out Bumpy, his face suddenly reddening with anger. “Or at least, it’s no longer unidentified,” he added, “though it most certainly was a flying object!”

“Ah, so you know whence it came?” asked Griselda, “I tell you what, councillor, if you like I’ll give you a cup of my special tea while we discuss this matter in more detail...”

At the reference to her special tea a mixture of conflicting thoughts fought for supremacy in Bumpy’s mind. Firstly, he knew all about Griselda's special brews: tea, coffee, chocolate, they all had the same notoriety and he was convinced that she must have some exotic plants blooming somewhere under her roof and he, like everyone else feared getting under the influence of the least bit of one of them. Secondly, he was feeling so unsure of himself and so ill at ease that he could have murdered a couple of fingers of best Scotch, just to calm him down. So he said the only thing he could say.

“Yes please...”

“Just a tick,” enthused Griselda, “you’ll enjoy this!” she added as she filled her black kitchen kettle with water from a garden pump and hung it over the barely smoking log in the fireplace.

That’ll still be there come Michaelmas, and not boiling yet!” thought Bumptious, but he thought it without knowing enough about Griselda.

“Come on, fiery log,” she whispered, and with a vicious plop and a plip the log burst into the most cheery, warming flames Bumpy had ever seen, and within almost no time at all the kettle was boiling with a frenzy that almost defied belief.

“That’s better!” chortled Griselda, “now for a nice cup of tea.”

It didn’t taste anything like tea, but it was most certainly refreshing. As he sipped it, Bumpy became aware that a great weight of absolute nonsense was being sucked out of his head and was being replaced by a soothing cushion of memory.

“When I was a boy,” he said, and added, “in short pants,”

“Yes?” grinned Griselda.

“When I was a lad I had a train set,” he whimpered, “a lovely electric train set and the rest of the kids on the street were jealous because theirs needed winding up because they were clockwork, and I build a track...”

He frowned. Why am I telling her this? What’s going on in my head?

But he continued, “I built a track that went from my bedroom, round the edge of the landing and into mummy and daddy’s bedroom so that I could spy on them when they were, you know, doing it....”

Did I just say mummy and daddy as if I was still a greasy little nipper? I guess I must have… what’s happened to me?

“And that’s exactly what the enemy have done,” he concluded, “they built a powerful flying object and sent it out way to spy on us...”

“How could an electric toy train spy on anyone?” asked Griselda, “it doesn’t seem likely to me...”

“I hadn’t worked that bit out. I was only in short pants,” he explained. “But you get the idea don’t you? The enemy did the same to us! They sent that wonderful flying object, hoping it would be unidentified, to spy on us.

“But they forgot that when it crashed its technology would stop working. They forgot that when it crashed they wouldn’t be able to spy any more...”

He took another sip of the strange-flavoured tea.

“And that’s why they’re coming! They’re coming back to find it! They want their UFO back!

“It’s why the world’s seems to be going mad! I mean, just you look at the way things are!”

© Peter Rogerson 27.01.18

*There’s a tome self-published by me on Lulu concerning Griselda’s political past. For anyone interested, it’s called Spellbound and I think it might have sold two copies over the last twenty or so years..