GRISELDA, BROOMSTICK RIDER

There is a great deal of mystery concerning the origin of a UFO

Griselda sat in her smallest armchair and studied Councillor Bumptious Tiddles with sparkling eyes, then shook her head almost sadly.

“You’re getting to be what I might call muddled,” she said almost crossly to the confused and confusing individual. “Who do you think sent the nuisance that blew up half the road, then, and why do they want it back? And more importantly, why did everyone call it an unidentified flying object when it was quite easily identified?”

Bumpy looked at her wearily. “It wasn’t actually identified, just that it wasn’t an alien object. That’s all that was identified, in a manner of speaking. It’s hard to tell,” he mumbled, “but the lettering on the inside of it was in terrestrial characters. Why, they might just as well have been printed on in the Brumpton print works, for that matter. Or anywhere they use the Roman alphabet when they scribble their shopping lists.”

“I dared say they didn’t end with Printed In China did they?” grinned Griselda.

“How did you know that?” demanded a shocked Bumptious. “We’ve kept that quiet in case people think it was all a joke.”

“Because everything is either made or produced or printed in China these days,” replied Griselda, “even the black lead that I use on the outside of my cauldron to keep it nice and hygienic and shiny comes from China these days.”

“But it was the letters that got us all pondering,” explained the Councillor, “I suppose they might have been anything, but they weren’t. They were actually the post-code of the part of the street that was hit!”

“The post office post code?” queried Griselda.

“Yes. DO 69 mp,” muttered Bumpy, “Any letter or parcel with that code on it is delivered to an address on this road. And that’s the only clue we’ve got. Someone tried to blast a few houses down the way to Kingdom Come and as far as we can tell, for no reason at all.”

“I can think of a few reasons knowing who lived in some of the houses,” muttered Griselda darkly. “There’s one family that regularly reports me to the police, and it’s a good job Sergeant Lockemup knows me well enough to know I’m not up to anything nefarious.”

“He’s a good man,” sighed the Parish Councillor.

“I’ve known him since he was a dewy-eyed constable, all bushy-tailed and handsome,” Griselda told him. “And now that he’s a sergeant he’s still dewy-eyed and bushy-tailed and handsome, and excessively fond of my niece who comes round to see me every so often. A good lass, the is, even if her skirts are usually too short for decency!”

“What do the neighbours complain about?” asked Bumptious, curiously.

“They say I go on midnight spins on my broomstick,” replied Griselda mischievously, “as if I was any old witch! But I don’t, of course. At least, not very often. I like to be in bed by ten thirty and asleep by eleven, so midnight joyrides are definitely out barring emergencies.”

Bumpy couldn’t help wondering what on Earth she meant by emergencies, but instead said in an exasperated sigh “Which doesn’t bring us any closer to working out who the enemy is. Personally I think the thing about it being printed in China might be a clue, but who in China wants to flatten country cottages in Swanspottleof all places? I mean, who in China has even heard of Swanspottle?”

“Chairman Mao?” suggested Griselda glibly, “he might have thought he was getting back at me seeing as we had a blazing row about senility on one of his birthdays. I suggested he might be about to suffer from senility when he started producing his little red book of nonsense.”

“But he’s been dead for years,” Bumpy told her, “and the dead can’t send UFOs to places they’ve never heard of!”

“Dead? He has? How terrible? Why hasn’t someone told me? I should have sent flowers!” shouted Griselda, but the twinkle in her eye might have told him she was joking had he noticed it.

“Well, he can’t have heard of Swanspottle, alive or dead,” snapped the Councillor.

“I met him,” chided Griselda, “and I’m sure I slipped him my address in case he found his way to this neck of the woods and needed somewhere to rest his head.”

As if that’s likely, sniffed Bumptious.

“Oh it was, Very likely,” purred Griselda, “I got about a bit back in the day.”

“So you can’t help?” asked the councillor wearily, changing the subject. “You were my last hope. Thomas the Greek, you know him, landlord of the Crowne and Anchor, suggested you might be the one to solve the problem. He said you were as old as the hills and so your extra experience might give you a clue as to where the damned thing came from and who wanted us all destroyed.”

“He did, did he? Old as the hills, eh? Wait till I pop into his pub next: I’ll put such a spell on his beer that it’ll be flat and undrinkable for the millennium!”

“I don’t think he meant any harm. He was trying to be helpful. After all, he lost most of his customers with the UFO hit.”

“And he’ll lose the ones he’s got left if he calls them old as the hills!” snapped Griselda. “Now, sonny, you can beetle off. I’ve got my second-best broomstick to supercharge and I can’t afford to wile away my life in idle prattle with council officials.”

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, then,” grunted the disgruntled Bumptious. “You were my last hope and now I’ve spent so long here sipping your extraordinary tea that I’ve missed the last bus to Brumpton where I’m supposed to report on the result of my investigations.”

“You don’t seem to have a result,” pointed out Griselda.

“They’ll still expect me, and my car’s off the road with a broken chassis,” he mumbled.

“Then I suppose you’ll expect me to give you a lift,” offered Griselda, a light in her eyes that suggested he might want anything but a lift from her. But he didn’t know her as well as a parish councillor ought to have known the oldest resident in his district and instead of doing anything but accept her offfer he smiled his delight.

“That would be very kind of you. I didn’t know you had a car,” he grinned.

“Oh, I haven’t,” she cackled, “but anything of the right dimensions will do and it so happens my third favourite broomstick is ready for a test-run.”

“How delightful,” he laughed, assuming her words were no more than examples of country humour from the olden days when she’d been young and sprightly.

His mind, though, underwent a total reversal when she carried a gnarled and knobbly old besom broom into the room from an outside shed where it had collected a few cobwebs.

“Here we are!” she screeched, shaking it and dusting the business end with a bright yellow duster, and she lifted one bony leg until she was sitting astride a particularly knobbly bit which had always generated a degree of erotic pleasure to her nether regions when she squeezed it with her bony cheeks. “On you get!” she added, “and we’ll be off!”

© Peter Rogerson 29.01.18