GRISELDA GAINS HEIGHT

After a day's broomstick ride Griselda spots what looks like a pirate ship on the open seas...

Parish Councillor Bumptious Tiddles had never felt so cold in his entire life. It seemed to his battered mind that there hadn’t been a time in his life before he’d found himself perched behind an angular old witch on a broomstick and tearing through the Heavens at an unimaginable speed with what seemed to have turned into a freezing wind tearing into every square inch of his body. There had, of course been quite a lot of time before that, but the tortured mind can play the most evil tricks.

“We’ll take a break soon,” squawked Griselda, “I need a wee!”

Oh mercy me, he thought, I hope she doesn’t wet her pants up here and I get a stream of her noxious piss in my face…

“We’re approaching the coast,” she added, pointing at a golden line that separated the land from the not-so-distant sea where the sun was already setting, “we’ll find somewhere to hole up for the night because it’s getting dark and it might get a bit chilly during the night up here.”

Get a bit chilly over night? It might? What does she think it is now? I’m freezing at this very moment, freezing and ready to pop my clogs of hypothermia…

“All right,” he shivered, trying to sound brave.

“But it has been fun, hasn’t it?” she squawked as if it really had.

“So’s suicide,” he grumbled.

They flew on for several minutes longer, she encouraging their torturing transport ever lower, then “Lookee ahead, shipmate!” she squawked over her shoulder, “do you see what I see?”

He peered through the gathering gloom and saw what she could see, and didn’t believe his eyes.

Surely we’re in the 21^st century? The thought rattled through his brain, going in ever decreasing circles until it didn’t make sense any more.

For down below, getting closer as they sped towards it, was what could only be a pirate ship, the sort he’d seen in adventure comics when he’d been a boy. The kind with cannon and guns and swords and vicious men with eye-patches and parrots. The very kind on which brave men fought with unbelievable savagery or were tortured to death … or worse. And it was in full sail with a barbarous looking crew member in a crow’s nest high up the mast, gazing for all he was worth through a pair of binoculars and barely moving.

“There’s room there for us with that brave jack tar!” gurgled Griselda, and with surprising majesty she steered her broomstick towards the crow’s nest until they could quite clearly see that there just might be room on it for the two of them plus one mark 1 broomstick.

“Just the job,” cackled Griselda, and they landed.

The first thing Bumpy noticed was the simple delight he felt at the sudden absence of freezing wind in his face. It had after all been a balmy day and the wind that had tortured him had been created by the speed of the broomstick as they had hurtled along. The words wind-chill resonated hin his brain as he muttered that’s better and tried to pull himself together.

“We’ll get rid of this fellow,” decided Griselda, grabbing hold of the pirate with the binoculars and heaving him over the side where the wind caught him and he dropped with surprising slowness to land in the sea just behind the ship.

“That’s murder!” gasped Bumpy, horrified. Being a politician he didn’t like the idea of killing people unless it was him or his kind doing the killing. Then he might conclude that it was perfectly all right because it was for the common good.

“It was a stuffed dummy,” laughed Griselda. “Couldn’t you see where the stuffing was coming out? Didn’t you wonder why he wasn’t moving much? He’s here for decoration, possibly of an educational nature.”

But Bumptious couldn’t see anything. The crow’s nest was high up at the top of a mighty mast, and there was a gentle swell in the sea that made the whole thing sway, and as the swell increased, so did the swaying. And right there at the top of the tall mast the swaying was considerable. It shook his already enfeebled stomach. It made him feel more ill than he’d ever felt in his life before.

“I feel sick...” he gurgled, and, leaning over the side of the crow’s nest, he discharged the noxious contents of his stomach onto the deck far below. He couldn’t help it and in all honesty there was nowhere else he could have vomited without getting the foul corruption all over either himself or Griselda, not that he would have minded the latter option.

He watched as the bilious mixture descended via the gift of gravity and landed, eventually, on the tricorn hat of a pirate captain. He’d watched with a sort of horror as the captain had walked towards the mast and the vomit had descended. He’d anticipated at the last moment what would happen.

“Good shot!” wheezed Griselda. “Do that again if you can!”

Bumptious needed no second invitation as his internal organs heaved in time with each other and another, smaller but more foetid, dollop of accumulated semi-digested matter erupted from his mouth and flew accelerating at thirty-two feet per second squared towards the unfortunate recipient of the first toxic gift. And that recipient, startled by the sudden assault on his sensibilities by dollop number one, just managed to look up in order to see what was going on and to determine where the mess had come from when dollop number two splattered onto his face at some considerable speed.

“What the...” he raged, but to no avail. He could see the crow’s nest in the gathering gloom but there was no way he could distinguish between the stuffed sailor that had been placed there as an educational aid on a ship used to teach children the finer arts of piracy, and any other figure. And he knew for an absolute certainty that stuffed sailors, when they vomit, discharge stuffing of a cotton-woolly fibrous nature and not the foul stuff that was dripping off his hat and lay splattered on his face making him want to heave in sympathy.

“What the … what’s going on?” he bellowed.

“Sorry sir. It’s my parish councillor,” explained Griselda as sweetly as she could, bellowing from the top of the mast, “he’s got an upset tummy, the poor dear.”

“Just you wait!” he bellowed, “I’m going to have a shower then I’ll be back! Don’t you go anywhere or I’ll make you walk the plank, see if I don’t!”

He scurried off, his tricorn dripping and his face flushed with outrage, as you might expect. From where she stood in the crow’s nest Griselda could smell him as he scrambled off.

“Now look what you’ve done,” scorned Griselda, “you’ve got right up the back of a haughty captain on a pirate ship, and he has the power of life and death over scum like us!”

“There aren’t any pirates any more,” said Bumpy glumly, “they all went away a long time ago.”

“Then who do you think that bloke you puked on was?” demanded Griselda, “I’ve never seen anyone more like a pirate in my life!”

“I thought you said they were educational,” simpered a still nauseous Bumptious.

“They are, and that might be worse for you,” agreed Griselda, “it depends how many kids they’ve got aboard and just how pirate-like they feel. And you’d better hope they haven’t covered walking the plank and keel-hauling in their lessons yet because if they have life could get very interesting indeed for a land-lubber like yourself!”

Bumptious didn’t have very long at all to mull over Griselda’s gruesome suggestion before there was a sudden and very loud explosion of noise, and out of cabins and from below decks an army of ten year-olds dressed in all manner of piratical costumes and screaming at the tops of their voices swarmed onto the deck and stood in a threatening mass of undisciplined monsters below the main mast, gazing malevolently up and shaking their fists as though intent on murder, or worse.

© Peter Rogerson 03.02.18