GRISELDA LEARNS HORSEMANSHIP

Griselda encounters a weird horse woman on board the cruising ship

The notice board was full of fascinating activities to make the mouths of the cruise passengers all water with anticipation as fluid as hungry or greedy mouths can. There were banquets and feasts by the score on this or that deck and in this or that lounge/dining room/restaurant with the promise of an early heart attack if you gorged your way through half of them. A posse of passengers was dribbling as they soaked up the most tempting of the notices with eyes incapable of seeing past their own stomachs.

Then there were drinking competitions in Sailor John’s bar, with him dressed as a hunky tattooed boozer designed to encourage further purchases of the strong stuff. There was even a picnic on a middle deck, with tuna sandwiches, cucumber twirls and champagne. Every taste seemed to be catered for.

Even Griselda’s.

For the occasion as they sauntered around the ship as if they owned it Griselda had decided it might be wise not to be in the person of her own young niece, largely because her geriatric persona fitted in better with the general condition and ages of the other passengers. She had been grateful to notice quite a who were unmistakably in what she looked on as the more mature brigade, and in all honesty maintaining her alter ego put a few strains on her thought processes, largely because wrinkles that had been well established over a considerable lifetime had a nasty habit of returning if her concentration lapsed.

“Look!” she squawked to her political companion, Bumptious Tiddles, pointing at a small notice with tatty edges tucked almost out of sight at the bottom of the notice board, “that’s for us!”

“Jousting on deck?” he queried, horrified. “You do know what jousting is, I presume?”

“Racing around on horseback with a dirty long pole and murder in the heart!” she laughed, “of course I do! My grandfather told me that he was into jousting way back in his youth. He was quite old when I knew him, probably three hundred or so. You do know that I come from a family that is blessed with marvellous longevity, don’t you?”

“Three hundred?” gasped Bumpy.

“Probably. He’s dead now, of course. Even Entwhistles can’t live for ever, you know even after enjoying a diet made up mostly of lamb chops and pork scratchings. I wept when he died, and helped carry his coffin to the coast. He was loaded onto a timber raft complete with roses and a black flag, and the whole kit and caboodle set alight at sunset. Then off it want, bobbing on a gentle sea into the distance. I never did see such a wonderful sight as he leapt from out of his coffin, waved a fist at us mourners and told us in a really angry voice that he was still sleepy and he’d be back to haunt us when he woke properly. We knew he was kidding, of course. The dead don’t get sleepy.”

“What’s all that got to do with galloping round a twenty-first century luxury cruise ship deck with a long pole?” asked a grumpy Bumpy.

“You’ll see!” cackled Griselda, “Come on!”

The notice concerning a jousting tournament aboard ship hadn’t attracted too much attention and the only other entrants were there in error. The horsey woman in charge had a whip she was fond of cracking and a pair of shady blue extremely crossed eyes, which didn’t help when it came to not wounding her clients with that whip. Then there was a young couple who wanted the world to know they were very much in love, and some of the indiscreet little signals they made to each other made Griselda giggle.

“I remember when me and one of my beaus in my younger days did stuff like that,” she grinned as the girl stole a clandestine squeeze of the young man’s bottom.

Bumptious might have said he couldn’t imagine anything less likely, but thought it better not to mention his personal lack of imagination.

The only other passenger who showed even a modicum of enthusiasm for jousting was an elderly gentleman who carried a white stick, and not for decorative reasons, as was soon made evident by the way he collided with Griselda, spilling a cup of thankfully cooling tea down her considerably dated skirt.

“Silly old fool,” growled Griselda.

“Pardon?” he asked sweetly, “you’re not trying to chat me up, by any chance?”

“Now gather round!” roared the horse woman, cracking her whip. “You must understand that we don’t have real horses aboard this ship. We wanted them, of course, but the animal protection people, sod them, said it might be cruel subjecting the real McCoy to life on the briny. So we’ve got mechanical beasts!”

“What on Earth…?” whispered Bumptious as a metal and plastic creation that bore only a slight resemblance to a knackered old horse was encouraged to roll onto the deck through a doorway that opened all by itself.

“This is Lord of the Dance, my favourite,” shouted the whip woman with an expression of almost perverted lust on her face and shining from her eyes.

“Come here, sweetie,” she whispered, and the contraption rattled and jolted towards her.

“Isn’t he sweet?” she asked to nobody in particular.

“A fine stallion!” croaked the blind man.

“Put your hands a little bit further...” squealed the young lover, and Griselda wondered where the young man’s hands might be to excite his beloved to such extremes of noisy excitement. She frowned anyway. The whole passionate affair brought back an ancient memory in her old head, and she felt momentarily jealous.

Meanwhile Miss Horsewhip had climbed onto the back of the mechanical beast, and the odd tin-plate part of its construction fell off with a clatter.

“You control the beast like this!” she roared, cracking her whip and dislodging the elderly gentleman’s white stick from his grip so that he spun round unable to orientate himself.

Then her tragic beast reared up and snorted. A sound like Griselda imagined that the three horses of the apocalypse might make when outraged by demonic forces on a dull afternoon issued forth, and Bumpy was obliged to cover his ears with both hands.

“See how mighty he is!” roared the whip-wielding harridan, and she proceeded to make it gallop round the deck at a speed approaching that of an arthritic snail. Her momentum may have left a great deal to be desired but the associated rattling and flying tinplate components didn’t as the mechanical steed cast off its metal flesh in every direction.

Meanwhile the beast’s rider stood upright on its decomposing back and gazed manically at those she was meant to be teaching the subtle arts of jousting. “To Heaven and Back!” she roared, and she grabbed a jousting lance from a stand at the edge of the deck and proceeded to wave it randomly. She hooked it into the young lover’s pretty pink dress and contrived to undress her with one flick of an uncontrolled wrist before being thrown by her steed into the air and, in dreadful slow-motion, over the rail, ending up in the sea.

A junior seaman sauntered up and pulled her back onto the deck with a sardonic, “you’d think she’d learn! Every bloody day!” before vanishing into the bowels of the ship with a sack of dead metal horse, rusting rivets and a welding torch. Miss Jousting lay gasping and dripping with a small octopus clinging to her hair, and reaching for her whip.

“Well, my dear, you really ought to wear knickers,” said Griselda to the young lover when all was calm again, “because without them you’ll catch your death!” she added. “Come on, Bumpy, let’s go and gorge ourselves on caviare and dumplings in the posh restaurant!”

© Peter Rogerson 13.02.18