GRISELDA NEARS LAND

It's time for the two intrepid passengers to leave the luxury cruiser and take to the skies again

They had been at sea for about a week and Griselda was getting twitchy.

“We’re not far off,” she growled at Bumptious Tiddles as she tossed and turned in her bunk that night. “We need to be off,” she added.

“I’m trying to sleep,” he replied wearily, “I need my beauty sleep...”

“I hope you’ve got your passport, then,” she snarled, “because if you haven’t the Americans are very security conscious and might get it into their heads that you’re some kind of terrorist, and then who knows what they’ll do with their sub-machine guns.”

“You know I haven’t brought anything with me!” he snapped back at her. “It’s your fault that I’m all these miles from home, and no papers or anything.”

“I could always hand you over to the Captain as a stowaway,” she grinned, teasingly, “nobody really knows how many of the old punishments are still allowed to punish stowaways. They might bind you to a mast and flog the skin off your back. Or they might erect a plank for you to walk over until you step off the end and plunge into the dreadful briny. Or...”

“Okay, okay!” he interrupted her, “so what do I do now we’re just about where you want to get to?”

“We fly the last lap!” laughed Griselda. “I left my broomstick safely parked in a shaded little alcove where nobody is likely to go, and we’ll slip out under the cover of night, and Bob’s your father’s brother, we’ll end up in the land of the free in time for breakfast!”

“The cover of night? It’s night now!”

“I know. That’s why I woke you. You’ll have plenty of time for sleep when we get to the residence of the President and I sort out that UFO business with him. After all, we can’t have other people’s presidents demolishing quaint English villages, can we?”

“That’s why I knocked your door in the first place,” he replied, grateful that suddenly and completely out of the blue their mission seemed to have got back on track. “We thought you’d know what to do about the UFO.”

“So everything’s hunky-dory,” grinned Griselda. “Now how shall I travel? I think I’d better adopt a disguise rather than go as a grumpy old woman with warts! Let me see. I could be my niece. I like being her because I like the way men look at me and my short skirts, all very tasteful but they seem to find them provocative, but it might not be appropriate to flash my thighs to a mighty President.”

“From what I’ve heard he wouldn’t mind,” grunted Bumptious.

“Maybe not, but it’s always wise not to be too flirty until you know which way the wind’s blowing,” she told him. “Mistakes are more easily rectified if they’re not made in the first place!”

“So what are you going to do?” He was still in awe of her ability to transform herself into the niece he had almost been besotted by back in the Crowne and Anchor in Swanspottle, and the suggestion that she might have other disguises intrigued him.

“I remember a school ma’am I suffered under when I was knee-high to a grasshopper,” she muttered, “Miss Thrashem, and she was well named I can assure you. Teachers were encouraged to do a great deal of thrashing back then. It was assumed that fear of a good beating made their students behave and learn what was put in front of them. It didn’t work, of course, and anyway Miss Thrashem didn’t need an excuse to wield her cane.”

“Didn’t parents complain?” asked an almost horrified Bumpy.

“Oh, not very often. The rule was if your nipper was thrashed at school he or she must have done something wrong and deserved a second beating when they got home for being caught! There were one heck of a lot of bruises around in those days.”

“Life must have been horrible,” he shuddered.

“It was,” she said tartly, “unless you were Griselda Entwhistle, that is. I wasn’t going to have any gnarly old teacher beating my bottom with her instrument of torture, and it didn’t take long for her to get the message. I had my, what would you call them, powers? Yes, powers, and I had them from an early age.”

“I’ll bet the rest of the kids were jealous!”

“They didn’t know. I wasn’t the sort to show off and was wise enough to know that if you’ve got a secret weapon it’s best to keep it secret. So nobody except Miss Thrashem knew that if she tried to put weals on my bottom equally painful weals would erupt on hers! And it took her no time at all to make the discovery and leave me well alone! So I’ll be a severe middle-aged spinster like she was and carry a walking-cane as if it was a weapon ready to be wielded at need!”

And with no further ado she did her famous incoherent muttering and rapidly her outline wibbled and wobbled until she was no longer the crusty old witch but a very severe thin-lipped woman of an indeterminate age with indeterminate hair and an indeterminate expression on her face.

“That’s scary,” breathed Bumptious.

“So it ought to be!” she rapped back at him, and he couldn’t help the finger of fear that formed inside him as he looked at the unbelievably callous creature in front of him as she thrashed the air with her walking cane.

“I don’t like it,” he breathed, “you’re not like that. Nothing like that.”

“The President doesn’t know what I’m like,” she retorted, and he marvelled how Griselda had even managed to cover her teeth with an ochre impurity that even tainted her breath when she spoke.

“When are we going, then?” asked Bumpy fearing the answer even though he knew that the question must be asked.

“Now!” she replied, “while I’m in the mood for soaring across the face of the moon. You’re in for a treat, I can tell you. It might be the middle of the night but it’s still quite warm up above. Come on!”

“What? Right now?”

“There’s no time better than the present,” she told him in her thinnest school ma’am voice, and he could almost hear the thwack of a cane as she tried to underline each syllable.

“Your childhood must have been scary,” was all he could say.

“Oh, it was, young man, it most certainly was,” grinned Griselda, “Now come on and we’ll leave this miserably ship behind us. Before us lies glory and honour and a chat with an idiot!”

“What? The President?” asked Bumpy.

“Yes. And him too,” she replied, and somehow managed a very Griselda-type cackle. “Come on!”

And that was their last hour aboard the luxury cruiser. Somehow they had managed, with no doubt considerable invisible assistance from the magical Griselda, to avoid being apprehended as stowaways. Nobody of any importance had even known they were aboard the ship. Sailor John did, of course, but he assured them both that he would keep schtum, a promise that a little bit of muttering from Griselda would ensure he kept.

The broomstick was, indeed, where Griselda had left it. But then there was no chance that anyone would have discovered it, not with the words she had muttered over it when they had first left it in the alcove.

Then, and much to Bumptious’ regret, they were airborne. He was still painfully aware of the area of his backside that had been grated by an irksome nobble of the shaft of the broomstick, and he sighed and shook his head.

And a radar beam from a heightened security outpost on the American coast swept over them and made one half sozzled officer shake his head and wonder what on Earth was going on out there over the alien seas, and were there really witches in the real world?

© Peter Rogerson 15.02.18