GRISELDA YELLS OUT LOUD

A very strange day for Swanspottle, with an important guest expected...

There was a sort of trembling in the air as Sergeant Lockemup stood in the doorway of the Crowne and Anchor and surveyed the scene down the road that led towards green woodland and greener fields beyond. His heart was thumping like it had never thumped before. He knew his responsibility, and it scared the wits out of him.

There was expectancy everywhere. The summer breeze vibrated with it. The pub had been cleaned (almost) from top to bottom because of it. Thomas the Greek was even wearing a new pair of boxer shorts, though nobody, of course, could see them, but he was wearing them as a consequence of it. The Reverend Daisy Duchess was sporting a brand new dog collar which almost shone against the scarlet shirt whose neck it surrounded as she hovered, glass of gin in hand, just behind the good sergeant.

“Is he here yet?” she slurred into his ears. She’d started praying early. Too early, some might suggest, for a woman of the cloth.

“Soon. He’ll be here soon,” nodded Lockemup, dreaming of Griselda Entwhistle’s niece who almost certainly was due to arrive in time to meet their guest because he knew exactly who the niece was.

And it was to be not just any guest.

This guest was to be the President of the United States of America and, as Griselda had gone to pains to explain, an all round good egg with a fondness for p***y cats and broomsticks. But the great wonder was he was coming all the way from his shiny Whitehouse to Swanspottle, and that was surely a treat for everyone, even him.

And then the furore began.

A dozen shining policemen with crash helmets uniformly on their smart heads and perched on shinier motor cycles emerged over the hill in the distance and slowly, majestically, using the full width of the road (which was necessary as it was a country road and not much more than a lane, really), purred towards them. Yes, purred! No nasty noisy motor cycles these but the sort that purr with power. The sort that make the already vibrating air take on a new vibrancy.

Not one official penny was being saved it it could be spent because this was a most important occasion. The best police motor cyclists on the best motor cycles was the order of the day.

They were the guard. No man, no woman even, not even a child, could have breached their defences as, gaunt of face under their helmets and twisting their throttles with the merest hint of menace they hummed along the main Swanspottle road. Even a flock of starlings settled in a field and bowed their feathered heads as those motor cycles hummed past.

Behind them came a saloon car. The driver, smart in an almost fluorescent uniform, saluted everyone in sight as he followed the gently moving motor cycle brigade. This was his one special day out of so many less special days and would have been made perfect but for one minor hitch, of which more later.

And the Swanspottle Road was lined with onlookers, mostly little old ladies in hats, and those onlooker were cheering and waving flags, some of them even American flags, and then, like a suddenly dying wind, falling silence.

Yes, as the car crawled along, so majestic it might have belonged to a deity or someone even more unlikely than that, the cheering silenced as though a conductor had whipped his baton to the ground.

Because the saloon car had within it a driver, and nobody else.

Where was the President? Where in the name of goodness had he got to? Why wasn’t he in the car? What was the entourage all about if he wasn’t there? And why were there tears on the chauffeur’s face?

Why, in fact, was the back seat of the saloon car empty?

But this was Swanspottle and in the past, but only rarely, the impossible had come about. Of course it had! There was history in the crumbling bricks and splintered beams of the ancient houses that even now were being rescued from destruction by a veritable army of craftsmen.

But that didn’t explain it. It didn’t explain anything.

And then something did.

Close behind the shining saloon car and in the air like a goddess, sitting on a refurbished and very special broomstick, came Griselda Entwhistle with a crafty smile on her battered old face, and sitting behind her, his comb-over blowing in the breeze, sat the President of the United States himself.

Yes, that great man elected by a canny public and smiling as though he might be on the verge of entering Heaven (where he no doubt was a major shareholder) was sitting behind the old hag Griselda Entwhistle and apparently enjoying the journey in the air behind and above the procession.

All of which made the crowds start cheering again.

Now, there is many a major politician on this humble planet who would have been less reluctant to accompany a geriatric witch on her broomstick than he would to swim the Atlantic on a stormy day in a day-glow pair of trunks, but the American President wasn’t one of those.

He was a happy aeronaut on that extraordinary day. He was smiling, even chuckling from time to time, and waving his hands at one and all, and one and all waved back. And one and all cheered. One and all stamped their feet, even the old ladies in hats, and the day was made complete when the President in a move so daring and dangerous that it would have gone down in history had the event been recorded on anything more sophisticated than an old Box Brownie. For the President in a moment that defied logic decided to stand up on the broomstick behind the craggy old Griselda Entwhistle and sing the American anthem of Stars and Stripes in a fine and rather pleasing baritone, choosing the wrong words and an incorrect key, but melodious nonetheless.

But the people cheered anyway.

The procession, slow still, and majestic, pulled in at the newly cleansed car park pf the Crowne and Anchor. There never was a shinier or straighter row of police motor cycles and there never was a more lonely saloon car and there never was a more triumphant witch with her broomstick as Griselda Entwhistle leapt down and, displaying huge courtesy, took the President, the actual real live breathing President of the United States, by one hand and led him off the knobbly shaft of her broomstick, and into the Crowne and Anchor.

“Pints for all,” she cackled at Thomas the Greek, and “On the House,” she added, and Thomas the Greek turned a white shade of pale when he thought of the cost.

And then gave in with good grace if using as many naughty words as he could in the longest sentence ever escaping a man’s mouth can be called good grace.

“I’m going to have a room exactly like this built on to the Whitehouse,” said the President as he sipped his beer.

And everyone cheered again, even those lining the road outside, and Griselda yelled out loud.

© Peter Rogerson 04.03.18.