JOSIAH PYKE AND THE QUEEN OF TEARS

Some church activities are less well organised than others...

“I’m not having you parading around dressed like that!” shrieked a sudden frantic voice in the middle of the Church Garden Party. It was an annual event and, miracle above all miracles, very successful and even profitable, enabling the Reverend Simeon Crow to apportion funds to his two favourite charities, namely the Simeon Crow Bequest to Darkest Africa and the bar of The Bull and Crow which was a spit and a spat from the old Victorian vicarage where he held his highly peculiar domestic court.

The sudden discordant screech came courtesy of the lungs of Ophelia Jones’s mother. Ophelia had come along surprisingly late in her life and she had reached an age that most people would consider retiring at before her child became a woman, or almost one. The grind of child rearing wasn’t helped by the departure of her husband, via the cemetery of Saint Gertrude’s Church before her daughter was three years old.

The one thing everyone could say of Ophelia now that she was eighteen and a half was that she was a beauty. There was no doubt on that front, and here she was entering the Goosebury Beauty Pageant as a contestant for the coveted crown of Beauty Queen, an annual favourite event at the Church Garden Party. And just prior to her mother’s enraged squawk she had removed a flimsy dressing gown to reveal her body in all its splendour in the prettiest bikini ever seen in Goosebury. It wasn’t any more revealing than any other bikini in the contest, but its prettiness, the way its hues reminded everyone instantly of desert islands and far off places, gave it a unique charm. And what’s more, Ophelia had made it herself from a pattern in a teenage magazine for nimble-fingered girls.

And her mother clearly objected.

“Stop it, mother!” hissed an embarrassed Ophelia, “I need the prize!”

“You are NOT, repeat NOT, to be seen dressed like that!” screeched her mother. “I won’t have it! It’s disgusting!”

“It’s perfectly proper!” replied her daughter, and she joined the half dozen contestants in one of the loveliest queues seen in Goosebury that year.

The Reverend Simeon Crow decided it was time to intervene. “Excuse me,” he said in his holiest voice, “can I help you, Mavis?”

Mavis was the young Ophelia’s distraught mother, and she looked at his reverence with scornful eyes. “It’s all your doing!” she snapped, “the things you let those girls get up to! I’ve heard!”

The fact that she’d heard nothing reliable, though the odd rumour was bound to do the rounds in a tight community like that of Goosebury, what with the housekeepers at the Vicarage and the fact that they were all troubled young creatures in need of whatever it was the vicar provided. But she was sure as sure, now that her daughter was exposing her beautiful flesh for public view, who was to blame.

“I think, my dear, that comes under the banner of slander,” said Simeon quietly, “and in court you wouldn’t be helped by the number of witnesses who will attest to your scurrilous comments.”

That put the brakes on Mavis Jones’s tirade, and she stared open-eyes at the vicar. She couldn’t believe her ears or the threat. In court? Accused by a vicar? Who would believe who in that kind of contest? It was all that damned girl’s fault! She’d been nothing but trouble since the day she was born.

“But it ain’t right,” she almost wept after her mind had charged in circles round all kinds of thoughts and arrived at no conclusion other than the obvious one, that Ophelia was a disgrace to womankind being dressed like that. Why, it was a lovely summer’s day, she could feel the sun beating on her through the overcoat she knew she must wear just in case, but a lass should always bear in mind the saintliness of modesty.

“She looks perfectly all right to me,” murmured Simeon, “she’s as the good Lord made her, a beautiful young woman entering a competition to determine which beauty in Goosebury is the loveliest of them all, and there can’t be any harm in that, surely? Harm in what the good Lord created? If I were you, Mavis, I’d be asking myself why I’m so critical of our Saviour’s handiwork and why I’m criticising him.”

“But … look at her!” wept Mavis, and not even she could really see anything but good in the loveliness of her daughter. But she was determined to be right. She had her standards, standards set by her parents before her, and their parents, and they were good and proper and decent standards. They made sure that girls stayed on the straight and narrow. They kept boys away. “She’s in sin,” she whispered, “my Ophelia’s in sin...”

Josiah Pyke, the curate, chose that moment to start introducing the contestants one by one, and conducting a little interview with them in turn, asking simple little questions designed to tease out the very best of the best from the hearts and hopes of the girls in a line before him.

“And we have Ophelia Jones,” he said when it came to her turn into a creaky microphone that had probably seen service before the second world war. “Tell me, Ophelia, what do you intend to do with your life?”

“I wish to get married to a wonderful man,” she said, shy as only a teenage girl in her first public appearance can be.

“Why, that’s wonderful,” said a bored Josiah Pyke, “do we know the name of that wonderful man?”

“I haven’t met him yet,” she almost whispered, “but when I do I’ll know that he’s the right one.”

“And are there any things you particularly like?” he asked.

“You’d do.”

“Pardon?”

“As my wonderful man. You’d do.” Her voice had risen beyond a virtually inaudible cracked whisper and sounded, suddenly, boldly across the garden party as fractured wires in the microphone lead made a more thorough connection.

A few people laughed. One or two sniggered. One old lady was heard to say there’s just too much of that kind of thing about these days and no good’ll come of it, mark my words…

It was a good thing that besides being bored Josiah Pyke had his quick response hat on.

“I was asking,” he said into the suddenly rejuvenated microphone, “I was asking what sort of things you particularly like?”

“Oh, sorry,” she said quietly, blushing, and then she remembered the instructions intended for girls in her position in a beauty parade printed in the same magazine that had offered the pattern for her bikini.

“I like animals,” she said, modesty and beauty combined into a celebration of the most pure and perfect young womanhood, “and I want to be a vet.”

“What a wonderful ambition,” smiled Josiah at her.

“And if I can’t do that, I want to work with little children. I love little children and I want to help them,” she almost whispered into the microphone.

“Thank you, let me see, it’s Ophelia, isn’t it?” said Josiah consulting his list. “Let’s give her a round of applause!”

And the gathered assemblage did just that, and Ophelia smiled back at them and bowed, and as she did so, it may have been her stitching (she’d never had high marks when she’d done domestic studies and sewing at school) or it may have been some mischief sent there by the gods, but her very pretty bikini top chose that moment for the strap to break and the tiny bulk of it fly off into the crowd, revealing two nervously pretty breasts.

“That’s it!” screeched Mavis Jones, “that’s it indeed! I never want to see you again, you hussy! You’re no daughter of mine, not any longer you’re not!”

And with her thick overcoat pulled around her so that there would be no possible chance of mother imitating daughter, she stormed off, through the small crowds, and home.

“Well I never,” sighed the Reverend Josiah Pyke, curate of the parish, as he removed his summer jacket and offered it to the tearful Ophelia in order that she might cover up her embarrassment.

“Thanks,” she said coyly, and held it to her chest before turning away from the audience and putting it on, and then, turning back, she winked at him.

“Like I said, you could be the one,” she whispered, and scurried back into the contestant’s tent.

Oh no, thought Josiah Pyke, I wish I was anywhere else but here…

When it came to the judging a weeping Ophelia was eliminated. She had to be, really. Her breasts gave her too much of an advantage over the other girls who’d had the decency to keep theirs covered up.

Which made Ophelia Jones the queen of tears.

© Peter Rogerson 22.03.18