BLUE-EYED BLONDS

Maybe it was in her genes...

Petunia had been born at a time when there was no certainty about life even being continued beyond the moment. It was a time of conflict and the news on the radio was full of bombs raining down from the heavens, though one never rained down near where she lived and now she was approaching her eightieth year she could honestly say she’d never witnessed anything of the sort in the real world. There were television programmes, of course, and the odd bomb added a bit of spice to dramas and a lot of pain to current affairs.

But back to her birth.

Her mother had been a bit of a local celebrity and quite a few odd events were attributed to her apparently superhuman powers. Some even suggested that the lack of enemy bombs was down to her and her cauldron, but she always denied it.

She was fifty when Petunia was born, an age that even then was considered a little on the old side for a woman to bear her first and only child. But she had made up her mind that it would be nice to become a mother and had arranged a dalliance with an American airman from his base, which backed onto her small back garden. He had been willing enough to slip over her fence, and his seed had been extraordinarily copious, possibly as a side-effect of the delicious glass of punch that she encouraged him to imbibe, not that he needed much encouragement.

Once she was impregnated he left the scene. She might have invited him back for a second evening of pleasure, a sort of belt-and-braces assurance that all would be well and her offspring would arrive in due course, but he was sent back to his home across the sundering seas suffering from a fascinating rash on his nether regions, one that was beyond the skills even of American medics to identify.

So Petunia came along and it was immediately clear that she was extraordinary. But let’s not be over hasty in the telling of this tale. I have no intention of intimating that she inherited any of her mother’s extraordinary talents. She didn’t need to, because she had a whole set of her own, and they were considerably more astounding.

She had the evil eye.

There was nothing she could do about it. She had no more control over what it did than does a puppy have control of its bladder if left on its own all day. If there was something she didn’t approve of then all she had to do was bend her will via her eyes towards it, and things happened. Bad things were put right. Life was made more harmonious. At least, that was the idea (if she had one).

Like the time when the teacher at her Junior school wanted to administer punishment of an unkind and possibly cruel nature because her nose dribbled onto her exercise book causing an unsightly smear.

“Come here, Petunia!” she rasped, and picked up a long knobbly stick. Petunia knew about that stick and decided she didn’t like the whole idea of being hit with it. So she fixed Miss Musgrove with her deadly blue eyes.

That teacher sprouted a pair of ears that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a donkey and a tail to match. It wasn’t deliberate on the part of Petunia. Far from it. All she really wanted to do was to get Miss Musgrove to understand that she couldn’t help her nose dripping because it was a cold day and anyway she had a cold, but instead of stammering her excuses in a verbal and understandable way she caught Miss Musgrove with her evil eye, and there was a certain inevitability about the consequences. A pair of donkey ears, firmly fixed with muscles and veins attaching them to the head of the unfortunate but unkind teacher, and a tail.

Other events followed over the time she was a schoolgirl, not many because it didn’t take long for the rest of the children to realise that you didn’t mess with Petunia, and if you did dreadful things would ensue. So there were not so many monstrously deformed children at her school, though how Robin Cartwright got rid of his hideously knobbly knees was never properly understood by anyone but a particularly skilful surgeon from China.

It was whilst she was in her later years at school that her mother, still quite young by most standards, passed quietly away whilst seeking nirvana in a cocktail that contained, amongst several other ingredients, a little too much arsenic. It was a salutary lesson for the growing Petunia, and she learned it well and decided there and then that she was never going to imbibe anything containing arsenic, even if she lived to be one hundred (which she may do).

So Petunia became an adult with several “A” level certificates. But clever as she was, it wasn’t her intellectual attainments that marked her out as different. She was extraordinarily beautiful. It was said by most people that no young woman had the right to be so amazingly attractive. Her hair (long, past her waist when she stood up, of course, and blond) was described as perfect by one and all, her complexion unmarked (she never once had a dose of acne), her eyes, those evil eyes, a wonderful sky blue (if it’s a summer cloudless sky) and even her nose had about it the right kind of tilt to melt hearts.

And that nose did melt hearts. It wasn’t just boys who worshipped her charms, but quite a few girls doted on her as well. And she encouraged worshippers of both sexes because she was a genuinely friendly person, albeit with an evil eye.

Then Tony came along.

He was a scruffy young man with a misshapen nose that bent savagely to the left, protruding ears and one leg quite a bit shorter than the other, which meant that he limped rather obviously. But when he saw Petunia he fell for her lock, stock and barrel. She filled his eyes and then his brain with her stunning perfection. He even imagined what she would look like naked, which was a foolish thing to do because it sent him totally insane. It would, wouldn’t it, bearing in mind his own many imperfections?

Tony was threatened with an asylum for the dreadfully insane. They had to do something, really, because every time he saw Petunia he exposed himself to her even when she wasn’t looking his way, which most times. And by every time I mean every time he saw her, and as he had to pass her home twice a day on foot to go to and from work (they’d left school, of course, by now and he worked as a milkman’s assistant.) his trouser zip was up and down like a yo-yo.

Which is where her evil eye came in. But this time it did something truly extraordinary.

When he saw her on one particular occasion he performed his usual trick with his trouser zip, and she noticed for once.

Which was when he grew at least a foot taller, his nose straightened out, his ears became more placid and an amazing regrowth in one of his legs made it match the other one. The limp went in an instant, and he could stand up straight.

She fell for him at once, of course. After all, it had been her bright blue eyes that had crafted him. And in the rest of the world any talk of a lunatic asylum was forgotten. They even got married and here’s the very best thing that happened so far as Tony was concerned.

Her evil eye caused a spectacular growth in a particularly private part of his anatomy, which ended up with her giving birth to half a dozen of the prettiest girls you ever did see, all with blond hair and wonderful sky-blue eyes and the look of their mother about them.

And between them, mother and daughters were a force to reckon with if you needed to reckon with anything.

And, any blokes out there, take note of any blue eyed blonds that pass you by, and avoid them like the plague! They might be Petunia’s precious offspring.

© Peter Rogerson 02.08.21

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