She loved her Gran, but she still loved and missed her mum very much. She did her very best, though, to keep her feelings about losing her mum to herself, locked up, along with the broken bit of heart inside her; a sad and silent sort of secret.
As she walked along, she remembered hearing how her mum was something called a ‘single-mum,’ which she’d thought at the time a really strange idea.
“How could a mum be anything else, you only had one mum after all, didn’t you?”
Then she’d heard that her mum had some sort of a ‘syndromey’ thing and so had to go away for “full-time care” in a special hospital.
Her Grandma had taken overlooking after her then, so now it was just her and her Gran, and of course Jemima the parrot and Jericho the cat, living all alone, but happily, in their colourful and cosy caravan by the edge of the Good Wood.
The long-awaited summer holidays had arrived, and Mary eagerly looked forward to many days of roaming the woods, without the interference of having to go to school. She knew that her missing lessons and ‘bunking’ off school caused her Gran a lot of trouble.
She also knew, as her legal guardian, her Gran had already been seen by the Social Police Service. Mary had ‘accidentally’ looked at a letter that Grannie had left lying about a month or so ago. The SPS had voiced their grave concerns that her Grannie Maddam may not in fact be suitable as Mary’s Guardian.
The last thing Mary wanted was to be taken away and put in some horrid Psychonomy Institution and so lose her Gran as well as her mum.
But it wasn’t in Mary’s nature to dwell on such things for too long.
“Poor ol’ Grannie, she does suffer from her bone aches and such like,” Mary thought as she walked onward and strengthened her resolve to find the needed White Willow Bark.
“It’s probably juss too much of her home-brew, herb-cordials, and all her smoking too,” she added as an afterthought, shaking her head with a motherly sigh.
Mary’s worry about her Gran’s health and unorthodox ways and so-called ‘bad habits’ were of real concern to her. She did her very best to disguise this and keep cheerful though, but the truth was - Home was definitely where the Hurt was.
“And where do you think you’re off to?” boomed Mr. Briggs from his ground floor study, just as Roger, his one and only son and heir, came creeping down the sweeping stairway, doing his level best to evade just such an encounter.
“I thought I’d go out for a b-b-bit, to do scientific field work, Father,” Roger answered.
“Well, have you done your homework? Where are you now on the school class rankings? Are you still the top of your class, eh? Well, you’d better be, my boy. We can’t have a Briggs slacking off now, can we?”
“Yes, S-s-sir; I mean n-n-no, F-f-father; I mean yes, I have d-d-done my homework… and yes, I’m still t-t-top of the class. At l-l-least I was - when we were l-l-last tested, Sir!”
“Harrumph! Well, let’s keep it that way, eh? We have to show the world what the Briggs’s are made of, eh? And I see you still have that silly stammer of yours. Just when are you going to grow up and get rid of it boy, eh? Pure affectation it is, I say, pure affectation!”
“Yes, F-f-father; I mean, s-s-sorry, Father. I’ll try to get rid of it, I p-p-promise.”
“Well, see that you do, my boy, see that you do! Don’t you forget, I am now an elected Councillor of Inglande, serving on the Under Lundun Council.”
“Yes, F-f-father. I mean, no Father.”
“And that I’m standing for election as Prime Councillor this year. So, we all need to be smart and on the ball in the Briggs family right now, now don’t we, Roger?”
“Yes, S-s-sir, of course. I’m sure the f-f-field work helps my school r-r-results too, Sir.”
“Very good, very good; well carry on then, Roger, and no getting into any mischief, right?
“R-r-right Sir. Yes sir.”
“Good. I don’t want you getting mixed up with that riffraff that attends your state school. Really, if it wasn’t for your mother keeping you tied to her apron strings, I’d have boarded you out years ago, no matter the Psychonomy’s policies on such things.”
“Yes, S-s-sir,” agreed Roger meekly, as Mr Briggs indicated he was dismissed.
Then, just as he thought he was free, his mother came bustling in through the front door, carrying a hat box under one arm and a rolled-up newspaper under the other. And she wasn’t in a good mood.
“Brian dear, will you kindly instruct the paper boy to desist from hurling your paper into our front porch? It’s most uncouth and downright dangerous too. This newspaper thingy nearly had me right over. It would have totally ruined my new hat if I’d been tumbled over. It’s really not on, Brian. Brian, do you hear me!”
“Yes dear, I mean no dear, of course, dear, err… not on at all dear.” Mr Briggs replied, suddenly quite meek himself.
He dutifully took the paper Mrs Briggs rammed into his ribs, after depositing her precious hat box onto the hall stand.
Roger could see boldly blazoned across the newspaper’s front page, the startling headline:
THE DAILY BEACON: - Saturday, August 8th. 1951.
‘THE FUTURE IS SAFE! ATOMIC POWER WILL SOON BE OURS!!!
“Government Scientists have now scheduled a series of experiments over the next six months for the production of Atomic Power. The series of experiments will be overseen by a joint team of top scientists from Ameriga and Inglande, headed by Professor Kluxklu of…”
At this point, Roger’s attention was pulled away from the paper as his mother stepped abruptly between him and his father. His father, seeing his opportunity, quietly shrank back into his study with the newspaper and closed the door.
Roger’s rather shrill and excitable mother had now decided to directly address, what she considered, was her somewhat weak and ailing only child by giving him the doubtful benefit of her motherly attention.
“Now, now Roger, whatever are you up to? You know you mustn’t go out without a scarf! And do you have enough hankies with you, dearest?” she demanded, in a burst of effusive and frantic fussing, pulling him to her ample bosom and taking a scarf from the nearby hat stand and wrapping it around his neck several times.
Roger grimaced and showed her his wodge of hankies in his pockets. “Very well, dear, now don’t be late and do keep warm and away from any, er, well you know… bad people.”
With that, Roger finally scuttled across the hall and out the front door as fast as he could.
“Free at last, and its Froghopper day!” he gasped with great relief as he hurried away from the large and austere Manor-house perched on the outskirts of upmarket Mottington.
Roger Briggs was what, in olden times (at least as far back as the last century when Queen Victoria was on the throne) was called a “swot.” A swot is someone who likes to read books a lot and study and to do well at school and all that sort of thing.
And Roger did indeed love nothing more than reading, studying, experimenting and learning stuff! His favourite subjects all being scientific ones.
Now you may well ask, “Well, what’s wrong with that, surely, they are all good things, aren’t they? So, therefore, we should all be swots, right?”
And the answer to that of course is yes, you’re quite right. However, the trouble with Roger was that he was only a swot. He thought he just had no time, and definitely no interest, for anything else but his books and his studies, as he was repeatedly taught at School, it was: ‘Science and Law and Nothing More!’
The straight and simple truth though was he really believed that nobody had any time or any interest in him. He would tell you, if you asked him, that his most favourite subject of all was something called ‘entomology.’ This, however, was just the fancy word that he liked to use to either impress, or to put off other people from bugging him about it, ‘entomology’ of course merely being the important sounding name that so-called ‘proper’ scientists had for the Scientific Study of Insects.