1. THE EARLY YEARS.

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

Introducing Ursula at both the end and the start of her life.

Ursula Spandex hadn’t lived to a grand old age (she was in her nineties and still contemplated the possibility of running the odd Marathon once her hip replacement had settled in) without asking herself why that should be. After all, there were old ladies who had been in the same class at school as Primrose, her one and only daughter, and they’d died of old age and infirmity already. So had Primrose, which had saddened her.

She put her vigour down to a good sex life. Not just in the past but as often as she could find someone willing to exchange bodily fluids with her, and bearing in mind her age that was more frequently than you’d think possible. But enough of that talk. Ursula would call it smut, and that’s what it probably is.

Ursula, in fact, was remarkably unworldly when it came to matters of intimacy. She knew what she enjoyed and when it became available enjoyed it, but she never went out in search of excesses, though occasionally she got near doing that if chatting up young men seventy years her junior might be considered getting near to doing it.

She lived, as do so many eccentric old ladies, in the village of Swanspottle in the district of Middleworth not so far from the county town of Brumpton. But she was no sharp-tongued harridan, no pseudo witch, no echo of the old creature who lived at the other end of the village, the dreaded Griselda Entwhistle and her broomsticks. No, Ursula was level-headed, smart in appearance, only swore on Thursdays and considered that watching commercial television was tantamount to being a sin.

Spandex hadn’t always been the family name. Once, ages ago, even before Ursula was born, it had been very different and generally unpronounceable with far too many consonants to make any sense at all. So her parents, with the enthusiasm of youth, had decided to get rid of most of those wretched consonants and ended with Spandex. It had, they thought, got a ring to it.

Then they had settled down in Swanspottle, her father had tilled the land for Farmer Bismuth, and in the fullness of time and after a great deal of sexual congress between the newly renamed Spandexes, she had been conceived and then born.

It had been a happy day, the one in which she had breathed the first of many, many breaths, and she had been loved. Everyone said how cute she was, and bearing in mind that the first world war hadn’t been over for long, that was praise indeed.

You see, during the war there had been doubts in Middleworth when it leaked out that a suspicious number of consonants had been struck from their surname. To the Joneses and Smiths and Taylors and Pumpkins it seemed that anyone with Spandex as their name must be foreign, and with the healthy dislike of foreigners common to many in the land they were called names. Nasty names. Names that implied that somewhere in their genealogy one might find Satan if one poked around hard enough.

But Ursula put the end to that kind of suspicion because of her extreme cuteness.

“What a little dearie,” crooned Mrs Jones.

“And a cutie too,” agreed Mrs Smith.

“With such a pretty smile,” acknowledged Mrs Taylor,

“And the sweetest of dimples,” crooned Mrs Pumpkin.

That was during the early years of the twentieth century when being cute and cuddly was all a girl had to be in order to achieve her main objective in life, which was having babies, babies and yet more babies, preferably sons what with the war having stolen so many young male lives. And everyone knew that no lad worth his salt would want to impregnate an ugly lass if he had a choice, so cuteness and prettiness was a necessary pre-requisite to a successful life. Leave the politics and money matters up to the menfolk, the Joneses said, and we women are much too useful to be bothered with honest toil when there are nappies to be washed and doorsteps to be scrubbed, agreed the Smiths. And others, the Taylors and Pumpkins among them, said very much the same sort of thing, proudly, as if all life was about was honest if unpleasant toil..

“She’ll be going into service, then,” decided Mr Spandex when Ursula, still cute, was eleven.

“She’s not just cute,” pointed out Mrs Spandex with a frown, “she’s becoming a spectacularly attractive young women with big whatsits.”

“She’s not twelve yet, so we’ll have less of that kind of talk,” growled the father, who fortunately hadn’t noticed that his daughter was out of nappies. But then, he did work hard on the farm, making Farmer Bismuth obscenely wealthy and giving himself an aching back.

“I’m almost a woman, father,” sighed Ursula, and he snorted and went about his potato picking with a vengeance.

“I guess it’ll be service for you,” sighed mother, who wanted Ursula to be something special and not a skivvy.

“Most girls go into service,” whispered Ursula, with a secret thought in her head.

She often had secret thoughts in her head, but this one was more secret than any that had preceded it because it coincided with the little feelings lasses have when they start noticing there’s a second gender in the world.

And unbeknown to anyone else, she had cast her eyes, from behind an elder tree in full bloom, at Charles Snootnose, the youngest son of the toff, Squire Snootnose, who lived in Snooty Manor well enough outside Swanspottle for no-one who lived there to think of it unless they were sending their daughters there to be in service until the day they died. Charles Snootnose had been riding his horse, had actually dismounted it and tied it to a gate leading onto the field where Ursula was lurking pleasantly behind her tree, and she spotted him stooping behind a hawthorn hedge with his breeches round his knees and doing something vigorous to himself just out of sight of her curiosity.

But she was smitten anyway, no matter what he was doing. Charles Snootnose wasn’t handsome in any obvious way, what with that receding chin of his, and the slight squint in both of his eyes. But he had a bearing that had been provided to him by breeding and a mighty long chain of genes, mostly of the inbred and consequently pure variety. His family was proud of them. It meant he was as thoroughbred as the horse they liked to see him riding. And they turned a blind eye to some of the vigorous things he did behind hedges.

“It’s only natural in a boy that age,” grunted Squire Snootnose.

“It’s good to see,” purred his mother, who rather thought it was.

“I did it once,” nodded the squire in a confessional mood.

“So did I,” smiled his good lady, Patience Snootnose.

The villagers, particularly the Joneses, Smiths, Taylors and Pumpkins, had a different idea.

“He’ll get to be blind,” they grunted, “just you mark my words, the lad’ll end up blind as a bat with all the whatsit he gets up to.”

But Ursula had seen something about the lad that they hadn’t, and because of that she really fancied to go on low-paid service in Snooty Manor, despite the long hours and promised drudgery. Things, she thought, might get to be interesting.

TO BE CONTINUED…