Maddie’s World
In her weekly column, Maddie Grigg shares tales from her life in rural Dorset . . .
IT has been a while since we’ve been in France, though we are constantly being reminded about our time abroad. The first reminder came in early autumn in the shape of an envelope with a French postmark.
It was addressed to Mr Grigg.
“I wonder who that’s from?” he remarked, ripping it open with rather too much excitement.
His expression then went through all of Fry’s “Five Boys” faces.
This was the advert I used to see in the sweet shop to which my mother would take me occasionally when we went into town to do our shopping.
The advert shows a young boy whose five facial expressions go through desperation, pacification, expectation, acclamation and realisation.
This advert for a chocolate bar was famous in Edwardian times, although it was still a feature of our sweet shop in the 1960s.
We still had a department store with a tube system that took your money from the shop assistant to a cashier sitting behind a great wooden and glass counter, too. Anyway, I digress. When he opened the letter, Mr Grigg’s face was one of desperation.
“What is it?” I asked, buttering the toast.
It was a weekend so I allowed myself a couple of slices along with my morning cup of tea.
“Only a blooming speeding ticket,” he grumbled.
“Oh, no!” I exclaimed, preparing myself to show some sympathy.
Mr Grigg is a safe driver and usually keeps to the speed limit.
The trouble is that, in France, it’s not always obvious on some stretches of road what the speed limit actually is.
“It’s your fault,” he accused me.
“What? I wasn’t even driving. I was in the Beetle, remember?”
“Yes,” he allowed. “But you ran out of petrol and I had to zoom off and find some for you.
“I remember racing back because I was worried about you on the grass verge all on your own,” he added.
To be honest, it hadn’t been all that bad, because I had a copy of “The Gypsy Bride” by Katie Hutton which I was three-quarters of the way through.
But I wasn’t too happy about taking the rap for the speeding ticket, however concerned he had been about me.
When three more speeding tickets came through the letter-box in as many days, he could no longer pin the blame on me.
“How many is that now? Four or five?”
I knew very well how many it was – my maths isn’t that bad – but I wanted to rub it in.
It was easy for me to say, though, as I never drove his car in France because it’s an automatic and I’m not used to it.
The old Beetle, on the other hand, is so slow that I regularly have tailbacks behind me as long as the south-west peninsula.
I felt a bit sorry for him, so I offered to pay for some of the speeding tickets, but that just upset my husband even more.
About a week later, there was another interestinglooking envelope addressed to Mr Grigg.
This time, however, it was a £10 win on the Premium Bonds, which, as the saying goes, is better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick.
Buoyed up by the good news, he treated me to a bar of chocolate, to which I made an “expectation” and “acclamation” face all at once.
Then he had a call from Mr Brogue Boots, who’d picked up two speeding tickets in France that had only just come through.
“This calls for more chocolate,” he said, rejoicing in his friend’s misfortune. ■