The trumpeter stood up, puckered his lips, and blew. The assembled crowd rose to attention as a
breathless rendition of The Last Post issued forth. It was a sad day, it was a proud day, it was
a warm Sunday in November. There were
lots of medals winking in the early winter sunshine, top brass, manicured
moustaches, little old ladies wearing big necklaces standing next to their
red-faced husbands, silver whiskers twitching with emotion, bushy eyebrows
bristling. And when the trumpeter finished, there was silence and rememberence:
for the dead who gave their lives bravely, foolishly, or otherwise; for the
ones that got away with it, and among the young, idle thoughts of roast beef
and Yorkshire pudding.
And then the plane flew into the church steeple.
Lady Jane Fry and Admiral Horace Barnstable were the first
to die. Lady Jane’s carotid artery was
pierced by the falling weather vane, Admiral Horace Barnstable suffered massive
and fatal head injuries when hit by a falling gargoyle. The trumpeter survived by virtue of the
enormous and cumbersome bear-skin he had been stewing under during the entirety
of the morning’s proceedings (the bear-skin was from an Alaskan brown bear who,
thank heavens, did not die for nothing).
Flaming bits of wreckage were soon strewn all over the
church yard, and war veterans ran amok: one old boy searched his suit jacket for
his standard issue pistol that had long since been relieved of him forty years
previous, another waved his parade sword in the direction of the steeple in case
little, green aliens should appear and descend.
The women hid behind their husbands, their husbands – at least the
sensible ones – behind whatever cover they could find, headstones mainly, which
was somehow fitting and somewhat ironic.
Meanwhile, a reporter from the Wurlingham
Gazette took photos of the chaos from behind a particularly large piece of
graveyard architecture (the photos would end up being published on the same spread as
Caroline from Chesham, Double-D cup).
All of this time, the church bells had been ringing of their
own accord in spastic unison, signalling invasion, and yet the belfry was
swiftly becoming an inferno as part of the plane’s fuselage had become lodged
there. ‘Call the fire-brigade!’, shouted
Brigadier Swain to his wife, who was shuddering like a bloated bird of paradise
beside him. ‘What’s the number?’, she
shrieked in reply as the church warden rode shakily away on his bicycle to
fetch the rector.
In the aftermath the body count was seven: Lady Jane Fry
(severed carotid artery), Admiral Horace Barnstable (blunt trauma), Lt. Colonel
Philip Sanders-Powell (heart-attack), Viscount Alexander Wilson-Higgins (brain
aneurism), Vicar Stevens (Act of God), a page boy, and perhaps mercifully, the
errant pilot.
The post-mortem on the pilot was carried out some weeks
later, and it was revealed from DNA samples taken from the teeth of the
deceased that the pilot was a black man, christened Duane. Duane had been drunk on rum at the controls of a
stolen light-aircraft, or so the story went around, and the stolen
light-aircraft belonged to Lord SuchandSuch, and it was treason etcetera; all
of this when the truth of matter was Duane was just a bloody awful pilot – the
plane was his, purchased with his life-time savings and money from an out of
court settlement with his ex-employer, the largely Caucasian Metropolitan
Police.
Nevertheless, the Wurlingham
Gazette still went with the headline: ‘A black day for civil whites’.
... Such is life in Little England.
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