A surprising encounter which cheered me up
- Attfield Dutt
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
A good friend of mine happened to tell me today how well his partner is getting on learning English. They are reading a collection of short stories together at bedtime, a page at a time, and they came across one story about a gentleman who writes a letter to Her Majesty the Queen no less, claiming that he is an expert gardener and would like to offer his services in her gardens, which as we all know were dear to her heart. He could come at once, this character assured her, so long as the Queen was able to send him two first class air tickets from Malawi to London. There were unspoken circumstances which made a swift departure essential. My friend was particularly amused by the character’s sister who signs herself Dame Matilda (almost)…
This was beginning to sound familiar; yes it was one of the stories in my own collection of eleven stories, FRESH BEGINNINGS. Have you seen it? My friend says the stories are all very different from each other – “but in a good way!”
It is indeed a mixture; I wonder what these two friends of mine made of the two stories about characters who struggle to be accepted in the UK; a young German lad who was sent by his church to stay with a family in Hertfordshire shortly after the Second World War, and a Japanese engineering student who crashes his aunt’s old car near Cardiff and gets sent up the Valleys to get it mended by a veteran who had been a prisoner of the Japanese.
There’s a couple of time travel stories too, and two tales are about rifts between grandmothers and their families; not all the stories have happy endings. My own favourite is told by a Quaker whose Meeting celebrates her ninetieth birthday with a barbecue and a close look at some of the events of her long life.
FRESH BEGINNINGS is available from any good bookstore; it’s £8 on Amazon as a paperback, free on KindleUnlimited or £1.77 to buy as an ebook
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