Right up the Limp Po-Po

To celebrate Liss’s birthday, today is the start of a new full-length blockbuster saga. The first few instalments will simply be devoted to introducing the main characters and I will be responsible for pencilling in the initial vignettes. However, following that Monica has agreed to co-author with me to flesh out, no pun intended the remainder of the story. If anyone else would like to join in please let me know.

This story draws for its inspiration the true story of the notorious Happy Valley Set, a group of privileged British colonials living in the region of the Wanjohi Valley near the Aberdare mountains in Kenya during the 1920s - 1940s. This bastion of the British upper class abroad have since become infamous for drug-taking, wife swapping and multiple other excesses including murder. The antics of the Happy Valley Set have also been highlighted in books and films such as White Mischief, which dramatised the trial of Sir 'Jock' Delves Broughton for the murder of the 22nd Earl of Erroll. For anyone interested in the shenanigans of the British upper class, the escapades of The Happy Valley set make fascinating reading.

However here is our own fictitious account of those heady times when it seemed that the sun would never set on the world’s greatest empire…………

(The main characters of our story are picked out in red.)

Bartholomew Cholmondeley-Brown His Imperial Majesty’s District Officer, late of The Bengal Rifles stretched uneasily in his wicker chair, to assuage the constant irritation of his haemorrhoids, before knocking his briar pipe out on the Kikuyu tea-boy’s head with a sharp crack.

‘You rang Bwana!’ shrieked little Msambula , still trying to get the ringing sound out of his head. Blinded by the hot ash he staggered into the Ormolu clock which promptly rebuffed him by loudly chiming the hour. Startled, he stepped backwards and fell off the veranda. In doing so Philomena Palmer-Hopkinson’s golf caddy brutally assaulted his young groin, before he landed in the dust outside the Quango-Bango Planter’s Club.

Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! he screamed nursing his mangled and potentially ruined manhood.

The only person who appeared to notice this unseemly fracas was the District Medical Officer Lavinia Forbes-Mainwaring who under the cover of an carefully-ironed copy of The Times was scratching her crotch through her silk cami-knickers. After a week of high humidity, the week old stubble was becoming unbearable. She’d considered getting her maid to shave her, but had quickly dismissed the idea. The last time she had asked Tootsie to defoliate her pudenda a nasty nick from the cutthroat razor, had precluded her participation in a whole raft of unsavoury activities for over a month.

She idly watched as Msambula, half blind and in agony staggered around blindly in the dust clutching his nether regions. As fate would have it, one of the mangy flea-bitten dogs that had been asleep all afternoon decided to attack his ankles.

‘Save me Bwana!’ he shrieked as he tried to shake the growling mongrel off his leg.

Despite screaming hysterically Msambula’s cries of anguish were subsumed in the stentorian sounds of Count Frédéric Shagnazté singing in the shower nearby. One of the few Frenchmen in Kenya and the only one allowed in the club, a French nobleman from the ancient De la Minge dynasty, Frédéric was a rake and a philanderer who had made his name as a racing driver, in addition to two counts of gross indecency in a public place. Trying ingratiate himself with his English peers he was tackling his own version of The British Grenadiers*, which somehow didn’t sound quite right with his Gauloise-fuelled nasal accent:

Some die of drinking water
And some of drinking beer.
Some die of constipation
And some of diarrhoea
But of all the world's diseases
There's none that can compare
With the drip, drip, drip
Of a septic prick
And a dose of gonorrhoea

‘Tea-boy!’ Somebody shouted from within the bowls of the club. Nearer to, the muffled click of billiard balls and upper class snoring.

‘Coming Bwana!’ screamed the near-knackered Msambula before blindly colliding with a sickening crunch into the mud-guard of Superintendent Jock Strap’s Police Land Rover.


*As this story is about a now all but gone facet of British life, each instalment will carry a small glossary to aid non-British readers. The tune to British Grenadiers can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9MjL1vo_Gk&feature=related

Allowing readers to add to sing along with Count Frédéric Shagnazté