The Secret Five and the Stunt Nun Legacy

by John Lawrence

  The Secret Five

  and the

  Stunt Nun Legacy

  John Lawrence

  Copyright © 2010 John Lawrence

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

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  ISBN 978 1848 764 590

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset in 10.5pt Times New Roman by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For my brother, Colin,

  who’ll now never get to read this book

  but who shared the zany world

  that was our childhood

  Warning:

  This book contains mild violence to animals when deemed appropriate; one or two instances of innocuous swearing; eighty-eight uses of the word ‘suddenly’; three-hundred and eighty-nine, yes three-hundred and eighty-nine, uses of the quite irritating qualifier ‘quite’; one reference to drug abuse by a character who should have known better, and three tasteful references to explicit nudity in order to stoke up the narrative when all else had failed.

  Apathy is the way to happiness. Mental and transcendental tranquillity is only achieved through the joyful celebration of utter mediocrity. Utter mediocrity, if worked at, is the ultimate accomplishment. And then there are all the theories about Did Dog Create Man, and the creation of the universe, going right back to The Big Woof, which always brings me back to the same huge question – why on earth do I have these never-ending bouts of flatulence?

  The Thoughts of Whatshisname, 2010

  Author’s notes

  It started as a short story, written for fun, satirising children’s books of a certain age. But the characters soon insisted that it became something more hefty.

  In the course of writing the book, the intention of parodying elements of the style of Blyton and her contemporaries – the traditionally simple sentence structure, the abundance of the dreaded adverbs such as ‘suddenly’ and ‘carefully’, an array of qualifiers such as ‘quite’ and ‘rather’, not to mention plot holes the size of Saturn – soon meandered into other styles. (Mr H Pinter, Mr J Joyce, I’m so sorry!) It seemed to become a surreal parody of itself as the satire inflated beyond my original intentions. To sustain this mischievous way of writing, I had to control my mindset as I cast aside rudimentary writing rules while trying to maintain the narrative’s Blytonesque anchoring points. And the supposedly one-dimensional ‘child’ characters began to show signs of a second or even a third dimension, damn them. You can hardly blame them, as they are subject to curmudgeonly authorial commentary and a textual self-awareness – one of them even decides half-way through the book that his character, against my wishes, should wear spectacles. Hmmm.

  And, let’s face it, these aren’t children, I only call them that to upset them – they’re young adults, so we can get away with humour that’s occasionally a little cheeky, but never intentionally offensive. My parameter was: would it be acceptable for Radio 4? If it was, my internal editor okayed it.

  And as for the dog, Whatshisname – he, in particular, deserves a trilogy of his own; he, above all, never lost his sense of purpose; he was the one to lead the narrative in and out of philosophical territory. And he, unlike the four ‘children’, didn’t hide away from the author to complain about their treatment as characters. My only regret is the kangaroo.

  If you’ve never read children’s books such as Blyton’s, I have two messages: one, your childhood missed a treat; two, I suspect that when you have finished this work, you may well be searching out a Blyton book in an effort to capture the delight of her original style.

  Meanwhile, prepare yourself for a mischievous read! Enjoy.

  John Lawrence

  Contents

  Author’s notes

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  PART SIX

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Reading Groups – suggested discussion points

  Credits

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  In which we meet The Secret Five; are forced to listen to Ricky’s stream of consciousness oh not again I wish he’d stop; wonder if we’ve bought the wrong book; blame our parents for encouraging such a style of writing; hear about, but probably don’t care about, Uncle Quagmire’s strange disappearance.

  Whatshisname wasn’t thin and wasn’t fat. No, that’s a lie, he was fat. A fat ugly spaniel. As he lay curled up in the front porch of the English country cottage he pondered on the universal question: do animals think? He just didn’t know. There wasn’t enough spare time to think about it, to come up with a convincing conclusion. He sighed and opened one eye. No sign of a super adventure yet, then, thank goodness. Why on earth did they always have to have adventures? And why did they include him in their silly Secret Five club? Maybe if he feigned senility or distemper they’d leave him alone. He sighed again, opened the other eye, and lifted his head to glance at a Persian cat on the lawn. It was lying on its front, casually leafing through a Persian-English phrase book just in case a speaking cat might be needed later in the story.

  Whatshisname sniffed the air. Nice! Sweet peas, roses and various other brightly coloured flowers with long and unpronounceable Latin names, most of them ending in -eaeaisa or -dondendadooronron, crowded the garden of the cottage, their scent mingling with his own flatulence which, it seems, had passed through the gates of hell and back before being gently liberated from his generous backside.

  He closed his eyes again and sighed, happy to be part of a typical country cottage scene, exactly like you sometimes see
on the lid of a very posh tin of biscuits, except for the average contents label, of course. Apart from that, it was typical. It even had a typical village postman, wheeling his squeaky bicycle up the leafy lane. Squeak, the bicycle went, squeak, squeak. Marvelling at the quality of the ad lib sound effects, the postman rested it against the wall, next to the Best Before Date and the May Contains Nuts label, but it still continued to squeak so he kicked it and it stopped.

  The typical village postman carefully looked in his postman’s sack and even more carefully took out a letter. He held the envelope up. To The Secret Five, Guantanamo Cottage it said. What a surprise! Who’d have thought an envelope could speak! Well, bless his soul and everyone else’s too. He smiled, knowing that it might be a very important letter which could start yet another interminable adventure for these four insufferable children and their fat ugly dog. He smiled again, and then another one for luck. He looked at the long long path leading to the cottage door and the dozing dog, shrugged one shoulder, then the other, and tossed the letter over the gate and onto the top of an ecologically-sustainable compost heap.

  Satisfied, yet strangely dissatisfied, he adjusted his padded cycling scarf and jumped onto his bicycle. Suddenly he jumped off again, cursing the prankster who had stolen his saddle. Wiping a tear from his eye and re-adjusting his Love Kylie underwear1, he pushed the now unsqueaky bicycle back up the lane, bemoaning the insignificant part he was contracted to play in the story. As he walked gingerly away he loudly quoted lines from Shakespeare (‘Within their alabaster innocent arms, their lips were four red roses on a stalk . . .’) and, just in case, from Eastenders (‘cor, Mo, that geezer’s just fallen down the apples . . .’) in the vain hope that he might be called upon to appear later in the story, should the plot became desperate enough or the supply of supporting actors suddenly dries up.

  Whatshisname watched as the postman disappeared from view. He sighed again. Surely there was a better way of earning bones. Better make a move, they’d wonder where he was, maybe.

  Inside the cottage, Betty was slowly waking up after very quickly falling asleep. She ran down to the kitchen in her pink Barbie dressing gown, scratching her bosom, which had appeared almost overnight when she was sound asleep in her bed some years ago. The following morning Betty had asked her embarrassingly flat-chested mother what they were and where they had come from, as they seemed to be a matching pair, almost, but all she got was a mumbled story about The Bosom Fairy and An Unfair Share.

  In the kitchen, Betty’s Aunt Trinny was carefully toasting and buttering some home-made muffins which had, in truth, been made at someone else’s home. Betty’s elder brother Daniel, who was over twenty-and-seven-eighths, rather tall and just as serious, was seated at the kitchen table sucking Sugar Puffs up his nose through a straw. This was the first day of their holiday with their aunt, and Daniel was keen to impress. He was also keen to save up enough money for a Ninstation Y-Box Pii 4 games machine. So far he had saved over thirty-one pence, and very soon he would have marginally more. His secret ambition, though, was to buy into an off-shore high-yield tax-diverted bond. Thanks to his casual job as a part-time window mannequin for the local Oxfam shop, buying an on-shore no-yield win-diverted premium bond was far more likely.

  It was at that point that Whatshisname came loping into the kitchen, his nose in the air, which is an ideal place for a nose to be if you value your life. Although Whatshisname was, officially, Betty’s dog, he was disliked equally by everyone.

  ‘Woof woof woof,’ Whatshisname woofed, because he always woofed in threes. Then he began licking and sniffing and snuffling and wagging. Especially wagging, as that was his very very favourite. Apart from licking, that is, which took some beating. In fact, whenever Whatshisname sat and thought about it (which he did quite often when searching within his canine consciousness for an idealistic comprehension of morality and truth and his inner doggy-existentialism) when he licked he actually sniffed as well. Indeed, he probably snuffled and wagged at the same time, so all this talk about favourites is a complete waste of your time and mine so let’s hear no more about it.

  Very soon, all this uninhibited licking and sniffing and snuffling and wagging woke up Ricky and Amy. They were, by birth, and rather painful ones at that, Aunt Trinny’s two children, which made them cousins to Daniel and Betty, brother and sister to each other, son and daughter to Aunt Trinny, and grandfather and grandmother to their own future grandchildren in their respective marriages. As annoying young adults (although we shall call them children, just to irritate them) they hadn’t really given much thought to the rigours of grand-parenting, except for Ricky, who had recently shown an interest in an advert for trousers with an expandable elastic waistband and an integral incontinence trough. He had even built up an impressive collection of stamps. Enough, he thought, to minimise the amount of queuing time at post offices in his old age. Good old Ricky. He was probably going to grow up into an outstandingly sensible adult and utterly boring old fart.

  But enough of this pathetic attempt at characterisation. They all knew that it was high time for some gritty dialogue, and Ricky was the first to take up the challenge. ‘Hello, everyone,’ he said as he and Amy wandered sleepily over to the kitchen table. He was obviously keen to establish himself as a major character at an early stage, but we’ll have to see about that, won’t we? I mean, all that girly blond hair doesn’t help his cause.

  ‘What’s for breakfast?’ asked Amy in a strangely timorous way, for she was a moist girl of timid disposition and had no redeeming qualities whatsoever except perhaps . . . except perhaps . . . no, definitely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

  ‘Breakfast? It looks like we’ve got wholemeal muffins and watered-down rhubarb & turnip flavoured J3O,’ replied Betty. ‘Do you want some, Amy? And you, Daniel?’

  ‘Hey! What about me?’ whined Ricky. There we go again! Ricky often felt a little left out of it all. This was typical. No-one ever thought of his feelings, those feelings there they go again burning holes in the brain burrowing into my psyche undermining my courage until all I have left yes all I have left is a mouse-like no hamster-like notion of underwhelmingliness what a terrible faddle-fiddle what an utter nuisance je suis oh what a rot I’ve forgotten how to speak French again . . .

  ‘Ricky!’ Betty snapped. With her very own eyes, she glared a reasonably sized glare directly at him.

  Ricky jumped. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Were you indulging in a stream of consciousness and interior monologue just then?’ Betty asked, frowning quietly. ‘And were you using the first person tense and dubious punctuation? Hmmm? You know we don’t allow all that stuff in The Secret Five. It’s against our written constitution.’

  Of course, Ricky knew he’d been caught out. Maybe if I could bluff my way out of it and crikey that looks very much like a big zit on Betty’s nose . . .

  ‘You’re doing it again!’ Betty squealed.

  ‘What?’ queried Amy. ‘I didn’t notice him doing anything like a stream of . . . a stream of whatever.’

  ‘Consciousness! And you wouldn’t!’ said Betty irritably. ‘It’s so obvious! His head goes all funny when he does it!’

  ‘I didn’t notice anything either,’ mumbled Daniel.

  ‘Woof woof woof!’ said Whatshisname, who did.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ whined Ricky. ‘I’m quite conscious – so I have some degree of consciousness. And I indulge in the occasional streaming. It’s what I do as a character, apparently.’

  ‘Really!’ snapped Betty. ‘I do hope we don’t have to put up with that all the way through the adventure.’

  ‘What adventure?’ enquired Amy, quite enquiringly.

  ‘The adventure we are guaranteed to have,’ reassured Betty.

  ‘Oh,’ said Amy, who was still trying to get to grips with her own character, let alone understand everyone else’s, streaming or no streaming.

  ‘All right,’ said Betty. ‘Ricky, we’ll leave it this time, but if there’s any more o
f that stuff, you’re out of our guaranteed and spontaneous adventure, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ lied Ricky. Yes, a hamster-like notion of underwhelmingliness what an utter faddle-fiddle . . .

  ‘So, now we’ve sorted Ricky out, I need to ask,’ asked Betty, ‘where is Uncle Quagmire?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ricky. ‘Where is Uncle Quagmire? And, more importantly, why do I always have to call him that? Isn’t he married to you, Aunt Trinny? And am I not the fruit of his loin? And why do I not call you Mummy? Did not Amy and I emerge through your dilated cervix, attached to your umbilical cord, at some stage?’

  Aunt Trinny laughed quietly, but it was far too quiet for the children to hear so let’s make her laugh again. Aunt Trinny laughed, a little louder this time. Ricky looked quizzically at her. Amy was bewildered by all the talk about diluted servants and umbrella cords, and the freckles on her nose started to gather together into one big freckly huddle.

  ‘Ricky and Amy, my sweets,’ Aunt Trinny said, kindly yet heartlessly, as she ferociously buttered some more muffins. ‘When you were both born, Uncle Quagmire and I thought that you calling us Mummy and Daddy would be bowing to certain aspects of the irrational global concept of parenthood in modern society and, although we didn’t want to abrogate our childrearing responsibilities, we had to consider the social aspects of care-giving and include a variety of visual, verbal and physical behaviours so that we could engage you both emotionally and successfully manage our interpersonal and intergenerational exchanges.’

  ‘Oh, that’s alright then,’ chirped Ricky, trying to sneak a peek down Betty’s dressing gown.

  ‘And,’ Aunt Trinny added, ‘we just can’t wait to experience empty-nest-syndrome. Bring it on, I say.’

  ‘So,’ Amy said, ‘thank you for making it all so clear, Aunt Trinny. And it’s very comforting to be part of a loving family unit, but where is, erm, Uncle Quagmire?’