The Vixens and Erma Crump

A friend emailed to compliment me on my blog. I had forgotten I had mentioned it to her. She obviously finds it rather boring - she suggested I gave everyone fictional names, such as Erma Crump, and glamorous,exciting lives. She wishes. However, I shall now refer to her as Erma. Anyone else desiring to be included under a pseudonym of their choice be warned: I shall feel free to play with their actions and characters.

Back to Erma - she is a tall, annoyingly elegant woman of a certain age, who looks wonderful in pearls and can make a fake fur look real. She works at a glamorous opera venue (part-time of course - full-time would not be ladylike) but is otherwise a housewife, mother, grandmother and pillar of the community and WI member. All is not as it seems however.

Many years ago, a group of us, known as the vixens, once worked at a run-down hospital, which is where we all met. Working hard, she declared, was not 'ladylike'. In our ladylike way we would occasionally drink a very small glass of madeira, secreted in a box file, before luncheon in the appalling canteen.

Erna was an expert in displacement activities - always finding discarded furniture in dusty corners of the hospital, and dragging them up to 'furnish' our tatty old offices which looked like a rather unsuccessful charity shop.

I think Erma must have read in a fifties magazine that women should be 'mysterious'. She took this very seriously, to the extent of becoming totally unreliable regarding dates and times of meeting, and her home life is a mystery to all of us, though absolutely straightforward on the face of it.

Although highly intelligent she hides this very well behind a very flippant and frivolous front. Her sense of humour is quite evil: when we shared a lowly job taking cloaks on a VIP visit to the hospital, someone handed in a copy of the Times. Rather bored, she finished the crossword rapidly before folding up the paper and giving it back to the punter when he left. I have often smiled, imagining his face when he settled down to tackle the crossword on his way home.