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Grunty
Fen |
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Dennis Dennis was brought up by his mother’s parents after she went to live in Dennis corresponds occasionally but has not met her since.
His paternity is uncertain. Dennis learned to play the guitar by the Bert Weedon ‘Play with Yourself for a Day’ method. He also plays the banjo and makes up songs out of his own head. His most famous is ‘Ladder to the Moon’ but there are a dozen others ranging from the jubilant ‘Rhubarb March’ to the poignant ‘Queen Adelaide Waltz’. Many of his songs are featured in his recordings. Gran Aged 92, she is the long-time widow of a railwayman from a railway family. Her great interests are the Royal Family and embroidering mottoes on cushions. She often stitches mistakes, e.g.: ‘Bless this Horse’ and ‘A Miss is as Good as a Male’. She is also devoted to a mission to the cannibalistic Mambabambi tribe in As a
gifted whistler, Gran has several sets of dentures
for different tunes and she
reserves one set solely for when she whistles The Dream of Olwen. Her basic,
everyday teeth are known as her egnezols because she was
sucking a lozenge when the dentist took a mould of her mouth and the
words on the lozenge came out backwards on her teeth. The egnezols are used not only for chewing and informal
whistling but
also for crimping pasties and extracting splinters. Maudie Deeks Dennis’ fiancée. She shares with him a passion for tandem riding, and she always steers. Maudie runs the office at Mr Thrussell’s coalyard near her home at Swaffham Market. She knits her own bobble hats and wears a different one every day. She lives mostly on Ambrosia creamed rice and tinned spaghetti cooked on a paraffin stove beside her bed. Buzz Dennis’s stepfather
who runs a dry-cleaning business with Dennis’s mother in dealing mostly with greasy overalls from a peanut butter factory’s workers. Sally Field Sally is a great friend of Dennis. The impoverished mother of countless children (including Little Haley, the twins Kylie and Jason, and Little Reg, the angelic-looking but naughty choirboy), she is married to Slippery Sam who is usually in Bedford Jail but occasionally comes out to try some doomed and illicit business. Miss Edwards Runs the Post Office and village store which her father left to her and her sister Miss Edna. Miss Edwards is the victim of smart salesmen who talk her into buying huge quantities of unsaleable stock such as enamel sink tidies. She also types the parish newsletter, The Grunter, on her Olivetti. The Grunter consists chiefly of apologies and corrections. Miss Edna is of a very nervous disposition and seldom emerges from the back room behind the shop. She was courted by Dennis for 14 years but finally rejected him because ‘she couldn’t go out with a man what blowed off’. Woolly Woollard Woolly is the intellectually challenged best friend of Dennis. He lives with his brother in a frequently-flooded ramshackle house which totters on the edge of a fen drain. Sometimes it leans one way, sometimes another. The brothers have no known gainful occupation but breed Mudmogs, a species of fen cats whose back legs are longer than their front legs. Sid Potts Sid runs the Grunty Fen garage famous for ‘Potts’ Thick’, a miraculous fluid pumped from the lower depths of the petrol tank. The garage inspection pit is full of another miraculous fluid which rejuvenates machinery and metalwork. Married to Mrs Potts who collects teapots. George Robinson A Ukrainian shepherd refugee from World War II who lives in a Nissen hut surrounded by thorns and survives on an ever-simmering saucepan of stew made up from whatever he finds. Dennis’s Gran calls him ‘the Ukelele’. His original name is lost but he sometimes speaks of his girlfriend far away. He owns a van made up of many other vans of many different makes. Nigel The local bus driver who is ever ready to interrupt his scheduled service to help villagers with DIY but whose life is made a misery by the Feral Nuns. Stan and Rene They run the pub, the Bull, known chiefly for the height of the stink pipe above the gents’. Doc Wallace The village GP was formerly a Naval physician and still has his talking parrot which takes part in consultations. Farmer Saltmarsh Owns the land around the LNER upon which Dennis is furtively encroaching. Dennis’s water supply comes from a cattle trough in Saltmarsh’s field. The chief feature of the Saltmarsh farm is a huge slurry lagoon. Mrs Jeffrey A low-born but socially ambitious wife of an executive, Alan, who lives at The Closes, a smart housing estate in the village. Dennis hates her but does her odd jobs. She despises him. Miss Bedding
Stuff The title awarded by the local horticultural industry to their beauty queen. Matron Runs the Cottage Hospital like a private hotel where the ambulance is available for light removals and outings. The District Nurse A respected disciplinarian going on her rounds in a ‘Tudor’ (Morris Traveller) car. Inigo Haycock A former revue artist who makes all his own clothes, mostly of plum velvet. He and Honey Brite make a living writing verses for greetings cards and hold sophisticated soirees at which all the food, even the sprouts, is served on cocktail sticks. Honey Brite A holiday camp Yellow Coat before returning to her native village where she was born Nora Merchant and captivated the young Dennis. She gave him a plastic butterfly hairgrip he still treasures. She lives in a ‘Tudor’ asbestos bungalow with Inigo Haycock. PC Faircloth Grows mushrooms in the cells and accommodates any prisoners in his home where they dine with the family. Known for his very quiet bicycle on which he approaches unsuspecting villains. Big Makes holly wreaths with her bare hands and beats a drum so dancers can keep time at village socials. Antoinette Clayden Devoted to handicrafts and the arts. Dennis has long been trying to help her assemble a spinning wheel she bought by post but it keeps turning into a nest of tables. Mrs Sharp Lives in the council houses and is famous for taking a
5-day holiday in the where she learned flamenco dancing using one castanet, the other having been ‘lost in customs’. Mr Simpson Printer and editor of the local weekly newspaper, The Bugle. Despite a serious shortage of some letters of the alphabet in his type cases, Mr Simpson prints not only The Bugle but also many periodicals, including Modern Ferretting, The British Bird Stuffer and The Grunter, parish newsletter of Grunty Fen. Due to limited space and a busy workload, pages of these and other periodicals are sometimes muddled, so that readers of The Gas Fitter may get a glimpse of the complex musical scene
reported in by: Winston Cornfoot Famous local journalist for the above publication. Mr Broomhead Formerly the stern but fair head of the school, determined to stamp out misconduct in the Art Cupboard. Eunice Turkentine Current headmistress of the school, she has many modern ideas about education, including banning parents from the school lavatories where they had long done their laundry, often causing fights over whose detergent was whose. Gladys and Len Proprietors of the Gladlen Transport Café. Their sophisticated restaurant cuisine is widely admired by those diners who can find their way through the stacks of pallets obstructing the entrance. Dennis and Maudie eat there on special occasions, undeterred by the aroma of the diesel pumps adjoining the kitchen which tend to taint the gravy and the fruit salad with mandarin segments. Dennis’s Guardian Angel. to get a packet of fruit gums from the machine on the other platform and was hit by a passing express. Now he rides pillion on Dennis’s bike and offers advice. |