The Bluebell Bunting Society by Poppy Dolan

Author:Poppy Dolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo Books
Published: 2017-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

The Bluebells all ooohed and aaaahed at my paint job in the hall at the last meeting but tonight we’re moving outside, onto the scrubby patch of ground behind the building. With everything that’s been going on, I perhaps haven’t been the most attentive Bloom Mistress. One of our meetings recently was themed ‘modern journalism’ and I got them comparing a copy of Heat to the home page of BuzzFeed. For 90 minutes, with some squash for kicks.

But now we seem to be on a high with our campaign and everything is about nailing the perfect May Day fete, just nine days away, so I really do need to catch up with my girls and their part of the day – maypole dancing. Yup, skipping round a log with some gaudy ribbons. It’s still happening in this day and age. And I’m perpetrating it.

I always felt like a prat doing maypole dances when I was a Bluebell but Gran wouldn’t hear of us moving on to something different. Even the mention of Scottish Country dancing instead had her tsking and rolling her eyes. To be fair, she used to play the accordion for us herself and the memory of her elbows and shoulders swinging back and forth, a massive grin plastered on her wrinkly face, is still one of my most vivid childhood memories. So I’m sticking firmly in the past with Gran on this one.

We don’t get the actual pole out to practise with (I’m not the Incredible Caretaker. I can barely lift the old cassette player out of its box, let alone a trussed up caber) but we have the crown of ribbons from the top, and that sits on a traffic cone while I hit play on my crunchy-sounding tape of accordion music. Some of the girls here have a few May Day fetes behind them and know the drill of keeping up with the pace of the song but not overtaking anyone in a flush of excitement and bodging up the pattern. Veronica is my maypole Jedi Knight. If I ever pause while yelling out instructions, she calmly takes up where I left off. ‘Pass on your left, skip back twice, and around.’ And all the Bluebells fall into a perfectly synchronised jig. Sometimes I think I should just abdicate and make her Bloom Mistress right now, before she cuts me in half with a lightsaber.

Gurpreet is struggling a bit with left and right today, something I’m familiar with, so we tuck a pencil between the laces of her right trainer. ‘You write with a pencil. So you write on your right,’ I say for the tenth time. She gives me a sunny thumbs up and clutches her green ribbon like a tug of war is about to break out.

‘Nice and gentle, now off we go!’ The music crackles into life. It’s the song that goes, ‘I want to be near you, you’re the one the one the one. I want to be near you, you’re the one for me.

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