Word: edna
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Mother made a fine 15-stone* corpse. Even in her coffin, she dominated the dingy, chocolate-colored house which Edna, her spinster daughter, would now inherit along with other odds & ends of property and nondescript furnishings. Edna had devoted her life to Mother. Edna was fiftyish. "What a relief for Edna," whispered the family. "She must feel that she's starting life again...
...Snigger from Mother. About an hour before the mutes arrived, Mother's will was read. But Mother, "with her fondness for underdone beef and breezy unpleasantness," was to have the last word. Edna was to inherit on one condition: she must be earning ?5 a week within a month of the funeral. In her whole life, Edna had never earned anything but a snigger from Mother. But as the family smiled, Edna felt a quiet pleasure in her new-found sense of freedom...
...Edna asserted her new freedom at once. She insisted on wearing a dashing hat to Mother's burial. It was one of those flower-&-fruit affairs trimmed with poppies and cherries...
...Bird. But a thrush knew. "No sooner was the coffin grounded, than he was up on the brim of Edna's hat, his beak an inch from a purple cherry. . . ." For if Edna was odd, her hat was odder: the "goodness going up through her hair" had turned the trimmings to real flowers and fruit. The rest of the story reports how Edna earned her ?5 a week by exhibiting her unusual headgear in a publicity splurge that would have made Mother turn over in her grave. By the time she had been eclipsed by a woman...
Most of the 16 gently amusing stories in Author Pudney's book are prettily braided from the same wisps of fancy. For readers who find all whimsy emetic, Edna's Fruit Hat is no tonic. Others may find the whimsy effectively laced with the author's astringent loathing for British lower-middle-class gentility (the stories are laid in unspecified small towns in England). For Author Pudney deftly uses fantasy to show what devastating discomfort the intrusion of improbability can cause in the lives of people who mistake the prejudices of their social group for the laws...