The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3336 by Angharad Copyright© 2021 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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278 Dozen for the non-bakers among us.
I got Diane to call my assistant at the bank, she put the call through a few moments later. This is a new assistant, the previous one went off to pastures new and a few thousand more at some other institution, insurance, I think. Anyway, Lottie, is the new one and she has a degree in environmental science and is very keen, so when I asked her to see what other banks were up to in selling green issues, she rolled up her sleeves and researched it very thoroughly. I'm trying to talk her into studying for a part time master's degree but she says she's happy for the moment.

Apart from supposedly only investing in green companies, avoiding oil companies or armaments, most don't seem to be doing very much. One was offering tips upon its website to save money on fuel, save fuel - duh. Yeah, save money, freeze to death with a friend.

I suggested we put up a thing on our website on how to avoid problems of debt with energy bills and it was more about some low interest loans we offered for a limited period. It must be awful if you're on a low income and struggling to pay the rent and heating and feeding a family, no wonder food banks are proliferating. I called my favourite supermarket and asked to speak to the manager, once they knew it was Lady Cameron, they seemed to find him very quickly.

"How can I help you, Lady Cameron?" he said.

"If I give you an order could you deliver it to the local food bank?" I asked.

"I don't see why not, would you like to dictate it to me and I'll organise it."

"Fine, and I started. I wanted a case of large tins of baked beans, a case of peeled tomatoes, case of corned beef, ten 2.5 kg bags of potatoes, a tray of lettuce, a tray of tomatoes, a tray of spring greens..." and so on. By the time I'd finished he totted it up as £500. I gave him my card number and he thanked me for my custom, but also said he would add a hundred pounds of other tinned and fresh produce from the supermarket and have it all delivered together. I asked him not to give my name, I wanted it to be an anonymous donation, which he understood but he would ensure they knew it was mostly from a customer with a bit of the supermarket largesse added. I was happy with that, I know all the supermarkets give food and cleaning things to food banks all the time, but at least I felt I'd helped ours.

I wasn't sure about the women's refuge anymore, because according to the Equalities Commission as a transgender woman, I couldn't use one if I was being abused by a partner. This was a fairly recent ruling and it appears trannie bashing is now the sport of choice in many of the countries who should know better and of course in the democratic republic of Russia, where their would be tsar, Vlad the destroyer Putin, got the courts to bash GLBTQ people even more. The only place possibly worse is the US where several states are doing their damnedest to make life impossible for transgender folk, especially children or their parents.

The right are on the rise, by right I don't mean correct, I mean fascist, ultra conservative, right wing bigot. There's always been an undercurrent of them but since the orange one, they've come out of the woodwork (or from under stones) and are increasingly mainstream. Their arguments are facile or puerile or both and based on selling fear or confusion, so tg kids in the wrong toilets is right up their street. I wish them well, or was that hell? Who cares, they're all bastards anyway.

I can't understand why the word liberal is such a stigma in the US especially as many of their politicians were neo-liberals until recently, presumably they're just neo now? Sounds like someone from a poor man's Matrix.

Diane brought me in a cuppa and some letters to sign I was waiting for Lottie to confirm that no other bank was matching us for green measures. I had an idea and spoke with a contact I had in the Forestry Commission. I told him of my scheme and he agreed to go and ask about it and come back to me. Basically, I was thinking of a joint sponsored initiative between the FC and High St of offering ten native trees to every school with enough land to plant them. Okay, it's more publicity than progress but it involves children and some of them may just remember that trees are good for the environment, carbon capture and mental health and even remember the bank who sponsored them. I sent an email to Lottie to see how many schools there were with enough grounds to plant trees, these were council run schools not fee paying or public schools or academies - they want to plant trees, they can buy their own out of their profits.

If that didn't work, I would suggest we help breakfast clubs in schools by making a donation. It's appalling that many children come to school not having had breakfast, I don't mean teen girls who are terrified of putting on weight or are too lazy to make any, but the younger children who don't have a choice or whose parents don't.

At lunch I ordered a few second-hand books on freshwater biology or species guides and decided I'd spent enough.

I arrived at home and Trish told me she'd been looking at my Freshwater Life book, the one I got for helping to rescue the old man, you know the one, when Sarah asked to look at it and noticed the inscription in the front and asked, 'Who was Charlotte?' Trish told her to ask me.

I sighed, asked David to make me cuppa and I ran up to change out of my suit and into something more comfortable and casual. I trotted back down and went into my study bearing my cuppa when Sarah appeared with her own tea and asked if I would tell her the story of the book inscription.

I could have said no, but I didn't. "My dad mistakenly bought me a pair of dungarees in the hope it would make me want to do messy jobs in the house or garden. He didn't realise they were girls' ones and I wore them at weekends and when I went pond dipping. I explained my kit was straight out of The Observer's Book of Pond Life and I used to tote it to our local pond about a mile away. While passing a house I saw feet sticking out from under a bush and went to investigate. It was an elderly man and as there was no one else in his house I went knocking on neighbour's houses until I found one in and they called the ambulance. They mistook me for a girl with my dungarees and long hair tied back into a ponytail, and made me wait until the police and ambulance arrived."

"You do get in some scrapes, don't you?"

"I just did what anyone else would do."

"Except they don't, do they?"

"I can't speak for them, whoever they are, but the copper asked my name and I said 'Charlie Watts,' he assumed that was Charlotte Watts, addressed me as Miss and took a note of my name.

"A few weeks later, I was upstairs when the door was knocked and my mother answered it and moments later ran upstairs and told me to wear something girlish and come down in a few minutes. I couldn't believe my ears, so I pulled on the dungarees over a girly tee-shirt and went down. They were all drinking tea and the copper was the one from the day I found the old man. The person with him was the old man's son and he presented me with the book, I've had it ever since. I had to pose for a photo which went in the Echo."

"What here?"

"No this was up in Bristol."

"Oh, I didn't see that one."

"As you probably wouldn't have been born, it's not surprising."

She blushed and shrugged. "As you're a strikingly beautiful woman, you were probably a very feminine and pretty child."

"I didn't think of myself as pretty, I was inclined to be a bit feminine but a few beatings and I learned to disguise it because they thought I was gay, but I wasn't camp, I was..."

"A girl, I know, Mummy, it was only the Neanderthals who couldn't make the connection. I've seen one or two photos of you, remember, of the play and stuff and Mr Whitehead's journal. You were a very pretty girl."

"Anyway, that was the story, I have some work to do, so go and abuse my children or something useful."

She laughed and went off leaving her empty cup behind. You just can't get the staff. Just before the dinner gong went she came back with the story and the photo. "You were a girl, Mummy, there's no sign of a boy here at all," she handed me the sheet of paper, I looked at it and handed it back to her.

"My headmaster didn't think so, he called me in when we were back in school having seen the story and photo and our mutual dislike of each other began. He was a bully and a sadist and should never have been allowed anywhere near children or teens, let alone a school. He spent the rest of my time there trying to humiliate me or get me to leave. I spent my time winding him up or pissing him off. I was also winding up my father, with whom he occasionally colluded in what he thought was a way to make me drop the girly stuff. Neither of them seemed to be aware of gender dysphoria and how to deal with it which wasn't what they were doing. I should have been sent to see a psychologist or specialist in mental health and the fact that even as a sixth former, I was still smaller, with no facial hair, zits or deep voice, but they didn't."

"At Sussex, they didn't know what to make of me, was I boy pretending to be a girl or a girl pretending to be a boy. I wore drab clothes which were loose fitting mostly and usually women's. I wore a sports bra or elastic bandages to hide my bulging chest and loose trousers hid my widening hips. They weren't as developed as most women of my age but my bum was definitely larger than any boy I knew.

"In school, I had to wear girl's trousers because boys ones no longer fitted me, too loose at the waist and too tight over the bum. I bought my own in the end because the ones my mother got were useless. She'd buy them in M&S, I'd return them and use the money to buy two pairs in Matalan. In uni, I tended to wear women's cargo pants and had pens or pencils in the leg pockets. That I used a fountain pen used to amuse people no end. I had ball points but have never liked them as much as my fountain pens."

"You are so different, Mummy."

"Am I? Does that worry you - living with an eccentric?"

"No I love it. You do things because you choose to or because you value something not to be different, but you are. It isn't being affected, you are just different."

"If you start comparing me to Jacob Rees-Mogg, I shall personally shoot you."

"Is that the guy in double-breasted suits who acts like Lord Snooty?"

"The same, he pretends to be old fashioned, a throwback to the 1950s but he wasn't born until 1969, so it's all total nonsense."

"Whereas, you're being different is genuine."

"Yep, I'm an alien," I said dead pan. Then the gong sounded. "See, that's the mother ship calling me."

"What calling you to be a mother again?"

"Something like that," I replied as we both walked towards the kitchen and dinner.

"I'm so glad you let me stay here, I feel so much at home."

"If you start wearing double-breasted suits, you're out," I said and we bothbegan to laugh.

"I won't, Mummy, promise."

I put down the dirty mugs and asked David what we were having.

"Mushy pea fritters in a pesto and soy sauce. You told me to keep the costs down, so ..."

"We're not are we?" asked the brain, who despite her intelligence is often easier to con than her sisters.

"Don't be daft," said Livvie, "pesto is far too expensive."

"Is it?" asked Trish shrugging.

"It's not boiled beef and carrots, is it?" asked Livvie sniffing the aromas which filled the kitchen. Shades of Oliver the musical, I thought as I tried to interpret the smells. It was more salmon than beef. I was right, it was salmon with watercress sauce, a favourite of mine, with duchess potatoes and purple sprouting broccoli and with strawberry flan and ice cream for pudding. Oh boy, must try not to eat too much assuming the girls don't grab it all first.

"Save some for Simon, will you?" I asked David.

"His lordship called earlier and said he and Sammi were on their way, so I've put theirs in the cool oven of the Aga."

"Won't that melt the ice cream?" asked Trish, showing she was wide awake and salivating at the prospect of our feast.

Even our kitchen table is big, it sits us all plus room for David when he stays to eat which he did. He sat next to Danni and they chatted about football while Trish and Livvie were on about something for school and Sarah asked me more about my time in school in Bristol. We were soon the only conversation and I became self-conscious about it for the first time in ages.

"It's all so different to my experience in school. I went to a comprehensive and they didn't care if you worked or not, so loads of kids didn't. It was mixed, so we had girls and boys in the classes except for sport and PE. I was marked down as different so I tended to avoid the roughnecks as much as I could and made friends with a couple of girls and found to my delight that they allowed me into their group most of the time. Some of the roughnecks, the yobs and so on had first envied me being with the girls then realised I was more like the girls than they were, so they used to call me a poof or a nancy boy. Occasionally, they got me on my own and I got duffed, but mostly they left me alone," was Sarah's experience.

"It was the girls who gave me the trouble," said David. As he rarely said anything about his past, we all listened eagerly. "They thought I was a butch or a dyke, they hadn't heard of gender unconformity. Largely they left me alone because I fought like a boy, got into trouble once or twice for it but usually, they left me alone."

Just as we all agog to ask questions Simon and Sammi arrived and everything stopped to make a fuss of our latecomers. It was good to see Sammi, who was going to be here all weekend, an extended one for the bank holiday and I was going to enjoy it, I might even get a bike out if I can remember how to ride one.

"Missed you," said Simon hugging and kissing me.

"I missed you, too," I replied and kissed him back.