Free Little Nelson by Norman Collins

broken at last under the strain of Meals on Wheels, church decorations and all the rest of it, had reverted to second childhood. She was now helpless, a pathetic dependent invalid. And the Vicar, true Christian soldier that he was, had rallied to conceal the awful truth from her friends and his parishioners.
    Concealment of the truth, however, was something that stuck in Mrs Mewkes’s gullet. She had an abhorence of hanky-panky in any form, and here it was flowering at its most flagrant. It was all too clear that she would have to go on keeping an eye on things. Sweating slightly, she lowered herself by degrees from the high Gothic chair. Again it creaked protestingly during her descent. Breathless and panting, she began brushing herself down.
    Inside the wardrobe Little Nelson was sweating, too. A faint mist of perspiration was now clinging to his forehead. Nor was this surprising. The consciousness of being spied on is always unpleasant. But Little Nelson’s mind was working fast. Already, he had his own plan of counter-espionage.
    It would take time, but he was determined to make it work.
    The intricacies of inter-sectarian theology had proved too much even for
The Times.
For a full week, impishness had not even once been mentioned. What had taken its place and was being just as angrily debated, was the identity of the three gnomes. The Albert Hall and the Covent Garden incidents were both closely analysed. Indeed, as the enquiry went on, the question arose as to whether they were the same three gnomes who earlier in the year had set Mr Meehan’s milk-float in motion – to say nothing of those who had taken part in thatunseemly race through the Chamber of the Commons while the House was still in session.
    An animal behaviourist from Bristol University suggested that, just as hunting lionesses move off in three or fours when in pursuit of their prey, so a trio in gnome society could be assumed to be the natural zoological unit. On the other hand a music lover, writing from St John’s Wood, contended that it was improbable that the barbarian attitude shown to both Vaughan Williams and Ballet would extend throughout the entire species and that the three miscreants were probably mere gnome drop-outs, miniature misfits, the sort who could be relied on to disrupt gnome football matches, if there were such things.
    And poor Cyril, so painfully dependent on his
Times,
was growing hopelessly confused again. His mind was now full of hunting lionesses and delinquent threesomes, and his work in the parish began to be affected. He visited some of the sick twice in a single day, even, in one instance, twice in a single morning. Services of marriage and baptism became noticeably vague and perfunctory as though his thoughts were elsewhere – as indeed they were.
    The actual breakdown, the public demonstration of pastoral incompetence, took place during a Civic Week sermon delivered to a congregation of neighbourhood tradesmen and borough councillors. It had already been a long and more than usually ramblingsermon when the preacher happened, in passing and purely by accident, to mention the credal belief in the Trinity. Why he should have done so he could not remember but, once he had uttered the words, they triggered something off and he was away again.
    â€˜Are they, we ask ourselves,’ he demanded rhetorically, ‘necessarily the same three, or could they not be a different three? Are they the three we keep reading about in the papers or another three who may crop up again at any moment? How many threes there are we may never know. And do we really need to know? Is it not perhaps better that we should leave to others what we do not know ourselves? Remember that hunting lionesses setting out as dusk
    That was when the verger mounted the pulpit steps, and touched him gently on the arm. At first the Reverend Cyril Woods-Denton did not appear to understand. He insisted on finishing his next sentence, which