Relatively Posh Summer

By Erik Ga Bean

The long awaited third book of the relative summer trilogy is finally here. It is the summer of 1978 and eleven year old twins Nigel and Michael have been asked to be ushers at their university lecturer aunt's wedding. This gives them an unforgettable first look inside the sometimes quite strange worlds of weddings, academia and university life. There are big rabbits and an even bigger dress.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erik Ga Bean
• Release date: Sep 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310693014

Erik Ga Bean

Science fiction fan, astronomy enthusiast and IT professional Erik Ga Bean lives in the English county of Hertfordshire with his wife Helen and his growing collection of carnivorous plants. As well as being an author, he is a keen narrowboater and a leading light in the Stevenage Plus social group.

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Relatively Posh Summer

By Erik Ga Bean

Published by Erik Ga Bean at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Erik Ga Bean

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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To my wonderful wife Helen.

Chapter 1 – Easter Sunday

A long time ago, before there were E-mails and Internet, even before there were mobile phones, there was a year called 1978.

In March 1978, twins Michael and Nigel were eleven years old. They were not identical twins, but they did look very much alike; the same but different. They were the youngest children in their class as their birthday was right at the end of August. As well as being brothers, they were the best of friends.

Granny and Granddad came to stay for the Easter holidays in 1978, as they did every year. In past years Michael and Nigel could never really relax when Granddad was there but they had got to know him a bit better on holiday the previous summer and somehow he had become less scary. Mum still made them tidy the whole house before Granny and Granddad arrived. The boys were starting to think that this was because she wanted it to be tidy and the coming of her parents gave Mum an excuse to get them to do it.

Granddad still looked at many things as if they were not really good enough but sometimes other things made him smile. Neither boy had ever seen a smile on Granddad's face before the unsuccessful family holiday that they had shared on the water the previous summer.

Now that they knew Granddad a bit better, Michael and Nigel didn't feel that they needed to keep out of the way of their grandparents by playing in their rooms or in the garden. Not for the whole visit, anyway. They even sometimes played chess with their grandfather, although he never let them beat him.

As always, Mum cooked an enormous roast chicken for lunch on Easter Sunday. Michael and Nigel liked roast chicken. They didn't eat as much chocolate as they could have done in the morning to save some room for lunch. When the chicken was served the boys, their parents and grandparents sat around the table talking about the week that they had sunk a narrowboat as a family the previous summer.

Before the boat sank Mum's sister, Aunty Adele, had fallen into the canal three times. She always claimed that one of her falls only counted as half. The family laughed together over their meal as Nigel tried to pull the face that Aunty Adele had had the first time that she fell into the water. Suddenly the doorbell rang.

Michael jumped up to run to the door. Mum told him that he was not to go out and play with his friends as it was a family day. While Michael was not expecting any friends to call, he also did not expect it to be as much of a family day as it was. He opened the door to find Aunty Adele on the doorstep. Before he could ask her whether she fell in the water two and a half times or three times, she introduced the white haired man stood beside her as Professor Graham and led him into the house.

Everyone around the table was as surprised to see Aunty Adele as Michael had been. Mum jumped up and told the boys to fetch the stools from the kitchen. She assured the new visitors that there would be enough chicken to go around. Granny followed her grandsons into the kitchen, returning with two sets of plates and cutlery.

When all eight of them were sat around the table, Michael thought that anyone looking in through the window would think that Aunty Adele and Professor Graham were giants as the kitchen stools were very much higher than the dining room chairs that everyone else was sat on. Nigel thought that people would just assume that they had a very tall history teacher with bad table manners who had invited himself to lunch. Within moments of being served, the Professor had dribbled gravy on his corduroy jacket. If the leather patches had been on his lapels, rather than his elbows, it would have wiped off. As it was, the stain was growing ever larger with more spatters being added as each forkful made its precarious journey to his bearded mouth from the plate on the table, so very far below.

Aunty Adele explained to the family that Professor Graham was another one of the lecturers from the university where she taught. They had known each other for some years but had recently got to know each other better after they had spent an evening together ungluing a student who had been the victim of a practical joke.

As soon as Aunty Adele said that Professor Graham had proposed to her and she had accepted, Mum jumped up from her seat and started screaming. It was a good scream but it took both boys by surprise. They were both itching to know what the student had been stuck to and how long it had taken to set him free again. Suddenly though everyone around the table was looking at jewellery and talking about weddings.

Aunty Adele and Professor Graham's plan was to get married that very summer, when the university that they worked in was closed. That way they could hold the party afterwards in the Great Hall and put everyone up in halls. Nigel wondered whether this would involve being glued to rafters and, more specifically, whether this would involve Granddad being glued to a rafter. Michael nudged him excitedly to get his attention when Aunty Adele said that Mum was going to be the chief bridesmaid and that the boys were going to be ushers. She had wanted them to be pageboys but had been surprised to see that they were suddenly almost as tall as she was. Ushers it was to be.

Michael and Nigel both knew what ushers were as they had seen them at the cinema, showing latecomers to their seats by torchlight. They wondered why a wedding would need to be held in