A Trifle Airship

By Erik Ga Bean

Three undergraduates make a friendship (and an airship) that sees them through the years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erik Ga Bean
• Release date: Feb 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311709004

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.

Book preview

A Trifle Airship

By Erik Ga Bean

Published by Erik Ga Bean at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Erik Ga Bean

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

To my wonderful wife Helen.

Chapter 1 - The First Year

David and Nelly met in their pyjamas. Freshers' Week, September 1992 at The University of Nelgumford in the English Midlands had been full of surprises for them both.

David had assumed that, at twenty-three years of age, he was just the same as he had been at eighteen. It took him a very short time amongst the teenage freshers to realise that he was old, in their eyes at least. The university's accommodation officer had presumably already been party to this pearl of wisdom. She had billeted Simon in the university halls room beside David's.

Simon's home town was a long way from David's and he had come to Nelgumford to study an entirely different course. The one thing that the two young men had in common was the year of their birth. This set them apart from their two hundred peers, who had also been woken by the over-sensitive fire alarm and were slowly assembling outside of the halls building in the small hours of that September morning.

Nelly spotted David and Simon standing a small way apart from the main group. She was one year younger than the men but had also felt the great age of the early twenties. The three of them were not the oldest undergraduates trampling the flowerbeds that night. There were many mature students; undergraduates in their thirties, forties and beyond. These people grouped together separately, seeing the new friends as three more of the young ones.

Nelly's biggest surprise of Freshers' week had been the number of young gentlemen callers that the other five girls staying in her corridor brought back to the communal kitchen. It quickly became clear to her that there was no point labelling her milk container. She soon resolved not to keep her milk in the fridge. As her corridor was on the first floor, directly above David and Simon's, she simply placed her milk in a carrier bag and hung it from the north-facing window of her room.

When the fire engine finally arrived, one of the firemen went into the building to switch the alarm off. Another man addressed the crowd on the need to treat the smoke detectors with respect and the consequences of not doing so. There was to be no hot water for twenty-four hours after each false alarm.

David invited Nelly to join him and Simon in their kitchen when the students were allowed to go back into the building. She accepted and was pleased to see that the three of them had the room to themselves. One of the other two bedrooms in the boy's corridor was double sized, to accommodate a disabled student. As a result of the likelihood of a disabled inhabitant, the corridor had been blessed with a second bathroom. This was larger than the standard bathroom which had been replicated in each of the couple of dozen corridors of which the halls building was comprised.

Simon thought that he had seen the occupants of the two south-facing rooms during the afternoon of chaos when everyone was moving in. After some noise on the second night there had been no more sign of the occupants. The rooms were always locked, the curtains always closed and the light on in the small room and off in the large.

Over mugs of late night hot chocolate, Nelly properly introduced herself. She was a law student from Thetford in Norfolk. Her childhood sweetheart had left her quite unexpectedly, in the middle of a cinema film, some months earlier. This had caused her to reflect on her life as shuffler of office papers and decide to chuck her job in and come to university.

David's story was quite similar, only with the cause and effect reversed. He had got a Saturday job in a general repair shop when he was fourteen. Initially his role had been to take in broken items from new customers and promise returning customers that whatever they were waiting for would be ready the following Thursday.

The elderly couple, who had been running the shop since the Second World War, were getting older and ever less able to run the business and repair the items. David had found himself working in the shop full-time during the school holidays and then permanently after he left school. In time he had been completing the repairs and keeping the books himself, while the elderly couple made the tea and told the lies about Thursdays.

Eventually the day had come when David had been forced to tell the elderly couple that their business could no longer support the three of them. They could see that it would not be fair to make the two of them redundant and carry on employing David to run the business for them. It was decided to call it a day and close the shop. The couple retired and David decided to go to university.

Having left school at sixteen, David was not qualified to go to university but he had been able to talk his way in to a Business Studies course at the university on the strength of his life experience. This had made David's parents very proud and his fiancé very angry. The opening statement of her tantrum had instructed David that he was going to have to decide between her and the university. The argument had not been a long one, but it had been conclusive.

Simon's girlfriend, Karen, had been far more supportive of his decision to enter higher education. Just as he had spent three years driving up to Newcastle from Exeter every other weekend while he worked in her family business, the roles were now to be reversed. She had got it easier, only having to drive up to Nelgumford. Whilst not explicit, it was expected that Simon would study stained glass for his degree and it was this that had led him to that particular university.

Eventually the conversation drew to a close. Nelly and Simon returned to their respective beds and David started to turn his mind to rigging up an improvised source of hot water. It was clear to him both that the smoke detectors were on a hair trigger and that any attempt