In Competition No. 2389 you were invited to provide a short story or anecdote entitled ‘Mishap with Pyjamas’.
The germ of this competition was a statistic presented to me on television: last year 22 cases of admission to hospital came under the heading ‘mishaps with pyjamas’. My mind grew feverish trying to imagine the different incidents which made up this alarming figure, and so I handed over to you. My own troubles with pyjamas, which I won’t bore you with, would never have got me into Accident and Emergency, though they might have landed me in a police station for the night. Commendations to Jeremy Lawrence, Basil Ransome-Davis, Keith Norman and R.J. Pickles, whose last sentence tickled my fancy: ‘Serves me right for agreeing to appear in a Slumberland advertisement with a hippopotamus.’ £30 to Bill Greenwell at the top, and £25 each to the other prizewinners printed below.
As a child, he wandered carelessly through the house with his pyjama trousers round his ankles. His mother patiently upbraided him. ‘Don’t pull the cord,’ she said, dinning it into his head until decency was established, and morning visitors were not treated to unseemly sights. ‘Daniel, don’t pull the cord’ — it went through his head like a perpetual mantra.
He was groggy now, his head nodding with exhaustion. He seemed to have been awake for hours and hours, to be scarcely human, to be almost beyond sleep. The maps began to blur. He was thinking of his mother when the flak hit the plane, and, following the others in their frenzy, he flipped himself out into the open air. He loved her very much. What was it she had said?
Bill Greenwell
Our wedding was idyllic. The second’s so much easier than the first; things fit together.
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