Bounce – Jane Pugh
January 31st, 2009 | Published in Volume III: Cautionary Tales
There was a cuddly, round post woman who wore her uniform shorts and a smile on her face all year round. She loved her job, driving the van past the field of abandoned vehicles, listening to Radio 2 and the hits from the 1980s, arriving in the village of Harrowbarrow and delivering the mail.
As we all know, here in Cornwall, there’s been a lot of trouble regarding the whole postal service with post offices closing down left, right and centre. The post office in Harrowbarrow is fine and thank goodness for that. But you will also probably remember that the price of fuel sky rocketed during 2008 which is when the story all began. Petrol prices meant that the deliver of letters was prohibitively expensive so Head office made the harsh decision that the post woman was no longer allowed to drive her van from door to door in the village of Harrowbarrow and delivering letters on foot was deemed too time consuming. Instead, she had to drop the letters off at the Post Office where the villagers had to come and collect them. The post woman was heart broken and anxious. She told her husband that not only were her hours cut but neither would she be able to see the villagers any more, which was a great pity because she liked them and they liked her too, in fact for some people, she was the only human being they saw on a regular basis. Her husband, who worked from home designing websites and sorting out people’s email problems, agreed, it was a terrible thing not to be able to communicate.
Of course, the post woman’s fears were well-founded. None of the rickety old people could get to the post office and neither could people with wobbly legs because of cerebral palsy or MS, or parents with very small troublesome children, or over-stretched people who commuted daily to Plymouth. They ended up with days and days of letters to collect. Those who could make it had to queue up whilst the post master tried to sort out their mail so the shop was always packed with people in bad moods because they kept getting the wrong disc from Lovefilm.com and the wrong letter from their gap year kids. They got so irritable that they took it out on the Post Woman but it wasn’t her fault. She shut herself into her van and switched on Radio 2, and poured herself a cup of hot Ribena. Then the radio started playing ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ by Foreigner from 1984 and that just did for the post woman and she burst into tears as the song warbled out I want to Know What Love is, I want you to show me!’ because no one was showing her love anymore.
Suddenly, from over the top of the hedge a little boy appeared and then disappeared, appeared and then disappeared. The post woman was very surprised so she got out of her red van to investigate and saw a little boy bouncing on a big, circular trampoline. It looked so much fun and for the first time in absolutely ages the post woman smiled. The boy was disconcerted to see this disembodied head grinning at him from over the hedge so he stopped bouncing and they ended up having chat. The boy explained that all his friends had trampolines in their gardens. He’d got his as a present when his parents had split up because they no longer communicated. This nearly made the post woman well up again because it reminded her of the problems with the postal service. The boy recognised the post woman’s unhappiness so to cheer up he asked her if she wanted to have a go.
With her Doc Martins kicked off, the post woman had a wonderful bounce on the trampoline. Up and down she went higher and higher and as she bounced she saw that the boy was right; in every garden around the village was a trampoline and seeing them all in everyone’s back garden gave the post woman a really cracking idea. That night she sat at the kitchen table and worked out her master plan which so engrossed her that when her husband asked her what she was doing she was too busy to answer.
Early the next morning, the post woman, with her mail bag strapped across her shoulders, mounted the little boy’s trampoline. She bounced and bounced and on the final bounce she leapt across to the next trampoline in the neighbour’s garden and then she bounced to the next trampoline in the next garden and then the next and the next. At each trampoline she stopped and carefully climbed down and delivered the post. The only letters she couldn’t deliver were at houses that didn’t have a trampoline. This was a problem she soon overcame by going home and kicking her husband off the computer so she could buy some trampolines off e-bay. She bought them with her own money because the post woman believed whole heartedly in the importance of the exchange of letters.
When the trampolines arrived she asked her husband if he would help erect them. He wasn’t convinced that the bouncing letter delivery was a good idea. He said that he believed in communication just as much as she did but perhaps everyone had to accept that letter writing was a thing of the past and everyone should now embrace the email. The post woman who despite listening to ‘War, what is it good for?’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood that morning, totally let rip, there she was single handedly trying to save the local postal service and all he could do was go on about email. They rarely argued but more than made up for it by making this a real belter which resulted in her husband walking off in a huff. The little boy’s dad came out to help her and as he wrestled with an Alan key, which he kept dropping and losing in the grass, he told the post woman that he was sorry to hear that her husband didn’t believe in letters anymore because communication is essential in every relationship. This was a massive hint but the post woman was so obsessed with getting all the trampolines fully functioning, and so cross with her husband she failed to take it.
Her hard work and devotion paid off because after a few days of bouncing round the village, she began to receive overwhelming gratitude and loads of apologies for ever being irritable with her from everyone in the village. Villagers began crowding at their doors in excited expectation of seeing the post woman flying through the air clutching letters from maiden aunts, in fact, they were so enthusiastic they even looked forward to receiving utility bills.
The post woman was feeling on top of the world and she barely noticed that as she felt bouncier, her husband, still smarting and troubled after the row, was becoming more withdrawn, flatter you could say. She promised herself that she would talk to him as soon as she got the chance but then the ‘powers that be’ got wind of what the post woman was doing and before she could sing the opening bars of ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ by Cindy Lauper, she was summoned to a management meeting during which they chastised her for flouting health and safety regs, acting in an uncouth manner and bringing the postal service into disrepute. The post woman was having none of it and, utilizing her newly found confidence, she told her bosses that she was saving fuel, helping the environment and delivering the mail faster than she’d ever done in the van. They remained unconvinced and so the post woman, feeling like she had no other choice, drafted a letter to the local press. Word spread like wild fire, one day she was on the front page of the Cornish Guardian, the next day she was on the front page of The Guardian and then her beloved Radio 2 got in touch and she quickly found herself giggling her way through an interview with Jeremy Vine whom she’d always fancied for his authoritative diction and masculine tone, unlike her moody husband who seemed barely capable of more than a grunt these days.
She had captured the nation’s imagination. She was, in her own words, combining a valuable service with a contemporary twist, or somersault if she practiced, ho-ho. With the entire nation behind the bouncing post woman, her bosses back-peddled at speed, saying they’d supported her all along and they were going to roll out her idea across the country. Almost over night, rural postal workers could be seen bouncing around villages nestled in the foothills of Snowdonia, or silhouetted against the skyline of the Cheshire Plain or skimming the Lochs in Scotland, one over enthusiastic young post woman wildly over-shot a trampoline on the shores of Loch Lomond and ended up going for an unscheduled, freezing cold swim.
The Post Woman made sure that The Postal Service paid a lot of money for her original idea and used some of it to upgrade the trampolines. They were practically threadbare because she wasn’t the only one using the trampolines to get from place to place, the whole village was at it. The trampolines were so busy, people had to be blow a whistle or call out to avoid a mid-air collision. Sometimes there were accidents as little children tried to make it to a friend’s house but missed by miles and ended up in a crumpled, tearful heap with a swollen tongue where they’d bitten it really hard on impact. One old chap was trying to get home from his seventieth birthday party but was definitely two sheets to the wind and ended up crashing down a disused well in a back garden and nobody knew where he was for 24 hours until he finally used his initiative and made a call to his daughter in law on his mobile phone.
The Bouncing Post Woman decided that she’d better write a book ‘How to Get the Most Out of Your Trampoline’ and in it she included some very useful Do’s and Don’ts.
Do where a cycling helmet.
Don’t bounce on a full stomach.
Do remove false teeth.
Don’t make calls on your mobile phone.
Do seletape your spectacles to your head.
Don’t attempt back flips or other dangerous stunts.
Do extinguish all cigarettes.
The book was an instant best seller and became a Richard and Judy Bookclub book. Just when she thought things couldn’t get any better, she was asked to represent her country at the 2012 Olympic Games. This was the pinnacle of her success but she decided not to tell her husband because it seemed clear that every time she told him about any of her achievements, he had nothing to say.
It was Valentine’s Day and the Bouncing Post Woman had a very heavy sack and, if she were being honest, she had a heavy heart too. She had saved her local postal round, she had revolutionised the postal service, she had become a National treasure and bounced her way into the history books, but what was the point of it all when she and her husband could barely look each other in the eye anymore. She couldn’t understand it, they had loved each other so much and now it had all gone horribly wrong.
She was just listening to Bananarama’s ‘Really Saying Something’ from 1985 when it dawned on her that they of all people, she, the exponent of letter writing, and he the champion of social networking and email, had quite simply forgotten how to communicate.
She finished her round with a double back somersault with a half pike finish, which was a bit naughty because she was breaking one of her golden rules, and she was going to nip to the post office to buy a valentine’s card but then thought better of it and drove home. She took off her helmet and hung up her bag. Her husband, bemused at first, switched off his computer. Then they sat at the kitchen table and had a conversation.
To this day the post woman and her husband still argue over which is better, the letter or the email but they do recognise that sometimes neither will suffice and when you have a burning desire to tell a person you love them, you must open your mouth and let the words tumble out instead.
End.