This week’s #writephoto prompt takes us off to Little Tittweaking unexpectedly…

The Little Tittweaking Reenactment Society has been a hot bed for intrigue and unpleasantness. Its committee comprises three elderly rebarbative grandmothers, the jaundiced Nan King, the icy Nan Tucket and and the monstrous Nana Purna. Despite being congenitally incapable of agreeing with the others, the society somehow functions. In 2019, a decision of a sort was taken to reenact the principle events of World War Two, commencing on the 80th anniversary in September.

As was customary in Little Tittweaking, little forewarning was given of the upcoming plans. Indeed so surprised was Ivor Goneski, the one Polish resident to find the three harridans, dressed as members of the Waffen SS invading his allotment that he took to his shed and refused to emerge without a police guard.

The town began to complain at the regular occurrence of air raid warnings that followed, variously, the unexpected arrival of an Ocado van, a swarm of Estonian bees, which found a home on Postillion Gerund’s overzealous architraves and the perturbation caused by the Vicar losing his kite during a particularly poignant exorcism of Mrs Jeroboam’s radishes.

Happily, the lull that replicated the period of ‘sitzkrieg’ coincided with the first lock down in 2020. The three witches had plans to invade Madame Pincenez’s novelty toiletries emporium but when the route via Hard Ken’s woods was closed, they retreated via the Churchyard while consoling themselves that no one really cared about the French anyway.

Hopes rose, as some of the restrictions were lifted that their next extravaganza – to replicate the Battle of Britain, through the medium of corralling all the German shepherds and English bull terriers and getting them to fight – might take place, but the dogs, when approached, said they were essentially pacifist, they preferred sniffing anuses to ripping off ears and could they please have more chicken?

Disappointed but far from downcast, the Nans plotted their next campaign. The lack of a beach initially made the Battle for the Western desert seem unfeasible, but the entrepreneurial Nans offered to childmind their seventeen grand offspring in the school sandpit. In an unexpected turn of events, five year old Jemima Piddle forced a retreat of the forces of good, aka Mrs Plectrum’s nursery class when she evacuated her bowels in Horace the Dinosaur. Other planned evacuations of the children were thus put on hold.

Now on a roll, just before a second lockdown in December 2021, Nan King donned her Madame Butterfly wig and attacked her neighbour, Pearl Sofwisdom’s hedge. The damage to Pearl’s Arbour didn’t go down well and ever since the Sofwisdoms have tried to undermine the Nan Plans.

The controversy arising from such wanton foliage destruction, has caused a rethink of the events. An injunction was sought to stop the planned Operation on Barbara’s Roger as being both tasteless in the light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and likely to cause Ned Stalin to stop supplying illicit sachets of psychotropic borscht to the residents of Little Tittweaking’s Home for the Permanently Bewildered.

Consequently, the Nans have gone underground while they plan their reenactment of the D Day landings. No one knows what or where this might take place which has led to the residents of Little Tittweaking fortifying their front gardens with new fences and the occasional gun battery. Everyone is on edge and not looking forward to 2024. As the Reverend Hamish McTatty recalled at a recent town meeting which was called to try and raise funds to repair the damage to the Church when the Nans withdrew from their early attempts to squat in the Toiletries Emporium in Early 2020, ‘They Dun my Kirk, so whatever next?’