When Frankie Loved Jeanie
(and Other Forgotten Scots Folk Tales)
by John McGroarty
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: The re-telling of a cheesy Scots legend.
_____________________________________________________________________
This little story is one that my old home economics (home eekies we called it) teacher, Mrs. Henderson, used to tell us to help relieve the all-pervading sense of pointlessness when we were receiving our first rate education at Saint Patrick and the Blind Virgin High - back in the eighties - in how to boil eggs, sew little denim sacks, make balsa wood coat racks with our teeth, and prepare endless plates of burnt toast and cheese. She swore that it was a real bona fide olde Scots legend and that it was an old favourite at the John o’ Groats suicide club when she was a teenager. Nowadays she would probably be arrested for gross perversion of young minds, but those were different times. Anyway, this is the way she always used to tell it, gazing dreamily out of the window out towards the bing.
Frankie really did love Jeanie Cream Cheese (she would always begin). Truly, butterly, sauerkrautly. All the men in the small Scottish village of Bàgh a' Chàise loved Jeanie too, though they never saw the cream cheese, or the butter, or the organic yogurt with raisins (just the handcuffs and the strong kernmantle rope and the odd lump of moldy cheese). That was reserved for Frankie. And that was why Frankie loved Jeanie more than anyone else. In fact he was the only one to know about the creams. The only one to slither under the sheets with the coleslaw queen. With princess egg flap. His whipped cream wonder. His little (bonny) butterfat baby. On reflection I now realise that all of this is not a true story, just the figment of a warped, slightly perverted, home economics teacher’s imagination (how teachers lie and deceive trusting young minds), trying pathetically to show how exciting domestic chores could be to hormone charged adolescents. The names I’ve used are different from Mrs. Henderson’s and are purely arbitrary and you can fill in any name you like, if you are so inclined, anytime that you come across a “Frankie” or a “Jeanie” in the world of your everyday experience, or if not, perhaps, in your dreams, where reason is dead, and all is absurd, all is permitted. And by the way, the resurrecting of this old yarn about “Frankie” and “Jeanie’s” cheesy shenanigans is designed with no other purpose than to make life easier for all of us, and as a gesture of national and international reconciliation in these times of crisis and big constitutional decisions, wherever we may be.
Frankie always kinda knew that he was in for a creaming. And he would smile. A cheesy smile of anticipation. There would be a lot of tension in the air and a distinct aroma of goat’s cheese would pervade the house. Frankie suspected, though this was something that Jeanie never confessed to, not even at the height of her creamy abandon, that his wife worshipped some diabolic forces around the time of her conversion to the clotted cream cutie (to whom Frankie would lovingly apply variously shaped spoons and dessert cutlery, and his long paddle tongue). Frankie imagined a sort of gigantic cheese demon. A huge floating orange blue-and-green-veined cheese ball with horns. A Mephistopheles mould. A fiendish feta. A diabolic Dutch edam. Under normal circumstances, that is when she was not Princess Egg Flap or some other super-cream heroine, Jeanie was famous in the Highlands as a borderline sectionable cleaning fanatic. Every nook and cranny in the house, the garage, and the surrounding five hundred yard radius was always pristine, shining, specklessly spick and span. Jeanie would smack on her latex suit and rubber gloves every morning and while Frankie was away at the office in Dundee get into the cupboards with her industrial hoover, toothbrush the toilet and the mopboard, polish the fridge and the washing machine, scrub the garage roof (every other Monday), buff the inside of the wardrobe (alternate Tuesdays), brush the garden and scour the oven hotplate with a huge under-wired brillo pad. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, she would chant to herself dementedly. When Frankie arrived home he would have to change into his scrub suit and mask before approaching the house. This was at the peak of the cleaning madness bell curve. Then Jeanie would slowly start her slide towards creamy minus infinity. She would start by sterilizing the cheapest canned reduced fat, and then work her way up the scale from half cream to whipped to double to extra-thick double clotted. Coleslaws and sauerkrauts and Waldorf salads and rich rice puddings with cinnamon would appear as if by magic in a now increasingly filthy fridge. For Jeanie was given over heart and soul to the cream cheese Devil. She would stop cleaning – her mind controlled by nothing but the mad need to cook cheese recipes – and the house would fall into a state of pre-hygienic chaos. That was when the all pervading smell of goat’s cheese would start to turn the air of the house rancid. A cheesy cloud would envelop everything and the people in the village would start to fix gasmasks on their children and domestic animals. The women of the village would vent their disgust and choke on cheese fumes in private and the men would sniff the air and smile and wonder who the lucky victim of Jeanie’s dairylea derangement would be. Slowly Frankie would become accustomed to the smell and the filth. He would dress progressively downwards, from scrub suit to patient’s green sterile drag to oily boiler suit to a smelly old T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. In this stage Jeanie would abandon her latex suit and get into a short kilt, ghillie shirt and balmoral bonnet and, taking up her kernmantle rope, drive into town looking for a victim. When she had located one, she would lasso him and throw him into the back of the jeep. Back home, Jeanie would strip the victim and tie him to a chair in the garage and handcuff his ears together. She would then proceed to barf, plook, and electric chair the victim in preparation for the grand finale. Moving quickly, while the victim was still dazed and delirious from the plooking and electric chairing (don’t try this at home), she would administer a cheesejob in a state of foul fetid frenzy. She would then rush up to the kitchen to start boiling up cheeses for Frankie. When Frankie arrived home and saw the jeep (the cream machine) parked outside, he would know exactly what to do. He would enter the garage and release the victim and then head upstairs for the long prayed for creaming. The cheese orgy would last for two days and then Jeanie, with a sudden look of disgust on her face and a deep sense of shame, would put away her Balmoral bonnet and slip back into her latex suit and wellies and start cleaning up. Things would return to normal, until the next time the goat would call….
Now, according to Mrs. Henderson, all of this happened many hard-boiled eggs ago and sadly Frankie and Jeanie are no more. Frankie went first, falling at Flodden, and Jeanie lived on for centuries alone, finally departing the stage after administering one final cheesejob to Robert the Bruce, smearing the big man in goat’s cheese just before Bannockburn. It was the electric chairing that sealed her fate. Apparently the Bruce reacted badly and had her put to death, though many think (not mentioned in any of the history books which I have consulted) that the ensuing enragement of the king swung the battle for the Scots. Mrs. Henderson told us that the village of Cheese Bay celebrated a re-enactment every Whitsunday with all the young local lassies dressing up in traditional latex and rubber suits and balmoral bonnets and hunting down young men in order to perform various types of cheesejobs and plookings (the electric chairing, as with the Bruce, proved to be unpopular and would be resisted). Mrs Henderson always gave a long pronounced “eee” and “ooo” in cheesejob and plooking. It became a sort of rite of passage in the far north. Some historians, according to Mrs. Henderson’s husband, who was also the history teacher at the Blind Virgin, even traced the origins of the story back to the Picts (pict meaning blue goat’s cheese). The festival became so popular that people would flock from miles around, and even as far away as England to take part. This really pissed off the locals and when the Australians started to arrive the town hall stopped funding the event. Sadly, Cheese Bay’s annual plooking has sloughed down the plughole of our national consciousness and I hope, as I am sure does Mrs. Henderson (wherever she is), whatever the result of the referendum, that we can start to rediscover our old legends and folk tales and give them the place that they deserve in our national life once again. Mr. Henderson, the music teacher, (all of my teachers were called Henderson at the Blind Virgin) used to tell us an even more disgusting story about the perversions of the great composers to keep us from smashing up the classroom during his “music” class. Miss Henderson, the modern languages teacher, used to recite the ballad of William Wallace’s Hot Nights in Paris for similar reasons and Father Henderson, our RE teacher, fought a losing battle against nature by explaining ad astra per alas porci how and why Blind Harry went blind (he was also our Latin teacher, and not a bad one at that, despite dark hairy arms and crypto-fascism). But I think I’ll wait till the results are in for those ones. They were probably all lies or gross exaggerations anyway.
Swearwords: None.
Description: The re-telling of a cheesy Scots legend.
_____________________________________________________________________
This little story is one that my old home economics (home eekies we called it) teacher, Mrs. Henderson, used to tell us to help relieve the all-pervading sense of pointlessness when we were receiving our first rate education at Saint Patrick and the Blind Virgin High - back in the eighties - in how to boil eggs, sew little denim sacks, make balsa wood coat racks with our teeth, and prepare endless plates of burnt toast and cheese. She swore that it was a real bona fide olde Scots legend and that it was an old favourite at the John o’ Groats suicide club when she was a teenager. Nowadays she would probably be arrested for gross perversion of young minds, but those were different times. Anyway, this is the way she always used to tell it, gazing dreamily out of the window out towards the bing.
Frankie really did love Jeanie Cream Cheese (she would always begin). Truly, butterly, sauerkrautly. All the men in the small Scottish village of Bàgh a' Chàise loved Jeanie too, though they never saw the cream cheese, or the butter, or the organic yogurt with raisins (just the handcuffs and the strong kernmantle rope and the odd lump of moldy cheese). That was reserved for Frankie. And that was why Frankie loved Jeanie more than anyone else. In fact he was the only one to know about the creams. The only one to slither under the sheets with the coleslaw queen. With princess egg flap. His whipped cream wonder. His little (bonny) butterfat baby. On reflection I now realise that all of this is not a true story, just the figment of a warped, slightly perverted, home economics teacher’s imagination (how teachers lie and deceive trusting young minds), trying pathetically to show how exciting domestic chores could be to hormone charged adolescents. The names I’ve used are different from Mrs. Henderson’s and are purely arbitrary and you can fill in any name you like, if you are so inclined, anytime that you come across a “Frankie” or a “Jeanie” in the world of your everyday experience, or if not, perhaps, in your dreams, where reason is dead, and all is absurd, all is permitted. And by the way, the resurrecting of this old yarn about “Frankie” and “Jeanie’s” cheesy shenanigans is designed with no other purpose than to make life easier for all of us, and as a gesture of national and international reconciliation in these times of crisis and big constitutional decisions, wherever we may be.
Frankie always kinda knew that he was in for a creaming. And he would smile. A cheesy smile of anticipation. There would be a lot of tension in the air and a distinct aroma of goat’s cheese would pervade the house. Frankie suspected, though this was something that Jeanie never confessed to, not even at the height of her creamy abandon, that his wife worshipped some diabolic forces around the time of her conversion to the clotted cream cutie (to whom Frankie would lovingly apply variously shaped spoons and dessert cutlery, and his long paddle tongue). Frankie imagined a sort of gigantic cheese demon. A huge floating orange blue-and-green-veined cheese ball with horns. A Mephistopheles mould. A fiendish feta. A diabolic Dutch edam. Under normal circumstances, that is when she was not Princess Egg Flap or some other super-cream heroine, Jeanie was famous in the Highlands as a borderline sectionable cleaning fanatic. Every nook and cranny in the house, the garage, and the surrounding five hundred yard radius was always pristine, shining, specklessly spick and span. Jeanie would smack on her latex suit and rubber gloves every morning and while Frankie was away at the office in Dundee get into the cupboards with her industrial hoover, toothbrush the toilet and the mopboard, polish the fridge and the washing machine, scrub the garage roof (every other Monday), buff the inside of the wardrobe (alternate Tuesdays), brush the garden and scour the oven hotplate with a huge under-wired brillo pad. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, she would chant to herself dementedly. When Frankie arrived home he would have to change into his scrub suit and mask before approaching the house. This was at the peak of the cleaning madness bell curve. Then Jeanie would slowly start her slide towards creamy minus infinity. She would start by sterilizing the cheapest canned reduced fat, and then work her way up the scale from half cream to whipped to double to extra-thick double clotted. Coleslaws and sauerkrauts and Waldorf salads and rich rice puddings with cinnamon would appear as if by magic in a now increasingly filthy fridge. For Jeanie was given over heart and soul to the cream cheese Devil. She would stop cleaning – her mind controlled by nothing but the mad need to cook cheese recipes – and the house would fall into a state of pre-hygienic chaos. That was when the all pervading smell of goat’s cheese would start to turn the air of the house rancid. A cheesy cloud would envelop everything and the people in the village would start to fix gasmasks on their children and domestic animals. The women of the village would vent their disgust and choke on cheese fumes in private and the men would sniff the air and smile and wonder who the lucky victim of Jeanie’s dairylea derangement would be. Slowly Frankie would become accustomed to the smell and the filth. He would dress progressively downwards, from scrub suit to patient’s green sterile drag to oily boiler suit to a smelly old T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. In this stage Jeanie would abandon her latex suit and get into a short kilt, ghillie shirt and balmoral bonnet and, taking up her kernmantle rope, drive into town looking for a victim. When she had located one, she would lasso him and throw him into the back of the jeep. Back home, Jeanie would strip the victim and tie him to a chair in the garage and handcuff his ears together. She would then proceed to barf, plook, and electric chair the victim in preparation for the grand finale. Moving quickly, while the victim was still dazed and delirious from the plooking and electric chairing (don’t try this at home), she would administer a cheesejob in a state of foul fetid frenzy. She would then rush up to the kitchen to start boiling up cheeses for Frankie. When Frankie arrived home and saw the jeep (the cream machine) parked outside, he would know exactly what to do. He would enter the garage and release the victim and then head upstairs for the long prayed for creaming. The cheese orgy would last for two days and then Jeanie, with a sudden look of disgust on her face and a deep sense of shame, would put away her Balmoral bonnet and slip back into her latex suit and wellies and start cleaning up. Things would return to normal, until the next time the goat would call….
Now, according to Mrs. Henderson, all of this happened many hard-boiled eggs ago and sadly Frankie and Jeanie are no more. Frankie went first, falling at Flodden, and Jeanie lived on for centuries alone, finally departing the stage after administering one final cheesejob to Robert the Bruce, smearing the big man in goat’s cheese just before Bannockburn. It was the electric chairing that sealed her fate. Apparently the Bruce reacted badly and had her put to death, though many think (not mentioned in any of the history books which I have consulted) that the ensuing enragement of the king swung the battle for the Scots. Mrs. Henderson told us that the village of Cheese Bay celebrated a re-enactment every Whitsunday with all the young local lassies dressing up in traditional latex and rubber suits and balmoral bonnets and hunting down young men in order to perform various types of cheesejobs and plookings (the electric chairing, as with the Bruce, proved to be unpopular and would be resisted). Mrs Henderson always gave a long pronounced “eee” and “ooo” in cheesejob and plooking. It became a sort of rite of passage in the far north. Some historians, according to Mrs. Henderson’s husband, who was also the history teacher at the Blind Virgin, even traced the origins of the story back to the Picts (pict meaning blue goat’s cheese). The festival became so popular that people would flock from miles around, and even as far away as England to take part. This really pissed off the locals and when the Australians started to arrive the town hall stopped funding the event. Sadly, Cheese Bay’s annual plooking has sloughed down the plughole of our national consciousness and I hope, as I am sure does Mrs. Henderson (wherever she is), whatever the result of the referendum, that we can start to rediscover our old legends and folk tales and give them the place that they deserve in our national life once again. Mr. Henderson, the music teacher, (all of my teachers were called Henderson at the Blind Virgin) used to tell us an even more disgusting story about the perversions of the great composers to keep us from smashing up the classroom during his “music” class. Miss Henderson, the modern languages teacher, used to recite the ballad of William Wallace’s Hot Nights in Paris for similar reasons and Father Henderson, our RE teacher, fought a losing battle against nature by explaining ad astra per alas porci how and why Blind Harry went blind (he was also our Latin teacher, and not a bad one at that, despite dark hairy arms and crypto-fascism). But I think I’ll wait till the results are in for those ones. They were probably all lies or gross exaggerations anyway.
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His acclaimed long short story Rainbow is a McStorytellers publication.