Which Witches

chapter 5

Ethel feedbag's familiar was not an octopus; it was a pig.
        Ethel was a country witch who lived in a tumble down cottage in a village to the west of Todcaster. She was a round - faced, rather simple person who liked to hack at rutabagas with her spade, make parsnip wine, and shovel manure over absolutely everything, and just as people often grow to look like their dogs ( or , the other way around) , Ethel had grown to look very like her pig. Both of them had round, pink cheeks and very large behinds. Both of them moved slowly on short hairy legs and grunted as they went along, and both of them had dun - colored, sleepy little eyes.
       Ethel had a Job at the egg packing station. It was a boring job because the eggs she packed were mostly rotten anyway so there was nothing for her to do, but she filled in by giving the sheep husk and turning the cows dry as she bicycled home of an evening. As for the plants in the hedgerow between the egg packing station and Ethel's cottage, there was scarcely one that wasn't covered in mold or rust or hadn't clusters of greedy aphids sucking at it's juices.
           But tonight she rode straight home. Ethel was not a snappy dresser, but to make herself smart for the coven she rubbed down her Wellington boats with a handful of straw and changed her pinafore for a clean one with felt tomatoes ( showing felt tomato blight) stitched to the pocket. 

Then she started looking for something she could take to eat. There didn't seem to be anything in the kitchen, but on the hearth rug in the living room she found a dead jackdaw which had fallen down the chimney.

          "That'll roast a treat! " Said Ethel, scooping it up.
Then she went down to the shed at the bottom of her garden to fetch her pig.

Nancy and Nora were twin witches who worked at Todcaster Central Station.  They were an unusually disagreeable pair who hated passengers, hated each other, and hated trains. As soon as Nancy went to the loudspeaker and announced that the seven fifty - two to Edinburgh was approaching platform nine, Nora rushed to her loudspeaker and cackled into it that the seven fifty - two had engine trouble and would be ninety minutes late and then it wouldn't approach platform nine at all but would come in at platform five, if they were lucky.

So now, when they should have been getting ready for the coven, they were standing in their underclothes in the bathroom of their flat in Station Road, arguing about which of their familiars was which.
       "That is so my chicken! " Shouted Nora, tugging at the tail feathers of the unfortunate bird.
       " That is not your chicken," shrieked Nora. " That is your chicken over there! "
    It was a most ridiculous argument. The Shouter girls were identical with dyed red hair, long noses, and smoke - stained fingertips.  They dressed alike and slept in twin beds and they both had chickens for familiars, which lived in wicker crates beneath their beds. And, of course, the chickens, too, were very much alike.  
Chicken often are ---- fidgety brown birds who would peck your fingers as soon as look at you. But none of this made any difference to the Shouter twins, who went on bickering so long that they were very nearly late for the most important coven of their lives.

For many years now, the witches of Todcaster had met on windylow Heath, a wild, wuthering sort of place with a few stunted thorn trees, a pond in which a gloomy lady had drowned herself on her wedding eve, and a single rock on which the ancient druids had done some dreadful deeds.
    To get there, the witches hired a bus
- the coven special which left the bus depot at seven P.M ( No one had flown on a broomstick since a witch called Mrs. Hockeridge had been sucked down the ventilation shaft of a Boeing 707 from Heathrow to Istanbul and nearly caused a very nasty mess indeed.)