Firm but Fair By Mark Pollard

Cry-Baby Jim Breaks. He pioneered it, they say. And the hushed, almost ecclesiastical tones of Ken Walton had heralded it's entry into Saturday afternoon folklore: the bright lights of Blackpool and Great Yarmouth, down to the lesser reputes of Ilfracombe and Skegness had all borne witness to it's savage, yet simple execution. Yet here it was, being administered by an unassuming but ultimately irrational horticultural sidekick, unleashed on a hitherto unsuspecting and uncomplicated lady of 27. The Folding Trouser Press.......

After some initial difficulties, Russell had been starting to enjoy his new job as a gardener at the Secure Unit. This particular morning had been shaping up nicely - the sun had been gently warming the glasshouses for a couple of hours, rabbits had been skipping about the adjacent hay meadow in their quest for the choicest cuts of daisy, and the coffee break conversation had featured none of the confused and dismembered dialogue that he had been having to decipher in the three days he'd been in the job.

He knew it would get easier after a while, that the novelty of a new staff member would soon wear thin with the natives. It all seemed fairly predictable, really.

It was then that Stephanie walked into the common area. His sense of self-preservation heightened by a couple of hairy encounters in the preceding days, he caught her reflection just behind his own in the spotless flank of the brand new Moulinex kettle (cordless, with a 360-degree swivel-base). In the side of the pristine and convex boiling apparatus he seemed to have undergone an unflattering transformation into Pete Townsend; strangely, Stephanie now looked like Felicity Kendall.

But it wasn't her now-delicate and symmetrical features that caught his eye; it was the unmistakable outline of the baseball bat that she held high above their heads. Before she could bring it down onto Russell's unprotected cranium, he span round and drove his shoulder firmly into her marshmallow-like midriff, just beneath the solar plexus. She exhaled sharply as she hit the floor squarely on her back, legs pointing straight at the ceiling and beginning to quiver slightly as Russell exerted the full fury of his 10 stone frame.

Steph started to gulp and gasp for the now-absent air that she needed, but despite the obvious lack of resistance, the frenzied horticulturalist ploughed on. She tried to turn her face towards him; without the power of breath or speech she somehow had to let him know how much pain she was in and how desperately she wanted him to stop. Perhaps a forlorn and tear-stained face would do it. No such luck - as she twisted her head round towards him, Russell expertly clipped her left cheek with his elbow. Thank Fireball Fisher at the Winter Gardens, Southport, in '81 for that move.

The act of bloody restraint only stilled once he had brought her legs down and twisted them both slightly outwards and backwards, against their natural range of movement from the pelvis. There was no escape now; once the FTP was executed, even by a lighter opponent, there was only ever one outcome. Steph finally found enough breath to let out a terrified and agonising howl.

Not only had Russell done a fine, professional job of restraining his would-be assailant, he had enhanced the procedure with a little bit extra, just so that Stephanie and the watching throng would know not to mess with him in future. Firmly but fairly; that's how he intended to approach this job.

In her struggle for survival, and probably as a result of the pride she felt in nurturing it from a seedling, feeding and watering it every day for seven months before uprooting it for the world to see, Stephanie had kept a vice-like grip on the large and well-proportioned leek she had danced into the common room with, waving it high above her head for all to see.

Russell only terminated his own boa-like clinch when he saw the Welsh root vegetable bounce to the floor next to his own, sweaty and gurning countenance. Maybe he had overdone it a bit, after all......

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