"The Doily Cart Gift Aid Scam"
or
"Foul-Mouth Freddy Receives Some Good ****ing Will Presents From Home"
A Flintloque Tale by Tony Harwood
Photograph and Miniature by Tony Harwood
Cryptmass wouldn't be Cryptmass without Foul Mouth Freddy! This year Freddy's creator, Tony Harwood, recounts a tale of how notoriety can lead to fortune. If you have a mind like Freddy's that is...
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In this year’s advent, I thought I would recount a less well known story featuring our potty mouthed anti-hero.
During the wars fought out over Urop the fame and exploits of Foul-Mouthed Freddy and his posse became the staple of many penny dreadfuls [1] which were in turn sold and bartered by the good Orcs of Albion. In fact Foul-Mouth Freddy was becoming quite the celebrity back in olde Blighty. Much to the dismay of the officers and staff at Orseguards.
One un-foreseen side effect of Freddy’s notoriety was that he regularly received gifts from ill-informed well wishers sending food parcels and trinkets. In the main the food was often stale (the postage service from Albion to Al Garvey left a lot to be desired) and the trinkets worthless but occasionally some item or other caused some mirth amongst the Orcs under Freddy’s command. One such package sent from the good seamstresses of an amateur operatic society called The Dirty Doily Cart of Shorditch contained some Dundee cake and jars of pickled cabbage which, by the time they had arrived with Freddy were completely inedible! Inedible that is to anyone other than a group of Dwarves, who for some reason got all starry-eyes at the sight of the rock-hard and flattened cake then some Goblin delinquents who thought that the pickled vegetables were manna from heaven.
Freddy thought nothing of passing the cake and pickled cabbage on to his erstwhile allies who received the items with all due reverence.
However there was something else of note in this package; each of the items had been carefully wrapped in sheets of crumpled and worn play sheets – pages from old musical performances with words and music notation that once again Freddy thought very little of. That is until some of the Orc officers saw them and asked if they could have them – something to do with Orc officer’s public school education where similar sheets brought back memories of three course school dinners and stage performances where the male Orcs would dress up as females and sing in falsetto voices to accompaniment from a single piano! These Orc officers had very strange ideas about what constituted entertainment...
As time went on Freddy was regularly asked if he had any more cake, pickled vegetables or song sheets.
This got Freddy thinking...
He got Dicky, that’s Tricky Dicky to you and me to write back to the ladies of the Dirty Doily Cart operatic society asking if they would be so kind as to send further supplies of cake, pickling jars and song sheets as they had been so well received by the loyal Orc redcoats who said that they reminded them of their good olde Mums back home.
As you can guess Freddy had identified yet another money-making scam.
Some weeks later the first of many such care-packages arrived with Freddy. The first had more stale cake which Freddy sold to the Dwarves. Then there was the pickled vegetables (the more rancid the better) which he bartered with the Goblins and then he exchanged the song sheets for favours with the besotted and chin-less Orc officers of the regiment.
Freddy was making the most of his newly-found good fortune and if he’d been sensible [2] this could have been his ‘golden-ticket’ in the Grande Army of Albion, but as we good readers know all too well – our Freddy just can’t act with restrain and all of his good fortune was dwindled away on Wine, Women and Gambling in the same way that Freddy managed to lose all of his hard-earned pennies...
More parcels came from Albion, more bartering was made and more coin was wasted on frivolous pastimes. The problem was that the Dwarves,
demanded more cake. The Goblins cried out for more pickled goods and the Officers wanted even more and varied songs to enable them to re-live their childhood public-school fantasies. As you can see these addictions were becoming a major chore and taking up most of Freddy’s time. Being a part-time supplier of contraband was becoming a full-time job...
As with most of Freddy’s grand ideas this one was also destined to failure and as the gift-aid parcels dried up, the Dwarves become irate, the Goblins rebelled and the Orc officers turned frosty [3], Ensuring that Freddy and the Posse were given the very worst of camp duties and horrid ****ing chores.
It is said that the local post office manager in Al Garvey was soon supplying cake, pickled vegetables and song sheets to the Army of Albion – but this may have been nothing more than an innocent coincidence.
The good news (for Freddy) is that this state of affairs didn’t last long and they were soon back fighting Ferach columns across the dusty plains of Al Garvey – but this is the story of how Freddy (and his posse) pissed away a fortune in good will while resting and billeted in the mountains of Al Garvey during the Great Mordrean Wars.
[1] Penny Dreadfuls – cheap single sheet newspaper-like story sheets usually sold for just 1 penny – hence the name.
[2] Need I say anything? This is after all our Freddy!
[3] The Orc Officers were really quite annoyed when they were not able to dress up in women’s clothing and sing in high voices.
Far fetched?
During my own youth, my mother and father worked on a university campus and at regular intervals the students would hold a ‘Rag’ or fund raising event with much of the money raised coming from the sale of student magazines or Rag Mags [4]. The Rags would have funny stories and jokes which when the fund raising event was over would be unceremoniously dumped. I quickly realised that these ‘spare’ joke sheets had some value to my school chums and I would sell them at my school. I can report that following Rag week, Mum and Dad didn’t need to send me off to school with dinner money as the proceeds from the second-hand magazines was more than enough to fund my lunch.
[4] If in any doubt, Google Rag Mags to see just how numerous and varied these magazines were in the 70’s and 80’s.
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Freddy's Posse
Miniatures and Terrain Painted, Based and Photographed by Tony Harwood
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Webmaster's Notes
This article was written exclusively for Orcs in the Webbe and was first published on the 2nd December 2019 as part of its 2019 Advent Calendar.
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