Well then, George Grundy was sent down. The prisons system being what it is, there’s no room for him among the young offenders. He’s with the big lads, in proper grownup jail, and someone has already pissed in his bed. It sounds … awful. George has promised he’ll come out of this experience better than he went in. Good luck with that: I’m unsure how he’ll survive without getting sucked into The Gang That Runs the Wing.
Brad Horrobin has been to visit him, George understandably preferring to see his undemanding mathematician cousin than his spiralling-out-of-control parents. George has historically got Brad in trouble – the affair of the vandalised bench in Grey Gables springs to mind. Maybe Brad will be the steadying influence who helps George survive his ordeal. Or maybe – I can see this all too clearly – Brad will end up the introverted but ruthless bespectacled accountant running the money-laundering side of George’s future criminal empire, the seeds of which will be sown during his time banged up.
Not that there is any shortage of prison experience in Ambridge. There are sociologists in the estimable Academic Archers network (a real thing, just as Ambridge itself is, of course, a real village) who work on notable features of life in rural Borsetshire. Has it come to their attention that, for a small settlement in middle England, Ambridge seems to have had quite the crime surge recently? Freddie Pargetter was inside for drug offences; Helen Archer for stabbing her husband; Philip Moss for running a ring of enslaved builders. Cast back in time a couple of decades and there was Susan for harbouring her brother Clive Horrobin; and Clive himself for holding up the shop with a gun. This is without mentioning the undiscovered and/or untackled crimes: Nic’s hit and run on Matt Crawford; Matt Crawford’s own deeply shady affairs; and, above all, the many crimes of the late Evil Rob, from the blocked culvert that led to the floods that led to the death of Freda Fry, to his most memorable misdeed, his coercive control of Helen.
The wider Grundy family is holding things together, just, despite George’s incarceration. They held their annual apple day, despite the hefty number of people who aren’t speaking to them. Alice Aldridge – more magnanimous than one might expect – attended, and submitted herself to the apple divination stall. Apparently, you skin the fruit, then throw the peel over your shoulder. The initial it most resembles as it hits the ground is that of the person you are going to marry. It came out as “C”. Perhaps her actual ex-husband Chris Carter? There are few other contenders: Chelsea Horrobin, I suppose, though that really would be a leap. He’s still in love with her. I live in hope.
• This article was amended on 5 November 2024. It was Freda Fry, not Bert Fry, who was swept away to her death in the floods.
