Rabbie’s Reward

About six months after brave Rabbie saved Queenie’s life, she announced in her Birthday Honours List that he was to be awarded the highest award available for civilian acts of heorism and courage in extreme danger – The Grecon Cross.

At Rabbie’s request, the award ceremony was a quiet one, held in the Sid Cooke Hotel in Harrogate. By this time Joyce was his fiancé and she and his sister, Flora, accompanied him.

At the ceremony, the Queen made a surprise announcement. In addition to the Grecon Cross, Rabbie was to have a Triang No. 81 (Agar Hall) bestowed upon him as a personal gesture of her gratitude.

She did, however, attach two conditions to the endowment. Firstly, Agar Hall was to be run as place of rest and recuperation for ex-service men and women – the first of many such establishments the Queen was planning to set up as part of her ‘Grecon Armed Service Personnel initiative’ (G.A.S.P.) Secondly, she stipulated that she and her royal entourage would stay at Agar Hall as Rabbie’s guests whenever she visited Grecondale. Rabbie agreed to the conditions and took possession of the hall which was actually in quite a sorry state and so a long process of restoration began.

Not long after Rabbie’s audience with the Queen, he and Joyce were married in a small, private ceremony. Rabbie subsequently moved in to Joyce’s tiny but homely Dolly Mixture and she gave up her job as an airline hostess so that they could concentrate on transforming Agar Hall into an establishment fit for a queen (and ex-service personnel).

Despite Rabbie’s tendency to hit the bottle if things aren’t going right, the renovations have gone reasonably well.

With the help of their recently hired Welsh house-keeper, Olwyn Owens and Wayne John the plumber [I should probably have mentioned Wayne the plumber in my ‘Commerce in Grecondale post!] the Hall is almost ready for its official opening. Only the restoration of the windows is holding them back – the ‘Human Bean’ entrusted with this job has been extremely lax…