Furious Fannies

The Furious Fannies

A humorous, raunchy novel about a sexually

diverse group of sassy women playing rugby

By

Chris Page

© chrispage2022

Introduction

‘A real Bohica moment, what does that mean…?’

‘It’s army slang for Bend Over Here It Comes Again…’

Both girls burst out laughing, they knew what that

meant from all ends up….

‘Machismo without panache is a dead stallion…’

The rugby forwards were nick-named the Howie’s, short for Howitzers and the backs called the Petticoats. The two youngest Petticoats – Romany and Gita – were also virgins and in a squad of multiform sexual diversity and raucous banter were christened by Heidi – the chief wag and enforcer of the side - as the Petticoats with a cherry on top…

It was two days to go before her diverse group of women – nicknamed the Furious Fannies –assembled for the first training session. Two days before the mixture of congenital oddballs, social misfits and relatively normal young women that held a mirror up to the Wiltshire sisterhood she had recruited, got together to see if there was a ladies rugby team in there scratching and clawing to get out. Then there was Ginnie herself, a twenty-seven-year-old sexually frustrated disaster area who had never managed to hold down a relationship with a man for more than three months. Was she good enough to actually play the game, captain and control this team and make the category life change she envisaged, or sleepwalking into a toxic shit storm of spitting cat-house proportions?

The Furious Fannies Squad – names, position and occupation

Forwards (Nick-named the Howie’s for Howitzers)

Sarah ‘Rocky’ Cook – Loose-head Prop/Pack Leader. Hospital procurement manager.

Gina ‘Bohica’ McKinnon – The Happy Hooker. Tattooed and married Army private.

Mary-Jane ‘Biggie’ Bagnall – Tight-head Prop. Dairy farmer and very solid citizen.

Ellie Cooper – Elegant black lock. Hotel Receptionist/Masters archaeology student.

Heidi Prager – Second-row. A posh, unemployed Goth. Loves a fight & louche team joker.

Mandy ‘Judo’ Sawyer – Blind-side flanker, Judo black belt & martial arts teacher.

Sonja ‘J.J’ van Leer – Open-side flanker. South African care assistant & former player,

Billie ‘Put the Fire Out’ Hayden – Number Eight and fire-fighter.

Backs (called the Petticoats)

Tanya ‘Flipper’ Bryan – Scrum-half, housewife, gymnast and mother of twin boys.

Mollie ‘Magical’ Cook – Fly-half and kicker. Van driver.

Romany ‘Blue Streak’ Cutler – Left-wing. Traveller and scrap metal collector.

Ginnie ‘The Skipper’ Joy – Founder, captain, inside-centre and office manager.

Iona ‘Tea Tray’ Pierce – Outside-centre. Former Pro. Athlete and now personal trainer

Gita Rodrigues – Right-wing, Anglo-Indian, waitress and squash player.

Avril ‘Love-bites’ Gordon – Full-back and left-footed kicker. Married Army PTI

Replacements (Howie’s and Petticoats)

Jenny Hynes – Centre/Wing. Software developer, stepmother of two girls

Kayla Taylor – Prop/Front-row. Construction student and former hockey player.

Stella Winters – Full-back/wing. Construction student and future wife of Kayla above.

Cassie Betts – Prop/front-row replacement. Welsh and black former champion body builder.

Agnes ‘Aggy’ Dillon – Centre/wing. Former varsity rugby blue. Management trainee.

Silvie Greatorex – Lock/Back-row, petrol station employee, former hockey player.

Sheila Bates – Wing – Council cashier and former hockey player.

Alfreda ‘Alfie’ Cushing. Hooker/front-row, unemployed/former rugby player.

Sian Robartes – Athletic black cousin of Ellie Cooper’s boyfriend, utility back.

Coach – Lindsey Chene – warehouse worker and former sacked lady’s rugby coach.

Assistant Coach – Sherry Moyes - lorry driver and former man now in transition

Groundsmen – Jimmy Corbett & Gavin Morris.

Others – lovers, rugby officials, supporters, rivals, family and friends.

Chapter One

If sex with men – looking back from the lofty position of her twenty-seven years on this scarlet earth, the last eleven of which she had been an ardent and enthusiastic devotee and ardent tryer – had proven to be a more satisfying pastime; Virginia (Ginnie) Joy―now there’s a name for a subject like this―would not have given it up as a lost cause. When it had worked it was marvellous and broke the daily case-hardening inflicted upon her by a safe but ultimately repetitive supervisor’s job at the head office of a large building society, a mortgage on a miniscule singles apartment in a noisy Swindon block, ownership of a small unreliable eight-year old car and, not when driving if she could help it, too much alcohol – and was still, despite the claims of some of her pill-popping, line-snorting clubbing friends, the nearest she ever got to the inner peace and sublime elasticity that comes with moosh-drenched fulfilment.

When it bloody worked, in her case this didn’t seem to be very often.

And with this occasional burst of spun-gold orgasmic sunshine came all the indulgent male bullshitting, slobbering, oedipally fixated, ego-boosting, fantasy-acting mess and prematurely frustrating hoops she had to jump through in order to get to one of those rare moosh-tingling occasions that she should be so favoured. She wouldn’t give it up, just the toxic, clingy mummy’s boy messy relationships that for her always seemed to come with it. From here on in permanent men – unless extra special and how rare were they? – would be banished to the nether regions of her life, peripheral occasional’s brought in when she needed an erect, twenty-minute staying rock-hard pork bayonet to salve her need and keep her sane, without if such a thing was possible, the white noise and childish attention that lasting proximity to its tumescence demanded. The whole male ego- stroking business had become, quite simply, just too much bloody trouble for the minimal gains that accompanied its required machismo pampering.

It was time for Ginnie to move on.

From here on in she would make her own rules, do her own thing, instead of hiding her common sense and natural practical ability to get things right and done behind the fake shining eyes of adoration she had formerly had to use in order to gain those precious and rare pulsing droplets of fulfilment from a self-serving male and anyone else who stood in her way.

Her older brother Robert – now a teacher and married to the very pregnant Emily, also a teacher – had a nick-name for her when they were younger and it had been ‘Peppery.’ He’d given it to her because she was independent and tempestuous and couldn’t be told anything by him or their long-suffering parents. Since then, her attitude had changed as she had boldly taken her embryonic teenage independence out to an uncaring world and gradually learned that in order to lead a more harmonious life and get the occasional boyfriend and the sexual release that supposedly accompanied these ambrosial relationships, she had to acquiesce and flatter, pretend and act the grateful companion. Well, that hadn’t worked either and so now she could go back to being ‘Peppery’ again. Acquiescence or nodding agreement with opinions she even mildly disagreed with was out. No shit would be taken and the sass would be hard and to the point and dished with a brutal honesty. Her de facto face to the mundane and uninteresting - other than work which was necessary tedium to be tolerated in order to pay her bills - would now come with the curl in her generous lips of bored disdain. When it suited her mood, she would spit and swear like a cornered hermit addressing the heavens on a thunderous night, and when it didn’t, she would turn on her heel and sashay away without a backward glance leaving a raised single digit. It was time to move her still young life onto a more fulfilling and honest plane, all she needed was something to hone it all into a focussed and committed gaol.

And now, after two months of watching and thinking and discussing it with Aggy, her friend from the office where she worked and whose idea it was, she bloody-well had it.

#

At first the local evening newspaper was rather reluctant to take her advertisement. It was the first test of the new ‘Peppery’ Ginnie and she rose to the challenge magnificently. Eyes blazing, she demanded to see the Advertising Manager immediately the young girl behind the tall counter with the sign saying ‘Classifieds’ had read, curled her lip and then refused to accept her copy for an advertisement. The girl was somewhat taken aback by the fierceness of the new Ginnies insistence and despite, or perhaps because of, the small, neck-craning interest from the watching queue forming behind her dashed off into an inner sanctum to comply bearing this tiresome pain-in-the-arse woman’s intended advertising copy at arm’s length as if it would poison her elaborate nails.

‘I must say it’s an unusual request,’ said the smarmy, balding Advertising Manager with a small smile waving her into his closet-sized glass domain behind the counter. ‘And not one I can recall that we’ve had in our classifieds before…’

‘Then it’s about time you broke that particular old out-of-date duck then, isn’t it?’ Ginnie said marching in to his busy-looking little business hole with her jaw stuck out pugnaciously.

The manager, who wore a badge naming him as Derek, shrugged and looked again at the piece of paper the receptionist had given him with Ginnies advertisement copy in bold capitals. ‘Perhaps we could tone it down a little bit…?’

‘Why? There’s no swear words, no overt sexual references or innuendo, nothing that going to upset the old gals and giff’s who read your moribund rag…’

‘Moribund’ she thought. Where did that come from, an Aggy word probably? I must get mad more often, it increases my word power.

‘Giff’s?’ he said ignoring her star turn and pompously picking another word...

‘Men,’ she replied sharply. ‘Giffer’s being middle aged and upwards. Old farts if you must, crumbly males who smell of tobacco and fried onions and have dandruff on their collars and dog hairs on their trousers…giff’s to me and my friends…unless you’d prefer fogies.’

She was enjoying the new her but resisted the urge to add ‘like you’re gonna be in a few years’ time.’

‘Okay…’ he said hesitantly looking back down at the bold type. ‘But this advertisement does have specific sexual references besides referring to females only between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to get together for group fun and playing activities.’

‘Where are the specific sexual references?’

‘Here,’ he said tapping the section that she and her friend and confident Aggy Dillon at the head office complex where they both worked, had sweated over for ages to get the right inflexion and knew exactly what he was referring to. Aggy had wanted it to be even more risqué which would have never got passed this dickhead of a job’s worth.

Derek tapped the copy.

‘This word you have spelled out with an asterisked beginning sounds pretty much like a well-known epithet to me M’dear starting with ‘f’.’ He curled his thin lips around the ‘M’dear’ and couldn’t bring his sparsely ringed mouth to even whisper the ‘f’ letter.

She leaned over and made a point of reading the name tag on his lapel that she already knew.

‘That’s not a well-known epithet, she said disdainfully. ‘It’s a little subtle innuendo and something that I suspect is way beyond your ability to understand…Derek.’

Her sneered insults were getting to him and deep red flush began to crawl up his neck.

‘Now that’ he began to answer racking up the pomposity and getting to his feet, ‘is way beyond what I and this newspaper will stand for…’

‘Do you have a sports section?’ Ginnie said softening her approach a little.

He came down from the high horse he’d climbed on, sat down and stroked his thinning scalp with a shrug.

‘Of course, we do. Our Saturday sport’s reporting is renowned for its factuality and professionalism and we carry all the local sporting leagues in our midweek roundup.’

‘Well then, you should have understood that the subtle innuendo of the word in question – which would have started with an ‘r’ if I hadn’t used the asterisk – refers to rucking, because, you see Derek, I ‘m looking to start a ladies rugby team not an orgiastic gathering of lesbians for sexual activities…’

The broad grin that followed left the poor obviously hen-pecked man whose only defence against the world of strong women he’d married into and from which his only relief was to be found here in this little closet of an office from which he could occasionally rule a very small part of an inconsequential world…left him floundering, speechless and stuttering in embarrassment.

‘Okay, you’d better have a seat and we’ll start again,’ he said eventually slumping back into his own chair and from which, until this aggressive but good-looking harpy had crossed the threshold, he’d ruled this irrelevant mini-world of small ads and classified requirements.

It took them five minutes to compromise on an advertisement that satisfied them both and he agreed to run it for three nights starting on the following Thursday. The *…u…c…k…i…n…g just had to go otherwise he wouldn’t have accepted it. Her parting shot was a cheeky invitation to the newspaper to sponsor them.

‘Well, if you start to get some winning results we might run a few lines on the games,’ he said. ‘Have you chosen a name for the team yet?’ He opened the closet door to let her out.

‘I have’ Ginnie replied purposefully stepping on his toe as she stepped through the door.

‘It’s the Fantail Furies and you’re gonna want us in every week of the two thousand and eighteen playing season before the nationals get onto us because we’re going places and will sell more newspapers than all your other local whist drives, cribbage, darts and domino leagues have ever done. Goodbye….’ She hesitated and then again disdainfully looked down at his pathetic name tag as if she’d forgotten it.

‘Derek.’

#

The advertisement was a great success with thirty-two replies. Who knew that the former railway town of Swindon and its downland surroundings harboured so many young ladies looking to relieve tension with some down-to-earth grovelling in the Wiltshire mud learning to ruck, maul, and scrummage and generally knock seven barrels of shite out of each other in the interest of getting an oblong shaped ball from one end of a pitch to the other?

Ginnie had missed the pre-Christmas start of the lady’s rugby season at the end of 2017/18 but hoped to use the second half of the season to prepare the team with perhaps a couple of friendly matches towards the end before the summer break.

But first, the interviews.