Bertie and Beatrice’s Dreams Part 2
audio story with textBeatrice has called off the wedding, left the palace, and gone to live in the town and look for a job. How will the ex-princess get on in the "real world"?
Story written by Bertie
Read by Natasha
Hello, this is Natasha, and I am picking up where we left off with the story of Bertie and Beatrice’s Dreams. Princess Beatrice has decided in a dream that she wants to be ordinary. When she wakes up she gives away all her lovely clothes and leaves the palace to start a new life in the Real World.
Beatrice’s new home was a room in the loft of a tall house. She gazed out of the window at the terrace of houses across the street. Each house was a carbon copy of all the others, except for the colour of the door. There were red, green and blue doors.
“To some people this might look like a drab, ordinary street,” she thought, “but to me it is a dream come true.”
A family lived in the house. The mother was called Angelina, and she said that Maureen - because that was what Beatrice had pretended her name was - could live in the loft room if she got the kids up in the morning and took them to school.
Beatrice, or should I say Maureen, was more than happy with this offer. The kids, Charlie and Ellie, were perfectly nice, though as with all kids, it was a bit of an ordeal getting them to put on their shoes and coats.
After she had dropped them off at school, Beatrice went to look for a job. She walked down the High Street until she came to a coffee shop with a notice in the window that read;
“New coffee maistro wanted.”
She summoned up all her courage and went inside to ask if she could speak to the manager about a job.
“Have you ever worked in a coffee shop before?” asked Jenny who ran the shop.
“No,” said Beatrice, “ but I’m very artistic and I know how to paint smiley faces and leaf shapes in the froth on top of the coffee.”
“Well that’s a good start,” said Jenny, “We’ll give you a try for a day.”
Beatrice was put in charge of making the coffee. She painted beautiful faces on all the coffees she made, but she spent so long perfecting each one, that the customers complained:
“Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa faster than this,” said one.
Jenny decided that Beatrice was not right for the job because she was too slow.
The next day, Beatrice signed up with an office agency. They sent her to work as a receptionist in a big shiny building. Her job was to check visitors in, give them security badges, and send them up in the lift to the right floor for their meetings. At first she was very good at this, because she was naturally helpful and all the visitors liked her. But then a smartly dressed man and woman rushed in all flustered and panicky and saying they were late for their meeting. Their names were not on Beatrice’s list, but she gave them badges without delay so as not to make them any later. It turned out that they were thieves who stole four mobile phones and two laptops from a conference room upstairs. Beatrice was fired for letting them into the building.
Her next job was as a parking warden. She looked super-smart in her uniform, but as you might guess, she was too soft hearted to give people fines for parking in the wrong place. Every driver had a hard luck sob story, and she let them off. Even when the driver wasn’t there to plead their cause, she felt sorry for them, and imagined that they must have only parked on a double yellow line because they absolutely had to. She was fired for not giving out enough fines.
That evening, Beatrice sat in her attic room and cried a little.
“I’m really not good at anything,” she thought. She wondered if Bertie was missing her, and for the first time since she left the palace, she put her old sim card in her phone. As soon as the phone switched on, it went,
“ping, ping, ping ping!”
Because Bertie had been sending her loads and loads of messages like:
Beatrice I dream about you all the time, when I’m asleep and awake.
and
Life isn’t fair, but the world’s a kinder place when you are a princess
and
I promise to try harder to understand you better and help you fulfill your dreams.
There were more messages like this. Beatrice thought: “Ah Bertie, he’s such a sweetie pie. “ She pressed Reply on one of the messages, and was about to ask him to send a limo to pick her up and take her back home to the palace, when a lightning bolt of defiance ran through her: ‘I can’t go back. Not until I’ve succeeded at something on my own two feet without help or favour from anyone.”
For the next two days, she looked for jobs, but all them needed good exam results or lots of experience, and Beatrice had neither. Then at last an advertisement caught her eye. It said.
“The Ha Ha Club
Make good money for laughs.”
She read on.
“Are you gutsy enough to face our crowd and tell them jokes? Make our audience laugh, and we’ll pay you 500 pounds. But if you don’t succeed, you get nothing.”
“Can’t say fairer than that,” thought Beatrice.
Now you may know that Prince Bertie fancies himself as a comedian. Opinion is very divided as to whether he’s actually funny or not, in fact, it would seem that quite a lot of people think not. Beatrice said to herself:
“I bet I would be better at making people laugh than Bertie,” and she filled in the entry form on the website calling herself, Maureen the ex princess.
Thursday night came. Beatrice had been practicing her comedy act in front of the mirror, and she thought she was pretty funny. As she took the bus to the Ha Ha Club she was confident that she would win the 500 pounds. But when she walked into the club, and saw the stage, she suddenly felt frightened. How embarrassing it would be to tell jokes that nobody thought was funny! It’s all very well if you are Bertie, who has got a skin as thick as a castle moat, but she was a sensitive type. aNow she felt more terrified than the time she met a ghost in the North Wing of the palace. She wanted to run to her mummy, but then she remembered that her stepmother was the Queen frog, and there was no point in running to her because she would just laugh wickedly and call her a good for nothing goody two shoes. So she took a deep breath and reported to the manager.
“Good thing you are early,” he said, “Because we’ve got you on first tonight.”
“There’s no turning back,” she thought, “I can only do my best.”
And that’s what she did. An hour later she stood behind the microphone and blinked. In dark corners of the room people were chatting and not paying any notice of her. Others in the front were gazing up at her intently, and that was even more frightening.
“Er hello,” she said, “I used to be a Princess, but now I’m just Maureen.”
One person chuckled: she felt so grateful to this unknown supporter that she wanted to kiss him. She glanced up and … oh no, oh my, it couldn’t be, but oh it could be, in fact it was: it was Prince Bertie.
This was terrible. How dare he turn up like this and ruin her performance? He had put her in an impossible position. If she wasn’t funny, she had failed, and if she made people laugh, Bertie would hate her for being funnier than him. Well she would show him, she would be hilarious and she did not care how jealous he was of her talent. She launched into her first joke:
“When I was a princess, I knew way too many rich and spoilt kids.
I once went out for lunch with girlfriend whose nickname was Princess Priceless. The table in the restaurant was wobbly, so she took out her gold plated iPhone 12 and wedged it under the shortest table leg. She said, “It’s just as good as an old piece of card.” But it wasn’t because when the queen of her country called her, the whole table shook and vibrated. She answered in a fury and said, “Mummy! What a time to call! You just spilt sparkling water my lap.“
There was this girl in my class who said to her daddy, “I feel embarrassed. The other kids come to school on the bus and they see me being dropped off by the chauffeur in the Rolls Royce. He replied, “That’s no problem dear, I’ll buy you a bus.’
The audience thought this was pretty funny and Bertie was laughing more than anyone. Beatrice began to enjoy herself. She told everyone about funny things that had happened in her jobs:
‘I was about to give a parking ticket to a car when the driver turned up, clutched his chest and rolled on the ground pretending to have a heart attack. Well even the meanest parking warden can’t give a fine to a sick man. I tore up the ticket and was about to call an ambulance when he jumped up and got into the driving seat: ‘Hey I thought you were dying,’ I said. ‘I just got better,’ he replied , ‘I’m fine, you’re fine, and best of all, there’s no parking fine!’
And when I worked in a coffee shop, there was a smartly dressed woman who came rushing in and called out:’“Quick, quick I need coffee right this second: I’m late for work.”
I rushed an emergency coffee to her, she calmly took it, and sat down. At almost lunch time she was still sunk in the sofa staring into the froth of her coffee. I said, “Didn’t you say you were late for work? ’
She glanced at the time and said, ‘Yes, I was late then and I’m even later now.’
‘Doesn’t your employer mind?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m never late more than once a day.’
‘Good for you. What do they say when you turn up?’ I asked.
She smiled and told me, ‘Well they usually say something like, “Hello Boss.”’
Which explained everything. So now I know a bit more about life in the real world, and to be honest, it does not see, any less unfair than being a princess.”
Beatrice’s act went down really well, and at the end of the evening, even though there six acts after her, the judges remembered that hers was the best and awarded her the £500 prize for the funniest act.
Bertie came up to her and said, ‘Beatrice, or should I say Maureen, you were brilliant.’
‘You don’t mind that I won a prize for being funny when you’ve tried loads times and never won anything?’ she asked. ‘And you don’t mind that then judges said I have a great future as a star comedian and they told you to go home and give up because it is foolhardy and dangerous to be so unfunny?’
‘No,’ said Bertie, ‘I don’t mind. For years it has been my dream to win a prize for being a comedian. I’ve not succeeded yet but I keep on dreaming. And now I see the proof that you and I have shared this same dream. So does that mean that we can be together again?’
‘Yes, Bertie’ said Beatrice, ‘It does.’
And she got into the Royal Car beside the prince who loved her more than his own dream.
And that was Bertie and Beatrice’s Dreams, written by Bertie, and read by me, Natasha, for Storynory.com.
And if you enjoyed this story, you might like to know that we have loads and loads of stories about Prince Bertie on the site at www.Storynory.com. Did you know for instance that Bertie spent several years living on the pond as a frog? In those days the Wicked Queen lived in the palace and Beatrice had no idea where her fiance had gone. Then the whole situation was reversed, so know the Wicked Queen is a frog and Bertie lives in the palace. One day he might even marry Beatrice - you never know.
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