Girls on the Up

by Linda Newbery

  “She’s always wanted to be an artist,” Mum said doubtfully, “ever since she was little –”

  “Well,” said Patrick, “she is an artist.”

  Now all the faces were turned Andie’s way, and it was like blinking in the beam of a spotlight.

  “Are you sure?” Her voice came out as a squawk.

  “Sure? I’ve got final-year students with less talent.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Patrick.” Mum was prim and pink, though there was no mistaking her look of pride.

  “No, he’s not being kind,” Marilyn told her. “He’s never kind. You should ask some of his students, the ones who crawl away in tears and shred up their work into microscopic bits. He never praises anyone’s work unless he really means it.”

  Andie’s head was afloat with shock and champagne. “I’d love to be an art student. More than anything in the world.”

  “No reason why you shouldn’t,” Patrick said.

  Andie shot a defiant look at Mum, who registered it, and explained to Patrick, “We’ve always encouraged her to think of it as a hobby, haven’t we, Dennis? But, well –”

  “There’s obviously money to be made – prospects – if you know your way around,” Dad said. “It doesn’t have to be starving in a garret.”

  “There’s plenty of us who have done a stint of that, before making much progress,” said Patrick. “I’m not saying it’s easy – but if you’ve got talent, and determination – and it seems to me that Andie’s got plenty of both – then good luck to you.”

  Now everyone wanted to see Andie’s pictures. She had to bring them down, and suffer the embarrassment of having them looked at and exclaimed over: “That’s fantastic, Andie!”…“What an imagination – I feel like I’m actually on the moon –”…“Well! We’ve always known she liked painting, and her teacher says she’s got talent…”…“Talent! I should say so!” So many compliments! She thought her head would burst.

  Needing to recover, she went inside with Kris to look at Patrick’s artwork for the album covers.

  Kris opened a portfolio – larger and smarter, as well as much fuller, than Andie’s, but she didn’t mind that now.

  First, there was just the word LEGEND, in letters that twined through and round each other like sinuous plants.

  “That’s going to be their logo – it means like a trademark,” Kris explained. “It’ll be on the record labels, and on all their posters. They haven’t decided which colours yet. And here are the sketches, and this is what they’re most likely using for the first album.”

  Andie looked. It was a fantastical landscape – the sort of thing she might try to paint herself. Picturesque, but also faintly sinister, with towering cliffs and the black clefts of chasms, and precipitous paths, and dark forests. She imagined herself walking into it, and wondered who she might meet.

  “It’s kind of fairy-tale,” she said at last. “Only a serious fairy-tale.”

  “What’s to say,” said Kris, “that fairy-tales can’t be serious? Some of them are very serious.”

  On Wednesday, the Millers’ last night at Chelsea Walk, Mum finally plucked up courage to invite everyone in. She had finished her agency work on Friday, and spent the whole of Monday cleaning the flat. Tuesday was for shopping – Andie helped – and Wednesday for packing and cooking. They prepared sausages on sticks, quiche and salads. They made egg mayonnaise and filled vol-au-vents with mushroom and ham; Mum made her speciality, lemon meringue pie.

  Being so busy – even if she thought Mum was going to far more trouble than was necessary – stopped Andie from feeling too sad. All the same, several times she found herself thinking, This is the last time. Tonight will be the last time I sleep here. The last time I live in the same house as a real artist, and Ravi and Kris. The last time I swing from the walnut tree.

  “Do you think there’s enough?” When everything was ready, Mum stood back and surveyed the dining table.

  “Mum! If fifteen extra people turned up, we’d still have enough.”

  Mum laughed. “It’s fun, though, isn’t it? I know I get myself too wound up, but I like this. We ought to do it more often, have people round. People at home, I mean. They’ve been so friendly, haven’t they, Patrick and Marilyn and the Kapoors? I hope you’re not too disappointed, Andie, this not working out.”

  Sometimes Andie felt that Mum was too busy fussing to take proper notice of her; but now Mum had stopped folding napkins, and was looking at her very seriously.

  “Well, a bit,” Andie said. “But there are nice things about going back home. There’s Barbara, and not having to share with Prune. Even not having to change schools.”

  “I know. I like it here, but I’m looking forward to being back in our own home. But it hasn’t been a wasted summer for you here, has it? Making friends with Kris and Ravi, and Patrick thinking so highly of you. He obviously knows what he’s talking about. The thing is, me and Dad don’t know anything about painting and art. It’s another world, to us. But we shouldn’t stand in your way, if that’s where you want to go. We were talking about it last night. We’re very proud of you.”

  She gave Andie a hug. Automatically, Andie wriggled away; she managed a gruff, “Thanks, Mum. That’s great.”

  Had Mum really said that? What was going on – everyone saying such nice things? Andie thought of Patrick’s words as fantastic shiny presents which she could keep unwrapping over and over again.

  Wasted summer? How could it have been? Not only had an artist – a real artist – admired her work, but these few weeks had shown her the moon and the stars, the immensity and the mystery. The wonder. And she would always have that, whenever she looked up at the sky on a clear night.

  It wasn’t as if she was losing her new friends, either. “Slough isn’t a million miles away,” Ravi had said. “You can come up on the train, can’t you? We’ll go to the Science Museum again, and the Planetarium, and Madame Tussaud’s, and the Geological Museum, and the Zoo.”

  “Come on a Saturday, and we’ll all go see a film,” added Kris.

  And Prune would be here for another two weeks. Now that they were going to be separated, Andie felt – rather to her own surprise – that she would actually miss Prune.

  “Prune? If you want to do any more fashion designs, I don’t mind drawing them for you,” she offered. “As long as – you know.”

  “Thanks,” said Prune, “but I’m going to be a bit busy for now, with my job and everything. Still, that’s nice of you.” After a moment, she added: “Do you think you could stop calling me Prune now? You know I don’t like it.”

  This seemed fair enough; Andie agreed. “It’ll be hard. But I’ll try.”

  Ravi had spent the last two weeks making a cassette tape of all the songs he could find that were about space or the moon, and it was playing now: “Bad Moon Rising”, “Space Oddity”, “In the Year 2525”. As usual, the grown-ups ate and drank and chatted, but there was only one thing Andie really wanted to do.

  As soon as it was dark enough, Ravi fetched his telescope, and he, Kris and Andie went up to the roof. One last time, went through Andie’s head like a refrain, as they climbed the narrow stairs and went through the storeroom and out.

  There it was, the moon. Alone again. Pale, almost transparent, above the glow of London. But of course it wasn’t really transparent. It was a place.

  “It’s still hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  They were taking turns with the telescope.

  “From now on,” said Andie, “it’ll be Dad’s binoculars in the back garden. But at least I’ve got my skymarks.”

  “Your dad’s binoculars are probably as powerful as Galileo’s telescope,” said Ravi. “And with that he saw the moons of Jupiter.”

  “What would he have thought of people flying to the moon?” Kris wondered.

  “What would my great-grandmother have thought?” said Ravi. “When she came from India, Queen Victoria was still alive and there were horse-drawn carriag
es in the streets. But that’s like a split second ago, when you think of stars shining at us from hundreds of thousands of light years away.”

  “It makes us seem so tiny and unimportant,” said Andie. “Like specks of dust.”

  “We are specks of dust,” Ravi told her. “That’s what we’re made of. Stardust.”

  “Oh! You mean, like in the ‘Woodstock’ song?” Kris started to sing it, in a warbling voice.

  “That’s right! We’ve got to be made of the same stuff as stars – whatever it was that exploded when the universe began. Because what else is there for us to be made of?”

  “But – all of this?” Andie stretched out her hands – to the street below, the traffic, the Albert Bridge, to the rest of London on the other side of the river.

  “Everything. Everything there is. The same beginning,” said Ravi. Then he clapped his hands over his ears and turned on Kris, who was pulling a contorted face as she strained for the highest notes. “Is someone strangling a hyena? You’re making my brain hurt!”

  “See, Andie?” Kris broke off singing. “You don’t have to want to be a star, with your painting. You are one, already. We all are.”

  Andie had been about to say, “It’s impossible! Everything made of stars?”

  But lots of things seemed impossible, and not all of them were. Humans had been to the moon, and left footprints, and come back again. There were two people alive who had stood on another world.

  If that was possible, who could say what wasn’t?

  No astronaut has set foot on the moon since 1972, though early this year a Chinese mission landed a spacecraft on the far side: another first. Back in 1969, it was confidently expected that the first exciting steps on the moon would lead to great advances in space travel for humans – but, so far, no habitable base has been set up on the lunar surface. I like to think, though, that during my lifetime we’ll see the first woman on the moon. Who will she be, and where will she come from? She may be a child now, growing up with no idea that she’ll make history.

  The Apollo missions produced, almost by accident, a beautiful photograph that’s come to symbolize how precious and fragile our planet is. It’s the photograph called Earthrise, which you can easily find online and in many books, taken by astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 while orbiting the moon. There’s our planet seen as never before, a small blue traveller in the vast silence of space. In the fifty years since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon we’ve done serious damage to that vital atmosphere on which all life depends, through pollution and deforestation and by simply failing to realize the dangers of interfering with ecosystems. All this damage has been done in a frighteningly short time, and we know now that we can’t go on ignoring it.

  In those years, too, there’s been increasing evidence for the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. But I hope we won’t send humans to live on other planets until we’ve learned to respect and care for our own.

  Meanwhile, I hope you’ll enjoy visiting 1969 and the heady excitement of those first footsteps on a place beyond Earth.

  February 2019

  Linda has written many books for children, teenagers and adults. She won the Costa Children’s Book Prize for Set in Stone, and has twice been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. With Yvonne Coppard she has written Writing Children’s Fiction: a Writers’ and Artists’ Companion, and she runs a review blog, Writers Review, with Adèle Geras and Celia Rees, and help from many of their writer friends (including Ann Turnbull).

  Linda lives in a small village in Oxfordshire and loves yoga, wildlife, photography, gardening and reading.

  See more at www.lindanewbery.co.uk

  Discover more inspirational stories from 6 Chelsea Walk, and the girls who lived there throughout history…

  When Polly discovers her new neighbours are suffragettes, fighting for women’s right to vote, she is determined to join their protest march. But her parents are scandalized. Will she dare to defy them and do what she thinks is right?

  Mary Ann’s greatest wish is to become an opera singer, but when she is told she must leave her boarding school, her singing dreams are shattered. Distraught, she comes up with a plan to stay at school, oblivious to the danger it will put her in…

  Cecily is enchanted when she meets Rosalind, a photographer, who seems to be the perfect match for Cecily’s lonely widowed father. But her father’s friend, the dull Miss Braithwaite, keeps spoiling her plans to unite the pair. Will Cecily’s dreams ever come true?

  When Lizzie’s stepfather sends her to stay with relatives in London, Lizzie struggles to adapt to her new life of stiff manners and formal pastimes. She lives for the daily letters from her mother, but when the letters suddenly stop, Lizzie sets out to discover the truth and finds herself on a rescue mission.

  Andie dreams of becoming an artist and loves living in Chelsea, with the fashion, music and art galleries along the trendy King’s Road. There’s even a real artist living in the flat downstairs. Could Andie’s paintings, inspired by the excitement of the first-ever moon landing, be good enough for her to achieve her dreams?

  When Josie goes to stay with her cousin, Edith, during the Blitz, she tries to fit in by joining Edith and her friends in teasing a timid classmate. But when the bullying gets out of hand, Josie faces a dilemma: she knows what it feels like to be picked on, but if she takes a stand, will Edith tell everyone her secret?

  For links to websites where you can find out more about Apollo 11’s mission to the moon, and fashion and music in 1960s London, go to the Usborne Quicklinks website at www.usborne.com/quicklinks and type in the title of this book.

  At Usborne Quicklinks you can:

  • Follow highlights of Apollo 11’s trip to the moon and see Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap”

  • Look at Bill Anders’s “Earthrise” photograph

  • Find out how to spot the Big Dipper, or the Plough, in the night sky

  • See minidresses by Mary Quant and other fashion designers

  Please follow the internet safety guidelines at the Usborne Quicklinks website. Children should be supervised online.

  The websites recommended at Usborne Quicklinks are regularly reviewed but Usborne Publishing is not responsible and does not accept liability for the availability or content of any website other than its own, or for any exposure to harmful, offensive or inaccurate material which may appear on the Web. Usborne Publishing will have no liability for any damage or loss caused by viruses that may be downloaded as a result of browsing the sites it recommends.

  This edition published 2019. First published in 2007 as “Historical House: Andie’s Moon” by Usborne Publishing Ltd., Usborne House, 83-85 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8RT, England. www.usborne.com

  Copyright © Linda Newbery, 2007.

  The right of Linda Newbery to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Cover and inside illustrations by Tiziana Longo © Usborne Publishing, 2019.

  The name Usborne and the devices are Trade Marks of Usborne Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or used in any way except as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or loaned or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  EPUB: 9781474965682

  00986/09

  ry, Girls on the Up