The Accidental Time Traveller

by Sharon Griffiths

  Oh God, I wanted to cry. Thank goodness it was the last hymn and soon we were all shuffling out and putting our hymn books back on the table at the back and out into the fresh air away from the musty smell of moth balls and peppermints.

  As soon as we got home, Mrs Brown changed out of her Sunday best, rolled up her sleeves and started on the lunch.

  Now my mum makes a mean Sunday dinner. The best. She always does it for my brother when he goes home and it’s good enough to make me forget I don’t really like red meat – roast beef and all the trimmings. But Mum manages to do it while knocking back the best part of a bottle of Merlot and in between sitting at the kitchen table reading the Sunday Times . It never seems a big deal.

  This was. Peggy had emerged from her pit and was trying to read the News of the World. Not that I think she was reading it really, she seemed more to be hiding behind it. But not for long. Mrs Brown has us both peeling (more bloody potatoes) and chopping. She had the cloth off the kitchen table and was making pastry.

  ‘Rosie, can you go down the garden and pick some rhubarb please?’ she asked.

  Rhubarb?

  The back garden was steep, narrow and treacherous, a sort of series of terraces leading down to the river, which went rushing past below. It was easy to see from the debris on the steps that the river had been halfway up the garden recently. I looked around for rhubarb and tried to think what it looked like. Long pink sticks.

  Anyway, I went up and down those slippy steps, along the little patches of garden and couldn’t see anything looking like rhubarb. I was so long, that Peggy came to look for me, stamping down the steps in a mood.

  ‘I can’t find it, sorry,’ I said.

  She just gave me a withering look and marched over to a big upturned metal bucket. She picked it up and beneath it were some long thin pink sticks of rhubarb with large pale green leaves.

  ‘Well how was I meant to know it was under a bucket?’ I said.

  ‘Where do you think rhubarb grows?’ she said, very sarcastically.

  I wanted to say ‘in a long polystyrene tray just on the left when you go into Sainsbury’s’, but thought I was probably wasting my breath …

  I had to get some apples from a shelf in the pantry. They were from the twisted old tree in the garden and had been packed in the previous autumn. Talk about past their sell-by date. The apples were all individually wrapped in newspaper and were soft and waxy. I peeled them and chopped them and stood stirring them on the side of the range until they went mushy. All this just for some apple sauce.

  The meal was a production. It was like something out of A Christmas Carol. Mrs Brown produced the meat, Mr Brown carved it. We were all meant to say ooh and ah … Gosh, it would have been so much easier for us all just to go to the pub. The only excitement came when we were working our way through the meat. And I said, ever so casually, to Peggy, ‘Do they do good food at the Rising Sun?’

  She gave me a filthy look and said, ‘How should I know? I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought you might have been there on official business, with the editor maybe.’

  ‘Well you’re wrong. I haven’t,’ she snapped, banging down a rhubarb pie on the table. She looked really upset and a bit pale, which made me feel guilty, so I left it at that. But I’d clearly touched a nerve.

  Finally, when we were all too full to move, we had the washing up to do. It took hours. It was like the porridge pot only much more of it, all cleaned with a bit of wire wool and some grey powder.

  And that was it. That was the excitement for the day.

  Peggy said she was going to see a friend and tittled off. Mr Brown sat at the dining-room table and did some parish council work, and Mrs Brown did the ironing.

  Oh yes and Stephen’s girlfriend Cheryl came around. She was a mousy little thing, but only seventeen years old. She’d brought a letter from Stephen to show to the Browns. Mrs Brown stopped ironing and went and got her latest letter from Stephen from behind the clock in the kitchen. The two women compared notes while Mr Brown paused in his parish council work.

  As far as I could tell the lad had written the same thing to both mother and girlfriend. It was very hot, there had been a spot of bother and they hadn’t been allowed any free time that week. They were still in the Nissen huts but hoped to move to proper barracks soon. Maybe his girlfriend had a few more kisses than his mother. And that seemed about it.

  ‘Oh he won’t like it in the heat,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘He always gets that itchy rash on his back.’

  ‘And behind his knees,’ said Cheryl.

  Heat rash? As far as I could tell Cyprus was in a state of riot after they’d got rid of Archbishop whatnot. There was shooting in the streets. Goodness knows what the ‘spot of bother’ was that Stephen had mentioned. And all his mother and girlfriend could worry about was the rash on the back of his knees.

  It baffled me. It really did. This couldn’t be real.

  I went up to my room, lay on my bed. Sambo followed me up and lay beside me purring happily. I listened to the river and tried to make sense of it all. And there was so much to make sense of.

  I am no nearer at all in working out where I am or why I’m here but I’m beginning to think that it cant be a reality show. There are no cameras, no rules, no video room, no perky little Geordie comics commenting on it.

  It’s too big. You can recreate a house, a newspaper office, a street even, but not a whole town.

  Then there are the people. Carol and Billy are not Caz and Will. Almost like them. Just like Caz and Will would be probably if they had grown up in a different time. If they had been transplanted to the 1950s for instance. I mean, Caz has always said she doesn’t want children, and here she is with three of them on whom she absolutely dotes. But Caz hasn’t missed them. Carol’s dead excited about getting a job as a school cook. If she hadn’t fallen pregnant at sixteen, then what could she have done?

  It’s ridiculous to think of Will and Caz as a couple. But Billy and Carol seem a real partnership, working together for the kids. If they’d had to, could Will and Caz have worked it out like Billy and Carol? Maybe. All very weird.

  I thought of the hymn we’d sung in church that morning. There was a line in it, ‘dwellers all in time and space’.

  We were all dwellers in time and space. We think we’re restricted to one little place, moving along a narrow path, always in the same direction, a bit like railway lines. But what if it’s not like that at all? What if we can move around in it like astronauts in the weightlessness of space, bobbing here and there without much control over where we go? Could I really, perhaps actually be in the real 1950s?

  It was a terrifying thought, so terrifying that I had been refusing to consider it. But now the thought would not be shoved to the back of my brain. I had to face it. I went hot and cold. My heartbeat raced and my skin went clammy. I took deep breaths to try to calm myself down.

  The real 1950s? It couldn’t be. Things like that don’t happen. People don’t go back in time, not really, not to a different world. It’s not possible.

  But what else could it be?

  I had thought and thought about what was going on, had twisted ideas this way and that, but there was one idea I had dared not face up to.

  That this was real. That I had somehow gone back in time. God knew how – or even why – it had happened. But it was beginning to be the only solution that made sense. I remembered a bit in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,where the older Pevensey children went to talk to the Professor about what Lucy had said about the land of Narnia. Basically, said the Professor, when you’ve eliminated everything else, then what is left must be the truth …

  I was breathing more evenly now and suddenly felt strangely calm. Maybe I really was back in the 1950s. In a way, mind-blowing as it seemed, it was the only thing that made sense. I had time travelled. No. I couldn’t have. But how else to explain it? How or why, I didn’t know or understand. Couldn’t begin to get my hea
d around it. But I was here. And if I needed reminding, the scratchy underwear and slippery eiderdown told me so.

  I didn’t fit here. I didn’t belong. If I stayed here – God, I’d be older than my parents. Panic surged through me again.

  But no. Deep breath. Everyone seemed to think I was here for only a few weeks. The Browns had said so. Richard Smarmy Henfield had said so. This wasn’t a full-scale exchange, just a time trip, a holiday in another age. It wasn’t for ever. I had to believe that.

  But what about my life at home? Did Mum and Dad know I was here? What if they were ringing me and not getting an answer? What if they were worrying? My heart raced again. It wasn’t for ever. That was the important bit. It wasn’t for ever. At least, I didn’t think so. And just in case, I’d keep smiling for those cameras …

  At teatime we had tinned salmon sandwiches, which were clearly a treat, and a cake that Mrs Brown had made that morning. Listen, I was so desperate for entertainment that I learnt to knit. Seriously. When What’s My Line came on, Mrs Brown dragged her knitting bag out.

  ‘Do you knit much?’ she asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Never learnt.’

  Well! Do I eat babies for breakfast? Or push little old ladies under cars? You’d think I did, the reaction I had from Mrs Brown. Anyway, it all ended up with her digging out a pair of needles and some scraps of wool and teaching me how to knit. I was apparently knitting a scarf. I have done at least three inches of it. So far, it was black, and red, and yellow, and further colours will depend on the scraps in Mrs Brown’s knitting bag.

  Once I’d got the hang of it, it was quite soothing really, click, click, click, as I watched the little grey people on the television signing in and then going through their mimes of the jobs. A lot of Hollywood stars have taken up knitting, haven’t they? Say it’s very good for their stress levels on set. I can believe it too.

  I thought of Carol’s children and their hand-knitted jumpers. I suppose Carol had done that too – in between making most of their clothes, washing by hand and trying to keep that small dark little house clean. Very different from Caz. Don’t get me wrong, Caz is a worker. I’ve known her do twelve-hour shifts at work and not moan at all. But on her days off she believes in as little effort as possible. I thought of their bathroom – power shower, deep tub, surrounded by bottles of bath oil and candles. Couldn’t imagine Caz settling for a tin tub in front of the fire. But if there was no alternative …

  I’d just come to the end of the red wool and was ready for a break from all this creativity and thinking – that’s the trouble with 1950s Sundays, too much time to think – when I heard a strange noise from the kitchen. When I went out there, it was young Janice, in a grubby shapeless kilt and jumper, eating what looked like a beef sandwich while walking up and down, with her eyes closed reciting a poem.

  ‘“Ish there any body there?” shaid the Traveller, knocking on the moonlit door.

  And hish horse in the silence champed the grashes

  Of the forest’s ferny floor.

  And a bird … and a bird … [Oh blow.]

  And a bird flew up out of the turret,’

  Above the Traveller’s head’, I said, having picked up the book and looked.

  Janice jumped and sprayed crumbs all over the kitchen.

  ‘Sorry Janice, didn’t mean to make you jump. Is this part of your homework?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got to learn it for first lesson tomorrow. And it’s impossible to do it in our house with all the howling.’

  ‘Well I’m sure if you explained that to your teacher, she’d let you off.’

  ‘No she wouldn’t. If things are difficult, she says you just have to try harder. Anyway I’d feel silly, wouldn’t I? If all the others learnt it and I hadn’t just because my brothers howl all the time.’

  I had to admire her. Even with her new haircut – already looking pretty grubby and greasy again – the poor kid didn’t have much going for her. But she was determined, I’ll give her that. She wasn’t making excuses even though it seemed she had a house full of them.

  ‘Well, come on, I’ll help you.’

  So we walked around the kitchen, Sambo weaving between our legs, chanting it together.

  ‘But only a host of phantom listeners that dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men …’

  Until Janice was word perfect and triumphant and I too had got it by heart. Knitting and learning poetry. Was this what Sundays had come to?

  After Janice had gone home I went back into the sitting room and sat on the sofa in front of the fire. A draught chilled my shoulders and the back of my neck, while the fronts of my legs were almost burnt by the fire. I felt edgy and restless and could feel Mrs Brown beginning to get impatient with me, so I picked up my knitting again. It gave me something to do with my hands while I carried on with my thinking. I looked at the pictures in the flames and knitted my scarf. And did some thinking. So much thinking.

  Click click ‘Is there anyone there?’ said the Traveller.

  Click click Dwellers all in time and space.

  Click click When you’ve eliminated everything else, then what’s left must be the truth.

  Click click They can’t take that away from me.

  Click, click, click …

  Chapter Nine

  Maybe it was the knitting … OK, maybe not. Trust me, its therapeutic effects are overrated. But on Monday morning I felt a lot calmer. Maybe this was just an adventure. Part of me was still bewildered, trying to work it out and if I thought too hard about it, I guess I could feel the panic rising again. But I clung on to the fact that everyone said I would be here just for a few weeks. So the other part of me was curious, excited almost. This was an adventure and I wanted to see what happened. After all, I thought, it could be a great story …

  After such a stodgy Sunday I practically ran into the office. I was actually looking forward to work. I went into the reporters’ room expecting to be greeted by Gordon’s demands for tea. But he wasn’t there. Instead Billy was standing with the big diary in front of him, marking up the stories.

  ‘Hello Rosie,’ he said, pleasant and friendly but still like a stranger. ‘Nice to see you on Saturday.’

  I was completely wrong-footed. For some reason I hadn’t expected him to be there, didn’t know what to do with my hands, the expression on my face. ‘Yes. I enjoyed meeting Peter. He’s a great lad, isn’t he?’ Gosh, I was making conversation like an old granny with the vicar.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Billy, but he looked pleased.

  ‘Right,’ he went on, ‘Gordon won’t be in for a week or two. He’s broken his leg, fell downstairs apparently – while stone cold sober, before you start. He’s in the Victoria Infirmary at the moment and they won’t let him out until he’s mastered the crutches. So it’ll be a while before he’s back at work.’

  I thought of Gordon trying to negotiate those long steep narrow cluttered stairs on crutches and for a moment – a very brief moment – almost sympathised.

  ‘So I’m taking over the desk for now and I’ve had to reorganise some of the jobs. Alan, you’ll have to get to the council planning meeting today. It’s the day they decide on the ring road. That’s a must. Tony’s down at the petty sessions. Derek’s gone to an accident on the Netherton Road. Marje – I’ve got you down for the Duke and Duchess opening the new school. OK?’

  ‘Fine by me,’ said Marje.

  ‘What about me?’ I asked.

  ‘Dan and Doris Archer are opening the spring flower show in the Shire Hall, but that’s not till lunch time, so if you can get on with some shorts till then …’

  ‘What, off the radio show? The Dan and Doris? Gosh my mum would be jealous. She loves The Archers.’

  ‘Not a patch on Dick Barton,’ muttered Marje. ‘They’re all yours.’

  First I had a phone call to make …

  Making phone calls was tricky because there were only three pho
nes in the office, none of them on my desk. And everything had to go through the operators downstairs. You couldn’t just dial a number, you had to wait for them to put you through. The upside of this was that often you didn’t even need to know the number you wanted – just left it up to them.

  I waited until the office was quiet, then I went over to Gordon’s desk, took a deep breath and picked up the phone. There was a quick click and a voice said, ‘Switchboard!’

  ‘Could you put me through to head office?’ I said briskly, in my best businesslike tone.

  ‘Who is that please?’ asked the switchboard operator suspiciously.

  ‘Rosie Harford.’

  There was a pause and I could hear them dithering over whether to connect me or not. Obviously, humble reporters never dared ring head office.

  ‘I have a few details I need to clarify with Lord Uzmas-ton’s secretary.’

  ‘Oooh, right you are love,’ said the operator and, many clicks later, I was speaking to another operator who sounded as though she were on Mars, or underwater.

  ‘This is Rosie Harford on The News. I have a few questions about my attachment here and I would like to speak to the person who arranged it.’

  ‘Have you a name for that person, caller?’

  ‘No I don’t, sorry.’

  ‘Right, I’d better put you through to Lord Uzmaston’s office.’

  Good. This was sounding promising. The phone was answered by an incredibly posh-sounding woman. I just knew – knew – that she was wearing pearls. She had that sort of voice. I went through my request again.

  ‘And who was the person who made this arrangement?’

  Bugger. This would make me look a lot less businesslike.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure. I believe it was a young man who is an assistant to Lord Uzmaston.’

  ‘Ah. That would be our Mr Simpson.’

  ‘Could I speak to him please?’

  ‘No, unfortunately not. He is away from the office for the next two weeks.’