by Alex Shearer
Anyway, wages could be negotiable. Perhaps he’d better say as much.
‘Saturday Boy Wanted, Mostly For Saturdays. Light Work. Good Wages – Negotiable. Easy Hours.’
Easy Hours? Well, that rather depended. It might be tough, luring ghosts in. Hard to say. But easy in the sense of duration. You couldn’t expect Saturday Boys to work long hours, there were regulations against it. Same as you couldn’t go sending boys down coal mines or stuffing them up chimneys any more.
Mind you, back when the Ministry of Ghosts was established, centuries ago, in 1792, boys up chimneys were a regular, even a daily occurrence. The chances were that whenever you walked along a street, there would be a few houses with boys in their chimneys, endeavouring to sweep them clean, and getting very dirty in the process.
Child labour laws had come a long way in the past two centuries. Children had to go to school now, for years and years. You couldn’t send them off to work in pits and in textile factories from the age of ten. No, you couldn’t leave school these days until you were almost fifty.
Well, maybe not fifty. But Mr Gibbings remembered his own school days as having gone on forever. They had gone on so long they seemed to have started all over again before he finally got to the end of them.
Easy Hours. That was fine. Light Work. Easy Hours. Good Wages. Oh, but where to apply to? Well, Within, of course. Just ring the bell or use the knocker – if you were tall enough to reach it and strong enough to whack it against the door.
That would do it then. So he made a few small alterations, and his final version read:
‘Saturday Boy Wanted. For Saturdays Only.
Light Work. Good Wages – Negotiable.
Easy Hours. Apply Within.’
But what about uniform? Would there be a uniform? No. No uniform. Protective clothing though, maybe.
‘Protective Clothing Supplied If Needed.’
That should do it. Just a bit of sticky tape now. Mrs Scant would have something. And indeed she did. She wasn’t at her desk, she was no doubt making tea or talking to the cat. So Mr Gibbings helped himself. Then he went to the front room on the ground floor, the dusty window of which faced Bric-a-Brac Street, and he polished up one of the panes, and he put up the notice.
‘Saturday Boy Wanted. For Saturdays Only.
Light Work. Good Wages – Negotiable.
Easy Hours. Apply Within.
Protective Clothing Supplied If Needed.’
Should he mention the apple, he wondered, at the last moment. No. Leave the apple for now. It could be mentioned during the interview. It would come as an added inducement, a sort of bonus, a reward for good work.
So the advertisement went up in the window, and Mr Gibbings retired to his office, to press on with his other work – such as it was that day. But he was too distracted by thoughts of the closure of the Ministry, and of his possible redeployment to the Sewage Department. He didn’t like the thought of sewage at all. Give him ghosts any day. Say what you like about them, at least they didn’t smell – or if they did, they didn’t smell as bad as sewage did.
The remains of the morning and the early part of the afternoon passed quietly.
Mr Copperstone woke from his slumbers; Mrs Scant appeared, with fresh promises of tea; Miss Rolly read up on ghosts in her Ghost and Ectoplasm Manual and she composed a few letters to various organisations – such as the Spiritualists’ Association and the Clairvoyants’ Guild – asking if they had yet acquired conclusive evidence of the existence of ghosts that would bear scientific scrutiny. Mr Gibbings spent some time thinking of Miss Rolly and of what a fine and able civil servant she was, with many exemplary qualities – though he was also a little nervous of her, as she was such a staunch feminist and supporter of equal rights.
Perhaps Mr Gibbings should have asked Miss Rolly to check through his advertisement before he put it up in the window. She would have pointed out his mistake to him immediately. As things were, he did not even know that he had made one.
He was very soon to find out that he had.
8
Eustace Scool School
Although the neighbourhood of which Bric-a-Brac Street was a part had the aura of a place that time had passed by and that the greater world had forgotten, for those who lived there life went on with as much urgency and importance as it did in more dynamic places.
True, it wasn’t the hub of life’s wheel, more the far end of one of the spokes. But even on the circumference of things, existence goes on, and while those on the rim of life’s revolving wheel may not be as fashionable as those at the centre, they still spin around, if at a slower rate.
The area around Bric-a-Brac Street was not only home to the obscure professions and the forgotten trades. Codger Row did not just house the elderly in its ancient alms houses. There were families living there too, in old, terraced dwellings, some spacious, some narrow, some with just two rooms upstairs and another two down.
There was a school, at the end of the aptly named Scool Street. This was no misspelling or error at the sign maker’s. It was a street named after one Mr Eustace Scool, who had left money for the establishment of a home for foundlings and orphans. That home was now the premises of the local school, named Eustace School – as it had been felt by the governors that to call it Eustace Scool School would only lead to confusion and spelling mistakes.
The school was not a large one. Indeed, it was one of those schools that would soon find itself closed down if the numbers of its pupils fell off. Which would have been a great inconvenience. For the next nearest school was a good bus ride away, whereas at present most pupils could walk in from home.
So there was a reasonable flow of children up and down Bric-a-Brac Street throughout the day – first thing in the morning and then last thing in the afternoon. They scuffed along, usually in no rush either to arrive at school in time, or to get home in any hurry. Many of them stopped off on the way to enter premises in Dust Street called Mrs Hallet’s Bon-Bons – Sweets and Toffees by Appointment. By whose appointment it was not said.
Dust Street was not so called because it was particularly dusty – no more so than any other street nearby. But it was here that diamond cutters and polishers once plied their trade. And there would be those who would come to sweep up and to buy the dust from their work. They would take the diamond dust away, and who knows what they did with it, but they put it to some kind of use.
Mrs Hallet’s Bon-Bons shop was a cavern of sweet and sticky things. There was no sign on her door saying ‘Only two school children at a time permitted.’ It was open house and the place was always crowded at 8.30 in the morning and at 3.45 in the afternoon. The rest of the day was quiet. But that did not matter. That was when she made the toffee and boiled sweets. She made enough money at peak times to keep her going. Of course, if the school ever closed, that would be the end of her. So she hoped it never would.
A dozen children a day at least must have walked past the Ministry of Ghosts in both directions, and had done so for years … for decades … for centuries.
Yet none of them knew it was there.
Which is a curious, even an extraordinary, thing. Because children usually have a deep and abiding interest in ghosts. Ghosts seem to fascinate them and to hold them spellbound. And while the thought of ghosts might frighten children too, there aren’t many children who wouldn’t like to see one, if only the once, and who’d be willing to risk the terror for the privilege of the experience, and to be able to say that they had seen a ghost with their very own eyes – and that they had lived to tell the tale (assuming they did), and that their hair hadn’t gone white overnight, nor had they been turned to stone.
But not one of the many children who had gone by the Ministry of Ghosts ever realised what they were passing. The Ministry’s tarnished brass plate, covered in verdigris and stained by the weather, was fastened to the frontage of the building at adult height, above their heads. They would not have seen it. Or if they had, would not have been
interested by such a mouldy, drab, boring-looking thing.
All those children had just walked on by, thinking their thoughts, wrapped up in their own concerns, chatting with their friends, or counting the coins in their hands, and wondering what they might get for them from Mrs Hallet’s Bon-Bons shop. Similarly, had they returned in the afternoon, now chewing on their toffees and eating their fudge and sucking on sherbet lemons, and in other ways giving tooth decay a sporting chance.
To them the Ministry of Ghosts was just another dingy building where adult dreariness no doubt went on, where paper was shuffled and forms were filled in, and where five thirty was a long time in coming. So back and forth the children had gone, to and from Eustace Junior School, until they had got old enough to go to Eustace Senior School, and then they had left, and most had moved on, and ceased to walk past the Ministry of Ghosts at all. Now they were tall enough to read the brass plate, they were no longer there to see it.
Only the postman had an active knowledge of the Ministry of Ghosts, but even he had his doubts about it. Few letters arrived there, and the postman believed those that did were misaddressed (and that the envelopes should have read the Ministry of Gas).
Or a new postman would come along and he would think the Ministry of Ghosts to be some kind of a made-up name for a company that sold fancy dress outfits, or novelties of some kind. That it was an actual government ministry charged with confirming or denying the existence of ghosts occurred to no one. After all, who would credit such a thing – in this day and age?
Off Bric-a-Brac Street ran another cobbled road called Prester Row. Along here were a few useful shops and businesses. There was a newsagent, a small supermarket, a fruit and veg shop called Shallots, a flower shop called Blossoms, a coffee shop called Beans, a butcher called Chops, and at the far end of the row, a fishmonger’s, named Good Coddley’s. In addition, there was a barber shop called Trimmers and a ladies’ hairdresser called Marlene’s. Around the corner again, in Blister Street, was Mr Nostrum’s Patent Remedies and a carpentry shop called The Legge Works.
Legge’s Carpentry Works had been established in roughly the same era as the Ministry of Ghosts. It had originally specialised in the making of wooden legs for injured soldiers returning from the Battle of Waterloo.
The Legge Works had gone on making high quality wooden legs for many years and several generations, until the bottom finally fell out of the wooden leg market – due to lighter and better materials and scientific advancement.
The Legges had then gone in for banister-making and for chair legs, and then, latterly, for cricket and baseball bats – the skills needed to make good cricket bats not being so dissimilar to those required for making decent wooden legs. Obviously the shapes are not the same, but the principle is. To prove this, the present Mr Legge’s father, a cricketer himself, once scored a full century not out, while batting using one of his wooden legs as a substitute for a proper bat. It had only been an exhibition match, but it had clearly vindicated his craftsmanship.
Now, the present Mr Legge and his wife had two children, a toddler called May and an older child called Timber, who went to Eustace School. Timber was not his real name, which was Tim. But it was better than the nickname he used to have before that, which was Knots.
Tim, or Timber (whichever you prefer, he answered to both), was a regular passer-by along Bric-a-Brac Street. But he had never noticed the brass plate on the wall at the Ministry of Ghosts. And as he walked home that weekday afternoon – the afternoon of the day in which the Saturday Boy Wanted sign had gone up in the window – he was so engrossed in eating the gobstopper he had bought from Mrs Hallet’s Bon-Bons (for he kept taking the gobstopper out of his mouth, to see whether it had changed colour yet) that he failed to see the notice either.
Had he done so, he would have been interested. For he was an enterprising boy and not averse to working hard for a bit of money. He needed some cash too, as he had a birthday present to buy soon – for himself. He always liked to buy himself a present on his birthday, on the principle that if you can’t be nice to yourself and treat yourself on your birthday, how can you expect other people to?
So, with his head down, and sucking on a gobstopper, Tim wended his way past the Ministry of Ghosts. ‘Saturday Boy Wanted,’ the sign read. ‘For Saturdays Only. Good wages.’
The hours would have suited young Tim, and so would the money; the promise of easy work and good wages would have lured him inside immediately. Had he seen the sign, he would have grasped the knocker and pummelled the door.
But he missed his chance – at least for the time being.
Yet the doorbell of the Ministry of Ghosts did ring that afternoon, and the knocker was knocked, too …
It was Mrs Scant who heard it first, followed by her colleagues on the same floor, and then by old Mr Copperstone, for the noise had first to rouse him from his winks. ‘What on earth?’
The knocker was being knocked with an unheard of persistence – not to say urgency, panic, anger or indignation.
Mr Gibbings went to a window and peered into the street to see who was creating the noise. Some troubled soul, he felt. Or someone with a grudge, bent on vengeance. He wasn’t at all sure that the door should be opened to someone capable of creating such a racket. If they could do that with a piece of metal and a plank of wood, what other extreme acts were they capable of?
Yet, to Mr Gibbings’ surprise, he saw not the monster he had expected – someone of gorilla-like build and with immense paws where their hands should be.
No, it wasn’t some huge ruffian he saw on the pavement, hammering at the door, and it wasn’t a potential Saturday Boy either. It was a girl. A smallish sort of one too, who could barely reach the knocker, and who was up on her tiptoes in order to be able to use it. In fact she wasn’t so much hammering the knocker as swinging from it, and using her swings to give force to her summons. And by the look and the sound of it, she was not going to go away until that summons was responded to and the door was opened and it yielded to her will.
‘What is that, Mr Gibbings? For heaven’s sake. It sounds like the end of the world has come.’
Miss Rolly was next to him at the window.
‘It appears to be a girl,’ he said. ‘Who seems to have her teeth into the knocker. I can’t imagine what she wants.’
‘I think we’d better go and find out, don’t you?’ Miss Rolly said. ‘Before we all end up deaf.’
‘You don’t suppose she’s a ghost, do you?’ Mr Gibbings said hopefully.
‘She looks a bit too solid to me,’ Miss Rolly said. ‘If that’s a ghost, then I’m a mint humbug.’
Mr Gibbings did not think that Miss Rolly looked anything like a mint humbug. Though he did think she was rather sweet sometimes.
Together they went out to the corridor and together they opened the door. Mr Copperstone looked down from the landing outside his office.
‘Be careful!’ he said. ‘They could be dangerous.’
Mrs Scant stood well back, close to the basement stairs, ready to run for it, and perhaps to arm herself with a heavy teapot. At her feet, Boddington the cat waited – with his hair standing up on the back of his neck. He looked a bit like a big lizard. Or a small, furry dinosaur.
9
Saturday Girl Applies
The name on the girl’s top read ‘Eustace’, which was an odd name for a girl. She had a backpack hanging off one shoulder, which appeared to contain, judging from the lumps, some school books and a small ukulele.
Just as Mr Gibbings was about to open the door, and the girl on the other side of it was about to give the brass knocker another hammering, the door appeared to swing open of its own accord. Presumably Mr Beeston had not properly secured it behind him when he had left.
The girl released her grip on the knocker, dropped to her feet, and looked defiantly at the figures in front of her – who, to her eyes, comprised a codger (old Mr Copperstone) a mumsy type (Mrs Scant) a rather formidable lady (Miss Ro
lly) and a wimp (Mr Gibbings).
‘Good afternoon, young lady,’ the codger said. ‘Is there something we can do for you? You do seem to be creating the most appalling noise.’
‘I want to speak to somebody about this here notice,’ the girl said.
‘What here notice, young lady?’ Mr Copperstone said.
‘This one here,’ the girl said, and she pointed to the notice in the window reading ‘Saturday Boy Wanted.’
‘And what about it?’ Mr Copperstone asked.
‘It’s wrong,’ the girl said. ‘And what’s more, it’s not legal. I know my rights.’
‘I think you’d better come in for a moment,’ Mr Copperstone said. ‘By the sound of it this isn’t the sort of matter one can discuss on the doorstep.’
‘I’m not coming in unless you promise that I’ll get out again,’ the girl said. ‘’Cause you all look a bit weird to me.’
‘Weird!’ Mr Copperstone said. ‘I will have you know, young lady, that we happen to be civil servants.’
‘Well, there you are then,’ the girl said. ‘That explains it. So I’ll come in, but don’t try anything funny –’
‘We wouldn’t dream of it –’ Mr Copperstone said.
‘As I only live just down the road and round the corner.’
‘Do you now?’
‘And if I don’t get home they’ll come looking for me.’
‘I’m sure they will, if they’re dutiful parents.’
‘My dad owns Coddley’s.’
‘Does he indeed?’
‘Good Coddley’s, the fish shop.’
‘Fish?’
‘But all because we own a fish shop it doesn’t mean we smell of kippers.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘In fact all I ever smell of is fresh strawberries.’
‘Yes, indeed you do. Doesn’t she, Mrs Scant? Do you get that pleasant aroma wafting in your direction?’
‘It’s my soap.’