Don't Know Where, Don't Know When (The Snipesville Chronicles Book 1)

by Annette Laing

  “You trusted us to get you out, and you trusted Mrs. D. when she asked you to tell the truth,” said Hannah. “Don’t you remember? It was only a few days ago…” Then she realized what she had said.

  He smiled patiently at her, and said, “Not for me, it wasn’t. That was a lifetime ago. But some things I remember like they were yesterday, and I remember a lot about that day. I remember looking into Mrs. D.’s eyes, and that was when I knew things would be all right. She had the kindest eyes I ever saw, before or since. And, of course, I remember you guys. But none of us could ever have guessed you were time travelers. Not in a million years.”

  “How do you know we’re not imposters?” asked Alex.

  Dr. Braithwaite, pouring out the iced tea, smiled at him. “Nobody could make this up. And, Alex, even though you all sound like Americans now, I never forget a face.”

  He told them what had become of everyone after they left. Dr. Arthur Oliver Healdstone and his wife Diana had adopted him, and Dr. Healdstone, who now went by his first name, Arthur, had told many stories of his brief childhood friendship with George.

  “You might not think that you could have made much of an impression in such a short time,” Dr. Braithwaite told Brandon. “But Uncle Arthur would remember you the rest of his life. He was so lonely in that house. Mr. Gordon did his best, but Mrs. Gordon resented having to care for her husband’s sister’s son, and his cousin, Peggy, vanished from their lives. It broke his heart when you left, too, but he appreciated the note you left for him. As he got older, the more certain he said he was that you had really been a time traveler. I thought he was joking, or maybe losing his marbles.” He chuckled.

  “What about your dad?” asked Alex.

  Dr. Braithwaite shook his head sadly, “My father never made it home. He died in the P.O.W. camp at the very end of the war in Europe. Uncle Arthur told me it was an escape attempt, but I tried to find a record of it years later, and there was nothing. I think Uncle Arthur just wanted me to feel better.”

  The Archers, he said, had continued to live quietly in Balesworth, until Geoffrey Archer died in the last year of the war, most likely from overwork brought on by all the demands of producing parachutes. After that, Mrs. Archer moved away from Balesworth, and was not heard from again. Brandon found himself feeling so sorry for the young woman in the garden, whose life, it seemed, had never really been happy. He felt a strong need to change the subject.

  “So how did you end up in Snipesville, sir?” asked Brandon.

  “Now that,” Dr. Braithwaite said, lighting his pipe, “is a long story. Hannah, do you want to open a window? I seem to recall Eric saying how much you hated people smoking.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Hannah, “and now I can make a big deal of it, because everyone knows it kills you. And you’re a doctor!”

  Dr. Braithwaite looked at her and gave her a wise smile. “True enough,” he said knowingly, “but don’t forget, I am in my own house. Now go open a window.”

  It was weird, she thought, as she pushed the window open, to be bossed around by an old man who just two days before had been a shy kid.

  Dr. Braithwaite told the kids that Dr. Healdstone had helped him gain admission to grammar school, and that he eventually earned a degree in biology from Oxford University. “I taught in a boys’ boarding school for a year,” he said, “but by then I had already decided I wanted out of England. You have to understand that everything was pretty bad in the years after the war. All the clothes and furniture were shabby, there was a housing shortage because of all the people bombed out of their homes, and the food rationing actually got worse. They even started rationing bread after the war, and they cut many of the other rations. We didn’t starve, of course. Mrs. D. even helped us out, because she often stopped by with eggs and vegetables from her garden.”

  He finally emigrated to New York in 1955, and won a scholarship to study medicine. “By then, the civil rights movement was in full swing in the South, and like a lot of people, I wanted to help. I learned that white doctors wouldn’t treat black patients, and that there was a shortage of black doctors. So that’s how I came to be the only black doctor in Snipesville. I’m glad to say that’s no longer the case!”

  “That is so cool!” breathed Brandon. “Well, except for the ‘living for forty years in Snipesville’ part. That’s too bad.”

  “Well, son…I mean, Brandon, sorry…” he smiled and shook his head. “It’s different when you’re not from here.This house was paid off a long time ago, and since I retired, I’ve been able to do a lot of traveling. Whenever Snipesville drives me crazy, I just get on the Web and book another flight.”

  “You know how to use the Internet?” squeaked Alex.

  “I didn’t get stuck in 1940, you know,” laughed Dr. Braithwaite. “Life moves on, and most of us move with it.”

  “But what about Eric? What happened to him?” asked Alex.

  “Oh, now, there is a story,” said Dr. Braithwaite. “Mrs. D. adopted him, although I don’t know that anything formal was ever signed, kind of like with me and the Healdstones. It was different back in those days, you see. Mrs. D. got Eric into the grammar school on a scholarship. She didn’t pull any strings to get him there, mind. After you guys and I left, and Verity was away at school much of the time, Eric says that Mrs. D. put a lot of energy into nagging him to do his homework. Eventually, he got a degree in civil engineering from the University of London.”

  “Did Verity make it to college, too?” asked Hannah.

  “Sure she did. She graduated from Newnham, which is a women’s college at Cambridge University, with a degree in English literature. And then she married Eric.”

  “She did?” gasped Hannah. All three kids giggled.

  “You’re all surprised?” Dr. Braithwaite asked with a twinkle in his eye. “I don’t know that Eric was given much of a choice, to be honest. You know how Verity is. I was at their wedding, which took place not long before I went to the States. Mrs. D. made a speech at the reception. I remember how she embarrassed poor Eric and Verity when she told everyone that she was the only person present who could say she had spanked both the bride and the groom.”

  The kids laughed.

  “Are Eric and Verity still alive?” asked Alex. Hannah wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but Dr. Braithwaite nodded emphatically.

  “Oh, very much so. I started going over to England every year when plane fares got cheaper in the Eighties, and they always insist I stay with them for a couple of weeks. Eric and Verity had two children in the end, a boy and a girl, but their daughter wasn’t born until Verity was forty, and by then they had pretty much given up hoping for kids. Their daughter, Lizzie, works at a museum in London, and she and her husband just had a baby girl a couple of years back. Eric and Verity’s son, well, he’s a story for another day.” He gave a small tight smile.

  To Alex and Hannah’s delight, he offered them Eric and Verity’s address. When Hannah read the address, she was puzzled. “Eric and Verity Powell? Wasn’t Powell Verity’s last name?”

  “Sure,” said Dr. Braithwaite. “You see, Eric had no interest in passing along the name of the parents who’d abandoned him, and he thought Devenish was too hard to say, so he took hers….Now, if you write to them, don’t tell them the truth about yourselves. They won’t believe it.”

  “You could tell them,” protested Hannah.

  Dr. Braithwaite shook his head. “They’ll just think I’m losing my mind in my old age. Oh, and by the way?”

  He looked mischievously at them.

  “I assume you know that we did beat Hitler in the end. We won the war, whether or not…Now, what is it Eric likes to say? Whether or not Hannah ate the stinky sandwiches.”

  While Dr. Braithwaite was back in the kitchen, fetching Cokes from the refrigerator and a bag of chips to share with them, Alex turned to Hannah, who was reading Dr. Braithwaite’s medical degree on the wall.

  “Hannah, you haven’t asked him about…Hey, Dr. Brai
thwaite, what happened to Mrs. D.? Was she mad at us when we didn’t write?”

  Hannah didn’t turn around.

  Dr. Braithwaite dropped four Coke cans on the coffee table, and emptied a bag of chips into a red bowl. “You know, Mrs. D. wondered what had happened to you guys. She grumbled a bit, but she wasn’t really angry. I expect she was disappointed, but, of course, being Mrs. D., she never said anything like that. A lot of people lost touch in the years after the war, and you have to remember that it was hard to trace people before we got the Web. Like most people, I guess, Mrs. D. just let it go, and assumed you had readjusted to being at home. But she never forgot any of us. She always talked about y’all, and especially Hannah. She wouldn’t come all the way to America to see me, although I was always asking her over. It was very expensive in those days, but I offered to pay for her ticket, of course. I think she wouldn’t come because she was afraid of flying, although she would never admit to such a pitiful thing as a fear of heights.”

  Hannah thought to herself of Mrs. Devenish at the top of the church tower.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Braithwaite continued, “Even so, she wrote letters to me for many years, even when I was young and busy and not very good at writing back. And she did live a wonderful, long life. She lived to be 93 years old. I remember Eric telling me in his letter back in, oh, when was it now…must have been around 1978…He told me that she was working in her garden on the day she died.”

  Hannah had been watching Dr. Braithwaite with a strange expression on her face. As he finished speaking, she burst into tears. Alex, who wasn’t too happy himself, was nonetheless amazed by Hannah’s reaction. Mrs. Devenish and his sister had battled so much, and now she was upset because Mrs. D. was long dead?

  Dr. Braithwaite immediately crossed the room, and took Hannah’s hands in his. “I’m so sorry, honey. I should have realized how this news would affect you…. Look, there’s something you should know. Mrs. D. was an Englishwoman of her time, and, unlike us Americans today, and even many of the Brits these days, she was very reserved. She didn’t hold much with showing her feelings, and especially her affections. But I know for a fact that she thought the world of you. If she had known what things would be like today, here and now, I’ll bet anything she wouldn’t mind my passing something along to you, Hannah. This is from Elizabeth Devenish.” With that, he wrapped his arms around Hannah, who bawled into his chest for what seemed to both Alex and Brandon like a very long time.

  Brandon, fighting the annoying lump in his throat, felt like crying himself when he thought of Mr. Gordon and Oliver, but he decided that he would wait until he got back to the privacy of his room.

  When Hannah and Alex arrived home, their dad noticed a box in the corner of the carport. He picked it up and inspected the label. “Hannah, looks like you got a package from the college. Must be from your writing camp.” He handed it to Hannah, who was puzzled, but she brought it inside. She struggled with the heavy box all the way up the stairs to her room, where she opened it up. Inside were three huge scrapbooks and a note, printed onto the college’s letterhead:

  Dear Hannah,

  One of these is for you, one is for your brother, and one is for Brandon. You will know which is which. Never lose these photos: Such mementos are irreplaceable. So long as you have these pictures, it is easy to revisit the past anytime you like.

  Best,

  Dr. Harrower

  Hannah sat on her bed, and opened the album that had her name on it.

  On the very first page, she found a huge photo of her in the garden with Alex, Eric, Verity, George, Brandon and Mrs. Devenish. It was dated November 15, 1940. It was hard for Hannah to look at the picture, but she found it even harder to look away.

  Epilogue

  South Kensington, London: Today

  The Professor walked briskly through Hyde Park, past well-wrapped-up officeworkers sitting on benches eating sandwiches, dogwalkers, soccer players, children playing tag, inline skaters, picture-snapping tourists, and all the hundreds of other people enjoying the enormous green space at the heart of London. Once upon a time, this had been King Henry VIII’s hunting grounds.

  The Professor crossed to Exhibition Road. More than 150 years before, this was the gateway to the Great Exhibition, the very first world’s fair, which was held in an enormous purpose-built greenhouse called the Crystal Palace. The Victoria and Albert Museum was now to the Professor’s left. She glanced at where, in 1940, falling German bombs had taken chunks of stone out of the side of the building. It looked as though a great monster had snacked on the solid wall. Turning left onto Brompton Road, the Professor climbed the great stone steps into the museum.

  An hour later, she was seated in the researchers’ reading room examining a very odd object with a magnifying glass. It was a tiny rectangular metal plate with holes in it. A smartly-dressed tall woman in her thirties with short dark brown hair walked up next to her.

  “Excuse me?” the woman said, “Hope you don’t mind my interrupting you, but one of the staff told me about your interest in this artifact, and I would love to chat with you about it. You’re Professor Harrower, is that right?” The Professor shook hands with her and smiled, saying “Kate, please.”

  The younger woman smiled back. “I’m Elizabeth Powell. Lizzie. I’m one of the curators.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said the Professor. “You know, I believe I once met your late great-grandmother while I was doing some research in Balesworth.”

  “Wow, did you really?” Lizzie laughed. “She was a character, wasn’t she?”

  “Indeed, she was. A truly remarkable woman.”

  “But how do you know I’m related to her?” Lizzie asked, puzzled.

  “Well, as I like to say, I am an historian. Plus your full name is on the website, and I couldn’t help noticing that your middle name is Devenish.”

  “Oh, right,” said Lizzie, uncertainly. “Yes, Mum and Dad named me after her.”

  The Professor swiftly changed the subject. “Now, I wonder whether there are any manuscript collections related to this thing? It was part of the Great Exhibition, wasn’t it?”

  “Hmm, so far as I can tell.” said Lizzie. “It’s a bit of a mystery, actually. It wasn’t in the official catalogue, but it arrived here with the rest of the exhibits that were retained after the Exhibition closed in 1851. Apparently, it looked like this when it got here. Nobody knows what it is, and nobody has studied it since the 1920s, from what I’ve been able to find out. After I came across it, I did some checking in other archives. What’s interesting is that it did leave a bit of a paper trail. I’ve discovered some materials related to it, and I’d be very interested in having you take a look at them. I’m afraid they can’t be photocopied under the rules of that particular archive, but if you’re interested, I’d be happy to pop along with you today and see if we can’t grease the wheels a little bit…”

  The Professor was thinking fast, asking herself questions. Was she ready…? Well, when was she ever?

  “I’d appreciate that very much. When can we go?”

  The End.

  I am a professional historian by trade, but, as Professor Harrower notes in her introduction, this is NOT a work of history. It is a work of art (with a very small ‘a’), and I won’t sully it with footnotes, bibliographies, and all the other contemporary apparatus of nervous authors.1 I’m also sure that despite a fair bit of research, not to mention a large amount of background knowledge diligently applied, I have got some things wrong. There is also stuff that I (gasp!) made up. No time traveling kid, to my knowledge, ever crashed into Winston Churchill. Folks, that’s why it’s called fiction.

  If you would like to know more about the actual history behind the book, and especially about what it was really like to be a kid in England during the two World Wars, please visit my website, www.AnnetteLaing.com, where Dr. Harrower has graciously agreed to discuss your queries. If your question is not already answered there, please message her with it, and she�
�ll do her best to help.

  My reluctance to use footnotes in a novel doesn’t mean that I fail to recognize that I have received a great deal of kind assistance. In fact, I fully realize that any book is a collaborative venture, depending on the time and talents of dozens of helpers.

  I would like to thank the following people in England for their prompt and very helpful research in response to my arcane enquiries:

  Helen Barker at Beamish, North of England Open Air Museum, for information on Edwardian dentistry and what it might have actually cost to fix that broken window. Thanks also to all the staff and volunteers at Beamish for a delightful and inspiring visit I made with my family one very drizzly day in summer, 2006. It was exciting to visit a town street and mining village from 1913, and what a thoroughly helpful and friendly group of people greeted us!

  Barry Attoe at the National Postal Museum, for fielding my enquiries on the frequency of postal delivery in Hertfordshire in 1915, and the terms on which one could buy postal orders during the First World War.