It seems they’ve all discovered a talent for making friends.
This is how it happened.
By the time Alice and Fergus and Jesse returned to school with the major and Madoc, wild rumours were flying around about what they had been up to. And even though they had sworn each other to secrecy, they couldn’t avoid the onslaught of questions.
‘So!’ Jenny dumped her dinner tray down next to Alice’s on their first night back and asked, ‘Is it true your tent was struck by lightning? And Fergus almost died, and Jesse nearly broke his neck?’
‘Did you really have to be rescued by helicopter?’ asked Duffy. ‘Did it really have to winch you out of the sea?’
‘Yes,’ Fergus declared. ‘Absolutely. All of this is true.’
‘Don’t believe him,’ Jesse mumbled. ‘It wasn’t nearly as dramatic.’
‘Says the boy who broke into a house!’ cried Fergus.
‘You broke into a house?’ Zeb gawped at Jesse with new respect.
‘And I did nearly die,’ Fergus insisted, and launched into a gruesome, detailed description of his food-poisoning symptoms which made some people turn green, and others roar with laughter.
As more and more children crowded round to listen, gasping and laughing and saying ‘That bit can’t be true!’ Alice watched and smiled but did not speak.
Until …
‘But why?’ asked Samira. ‘Why did you leave the Challenge, when you wanted to win so badly, and go off to an island?’
Fergus and Jesse turned to Alice.
‘W-what?’ she stammered.
‘You tell them,’ said Fergus.
‘Me?’ Alice stared round the table at a sea of expectant faces. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘You know I can’t. You’re the one who’s good at talking.’
‘But I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,’ he whispered back. ‘We agreed – you know – that we wouldn’t mention …’
‘I can’t do it!’
‘Alice, he’s your dad!’
And so Alice, for the first time in her life, told a story to a crowd.
She didn’t tell the whole truth, like about Barney being an international criminal and people chasing them with guns (even though I’m sure you agree those parts were particularly thrilling). But the story she did tell them, about a crazy marvellous father and the tales he told his daughter, wasn’t entirely untrue.
And the way Alice told it … ah, the way Alice told it!
It didn’t start well.
‘The thing is …’ Her mouth dried up, and she stopped.
Jesse gave her some water. She gulped it gratefully, then coughed as it went down the wrong way. Fergus thumped her on the back.
‘The thing is …’
Her stomach lurched. It was like vertigo – it was worse than vertigo!
She closed her eyes.
An image came into her mind, of a cliff, and a rope, and a girl climbing away from a beach, up and up towards a bright blue sky, never looking down.
She opened her eyes again.
‘Don’t tell if you’d rather not,’ said Samira.
‘It’s all right,’ said Alice.
She took a deep breath.
‘Imagine an island full of birds, and a rock in the shape of a castle …’
The children listened, spellbound, as Alice talked, and talked, and talked.
POST-SCRIPT
I grew up in London, but spent many happy holidays as a child on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, in a little cottage between the sea and the mountains, where my sister and I were free to roam wherever we wanted, as long as we stayed by the stream which ran through our garden. ‘That way you will be safe,’ my parents said, by which they meant we would not get lost (it never seemed to occur to them that there might be other dangers).
This was my first taste of the adventure and freedom I had previously only read about in the books of Enid Blyton. Up into the hills we marched on small determined legs, beneath huge skies which shone and hailed and rained on us, over grass soft and springy as mattresses and swamps which pulled the boots off our feet. We came across a small loch which changed colour with the shifting clouds, and rabbits and eagles and lambs and once, tragically, a dead stag lying in the heather, a reminder that this place was fierce and dangerous as well as beautiful.
Something about this roaming changed me forever, I think. My heart is firmly stamped with London’s DNA, but to this day it is shared with that sky and sea and mountains.
I went back to Scotland a few years ago with my husband. We took the sleeper train out of Euston (London’s ugliest station) to Fort William in the Highlands, and it was just as magnificent and romantic and fun as it sounds. We stayed in a friend’s house in an isolated part of the already isolated peninsula of Ardnamurchan, right on the beach where in the evenings we built bonfires of driftwood which spat blue sparks, and watched the mist rise on the islands opposite as we waited for the midnight sun to set. And then we took a boat to a tiny, tiny island, where we visited a colony of puffins, which is something everybody should do at least once in their life to understand just how amazing and precious this planet is. Puffins are funny and clumsy and graceful and brave, and the hour I spent watching them was one of the happiest of my life.
This book is written for the child I was, striding out over the Scottish mountains feeling like an explorer, but it is also a love letter to that beautiful natural environment. I hope that reading it will make you look more closely at the world around you, and inspire you to explore it. You don’t have to be on a Scottish island to see amazing things. One snowy morning in London, I woke up to find a vixen and her cub sheltering in our garden. In summer, I’ve noticed how three geese land at exactly the same time every morning on the pond of our local park. I’ve seen a tiny vole in the same park, sitting on a leaf, and a friend recently saw a dolphin in the Thames!
Adventures all start differently, and often where you least expect them. Some start ‘quietly, with tea and cake and sandwiches’, and some start with a book, or a new friend, or a simple walk down the street.
Any of these things could change your life.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND DISCLAIMERS
The Scotland of The Children of Castle Rock is a Scotland of my imagination, a blend of the many places I have visited and loved there. To this end, I have changed all the place names, though if you know the area at all you may be able to guess their origin …
Thank you to my dear friend, Janey McAllester, for lending me her beautiful home on Ardnamurchan, and for her patience answering my wild texts about local flora and meteorology. To my parents, for trusting their two little girls to the care of a stream. To my husband and daughters, as ever, for their support. To my agent, Catherine Clarke, for always being right. And to Alice Swan, editor extraordinaire, specialist of ‘it’s good … but I know you can do better’, who pushes me on to do things I never imagined I could. Being edited by her is an adventure in itself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Natasha Farrant lives in London with her family and a large tortoiseshell cat. She has written numerous books for children including the Bluebell Gadsby series. She has been shortlisted for the Queen of Teen Award, and the second Bluebell Gadbsy book, Flora in Love, was longlisted for the Guardian Children’s Prize, while the third, All About Pumpkin, was WHSmith Book of the Month. Natasha is also the author of the Carnegie-longlisted and Branford Boase-shortlisted YA historical novel The Things We Did For Love and Carnegie-nominated Lydia. She enjoys long rambling walks in the country but is a hopeless map-reader. This is her first standalone novel for middle-grade readers.
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
The Bluebell Gadsby Series
After Iris
Flora in Love
All About Pumpkin
Time for Jas
COPYRIGHT
First published in 2018
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House,
74–77 Great Russell Street,
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
Text © Natasha Farrant, 2018
Postcard and stamp © Shutterstock
Illustration © David Dean, 2018
The right of Natasha Farrant and David Dean to be identified as author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased 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
ISBN 978–0–571–32357–9
The Children of Castle Rock Page 17