After I’ve said hello to Grandma and had a Nesquik or something, I’ll take Teddy out into the maze. Or into the orchard, where we can find the Story Tree and the fairy glade. Maybe I’ll dress him up in a suit of armour or something.
Mum puts the indicator on – it’s so loud! – and we turn into a short road that leads into the forest. At the end is a small cottage. It’s got a little wooden bench outside and two square windows. What is this place?
‘What are we doing here?’ I ask.
‘This is Grandma’s house,’ says Dad, like I’m being silly. ‘You probably don’t recognize it without the Skype ring noise.’
I look at it again. What does he mean? I don’t recognize it at all.
Where are the turrets? Where’s the pond?
We get out and Mum says she hopes Grandma is in because this would have been ‘a hell of a journey otherwise’ (’scuse her language). Dad peers through the window and he spots something.
‘The teapot,’ he says. ‘It’s steaming. She’s in.’
So he takes a deep breath and knocks on the door.
Wait.
We all look at each other.
We smile.
Should we?
* * *
‘Blinkin’ kids!’ yells Grandma at the top of her lungs when she opens the door and there’s no one to be seen. ‘That’s the third time this week!’
‘Surprise!’ we all yell, jumping out from behind the tree.
‘Oh my days!’ shouts Grandma, and now she’s laughing and a bit shaky, and me and Teddy hug her hard.
‘We were worried about you!’ I say. ‘And we couldn’t remember your phone number and we didn’t have it written down and we couldn’t email you or text you or call you on Skype and we wanted to make sure you were okay and Dad committed a crime and fell in a pond and smelled really bad for a really long time and we lit a fire in a field!’
There was a lot I wanted to say, okay?
‘Oh, welcome!’ she says, and then she looks up at Mum and Dad.
And there’s a moment where her and Dad just look at each other. Then she stretches her arms out wide and Dad falls into them and he almost completely swallows her in a giant hug and I think that everything they wanted to say was said in that hug and never needed to be said again.
* * *
‘You came to rescue me!’ says Grandma as she brings out my Nesquik to the back garden.
‘We were worried about you,’ I say. ‘In case you needed help.’
‘Oh, I’ve got my vegetable patches,’ she says. ‘I’ve got my tins.’
Grandma’s added whipped cream and about four million marshmallows to my mug. She says she always made sure she had enough in her cupboard just in case I ever made it round.
‘People my age know how to be ready for anything!’ she says.
Her back garden is quite tiny. I remember it being the size of a football pitch.
‘Do you remember the maze?’ she says, and of course I do! But where is it? ‘We used to put out cardboard boxes everywhere and build them together for hours. Wearing our tinfoil suits of armour.’
Cardboard boxes? Tinfoil?
‘And the Story Tree?’ Grandma says. ‘Do you remember the Story Tree?’
I do, but I can’t see it…
She points at the big green garden umbrella in the corner.
‘We used to sit under that and make up our own stories, before we got the paddling pool out and then jumped in the—’
‘The pond!’ I say, remembering.
All these memories I have – of being little and stomping through big marshes and hiding in forests and building dens and finding fairy houses – Grandma gave them all to me and made them real.
‘There’s nothing like playing,’ she says. ‘You can do anything and be anyone. You can make the world your own!’
It’s nice to have some memories that could never, ever have actually happened the way I thought. Something unrecorded. It’s like magic. It’s like a present.
‘Did Dad use to play like that?’ I ask her.
‘Oh my, oh yes,’ says Grandma. ‘We used to put cereal boxes on our backs and pretend to be divers or astronauts. Oh, it was such fun. Can you imagine? Your dad could play for hours. He would just laugh and laugh and create incredible worlds!’
Hang on.
‘What – my dad?’
‘Yes,’ says Grandma. ‘Wait. I can show you!’
* * *
We have had to wait until the sky got a little bit darker and Grandma could find all the things she needed from the attic.
I still didn’t see how she could show us Dad as a kid. I still didn’t really believe Dad ever was a kid. Though I suppose seeing him and Mum singing and acting like they were young and then even playing Ding Dong Ditch is a clue that he must have been young at some stage.
Mum and Dad have been giggling in the kitchen, I think because they’d opened some wine (uh-oh) while they chopped some of Uncle Tony’s vegetables for a sauce, and now we have a big steaming bowl of pasta for us all to eat in the garden. We’re sat under the Story Tree, lit by yellow light bulbs, and I take two big bits of garlic bread. One for me and one for Teddy.
Then Grandma brings all these weird bits of equipment out.
‘I found the old films!’ she says.
‘Oh no,’ says Dad.
‘We can’t watch films, Grandma,’ I say. ‘The screens are all gone, remember?’
She laughs.
‘We haven’t always needed screens,’ she says. ‘Not electronic ones anyway!’
And she unfolds this big white sheet on a tripod and it’s like a sort of cinema screen. Then she puts together an old ‘projector’ that looks like something from before time began, but which Grandma says is actually from 1981, which I have to say sounds like a made-up year.
‘What’s that?’ I say, pointing to a square orange box in her hand. She doesn’t answer, but opens it up and I can see a roll of plastic inside, which she threads into the projector.
And then…
Up on the screen, in very tiny shorts – there’s a little boy Grandma claims is Dad!
‘Awwwww!’ says Mum, and she ruffles the real-life Dad’s hair and cuddles into him.
The colours are all a bit weird and there’s no sound apart from the whirr of the projector but, yeah, I think that’s my dad!
‘That’s Daddy!’ I tell Teddy. ‘In the very tight Superman T-shirt!’
And then there’s Grandma, with red hair, and she’s wearing cardboard boxes on her back and pretending to be an evil robot! And they’re laughing and playing and I don’t even need to hear what they’re saying because I’m just blown away by all the…
The what?
The love.
Next to me, Dad puts his arm round Grandma and kisses her on the head.
And he cuddles her a little more when the camera turns round and there’s Grandad.
The screens still haven’t come back, of course. But you know that.
Mum says everyone needs to learn how to live in a different world, and Grandma says she’s right because things always change.
But it’s a world I’m cool with.
We’re going to stay with Grandma the whole of the summer.
She says every day is going to be a play day. Of course at first this panics me because as you know I do enjoy a rigorously structured timetable. But she says by playing, we’ll learn. She’s going to teach us everything she knows. Things we wouldn’t learn if the screens came back, or from an online lesson, or from what she calls the Google Machines.
We’re going to get dirty every day, and we’re going to get out of breath, and we’re going to grow flowers and bake bread and invent stories and we’re going to talk.
And every week we’re going to do something special for someone we don’t really know at all. The way Uncle Tony and Ellie and the people we met did something for us.
And we’re going to make sure we remember to pay for those fish
and chips from that rude woman at that pub.
Most importantly, every Sunday will still be Bobcroft Family Film Night. But now the films will be ones we make ourselves, ones we watch while eating great big bowls of pasta around a table in the garden together.
We can’t take pictures on our phones any more. But I blink, hard, whenever I find a moment to remember. There are so many.
And just before I go, because I think I’ve given you the whole story now, Dad said that he thinks that in the past week we’ve made more memories together than we ever did before. So he said that he and Mum had been talking, and it was time to make some more. And that if I promised that I would be responsible for the walks, and for the feeding, and the care, we could do it this week.
So we’re going to go to the rescue centre, and we’re actually going to get a puppy.
I’m going to call her Grandma.
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks to Jane Griffiths, Ali Dougal, Sam Swinnerton, Jesse Green, Rachel Denwood, Laura Hough, Eve Wersocki Morris and all the greats at Simon & Schuster – as a reward, you all get an extra hour of screen time this weekend!
Robert Kirby, I’m taking your phone away, I’m afraid.
All Hail Gemma Correll!
And big thanks to my three inspirations: Elliot, Clover and Kit. Let’s do a road trip!
More from the Author
Hamish and the Monster Patrol
Hamish and the Terrible Terrible Christmas and…
Hamish and the Baby BOOM!
Hamish and the GravityBurp
Hamish and the Neverpeople
Hamish and the Terrible Terrible Christmas
About the Author and Illustrator
DANNY WALLACE is an award-winning writer and radio presenter who’s done lots of silly things. He’s been a character in a video game, made a TV show about monkeys, and even started his own country. He has written lots of bestselling books for grown-ups. Hamish and the Worldstoppers was his first book for children.
www.SimonandSchuster.co.uk/Authors/Danny-Wallace
GEMMA CORRELL is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist. In the past decade, she’s collaborated with various companies to design over 400 products, co-host multiple events, and launch a magazine. Be sure to check out Gemma Correll on Instagram and her website gemmacorrell.com
www.SimonandSchuster.co.uk/Authors/Gemma-Correll
Also by Danny Wallace
Hamish and the Worldstoppers
Hamish and the Neverpeople
Hamish and the GravityBurp
Hamish and the Babyboom
Hamish and the Monster Patrol
Hamish and the Terrible Terrible
Christmas and other Starkley Stories
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
Text copyright © 2021 Danny Wallace
Illustrations copyright © 2021 Gemma Correll
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Danny Wallace and Gemma Correll to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
PB ISBN 978-1-4711-9688-1
eBook ISBN 978-1-4711-9687-4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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