A Slip in Time Read online

  ‘My scarf?’

  ‘Your Millwall scarf I knitted you. Weren’t you wearing it when you went out?’

  ‘Oh, that! Was I?’

  He sure as heck wasn’t going out again to look for it! He was back where he belonged, and planning to stay. Still wondering what happened to Fadge, though.

  In the front room, Grandad was still watching Sherlock Holmes.

  Jack stood in the doorway for a bit. ‘I remember this one,’ he said slowly. ‘The Case of the Blue Carbuncle, right? The blue carbuncle. It’s a stolen jewel. It’s hidden inside the chicken, isn’t it?’

  ‘The goose,’ said Grandad, without turning round.

  ‘Whatever. The thief hid it inside the goose.’

  ‘The goose swallowed it.’

  ‘Oh, right. Grandad?’

  ‘What?’ Grandad punched the pause button. ‘You got something to say, then say it.’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes. You said there was no such person.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What about Dr Watson, though? I mean, it’s quite an ordinary sort of name. What if there really was a Dr Watson?’

  ‘Bound to have been. Lots of them.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. And who wrote the stories?’

  ‘Arthur Conan Doyle.’

  ‘Dr Arthur Conan Doyle?’

  ‘Yes! He was a doctor. Started off with a practice in – where was it?’

  ‘Southsea?’

  ‘That’s right. Why all these questions?’

  ‘Just making sure I remembered it right.’

  As Jack climbed the stairs to the attic, he heard the programme getting underway again. Dr Watson’s voice sounding gruff and kind of elderly, not very bright. Nothing like the Dr Watson he’d met.

  He sank down onto a moth-eaten tapestry foot stool, beside an old tin trunk painted an unlovely shade of green. For want of anything better to do, he flipped open the lid of the trunk. Inside were stacks of yellowing paper. Old account books. Letters tied up in bundles. Postcards and brown photographs. Theatre programmes. Pages of old newspapers. As he rifled through, a single photo fluttered out from among the rest and lay upside-down on the floor at his feet, waiting for him to pick it up.

  The back was printed like a postcard. No writing. No stamp. Jack turned it over. There was a picture on the front. A picture of a boy about his own age. Underneath, it said: Master Jack Farthing, as ‘Jo, the Crossing Sweeper’ in Bleak House. Looking sternly up at him was Fadge.

  Jack grabbed the photo and went tumbling down the stairs again. ‘Grandad! Grandad!’

  Grandad sighed and pressed the pause button again, ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Grandad, were you ever on the stage?’

  ‘No.’

  Jack thrust the photo under his nose, ‘Is this you?’

  The old man shook his head, disgusted. ‘I’m not that old. That’s my grandad.’

  ‘You never told me about him.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. Anyway, you never asked.’

  ‘I’m asking now. Everything you can remember.’

  ‘That’s not much.’ Grandad took the photo. ‘He was just a little feller. Smaller than you when he was full-grown, so he never got to play the hero, just what they call character parts.’ He thought for a bit, chewing on nothing. ‘I saw him in a play once.’ Another pause for thought. ‘He made me laugh and he made me cry, I remember that. Oh, yes! What was that play called?’

  Jack said, ‘There’s a load of programmes and stuff upstairs. Shall I bring them down?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Grandad, still half lost in memories. ‘You do that.’

  From the kitchen, Mum heard a rumbling like thunder down the stairs, but nobody yelled, so she didn’t go out. After that, a long silence. No telly. That was worrying.

  When she eased open the front-room door, she saw Grandad still in his chair, with Jack sitting on the floor at his feet, the two of them marooned on a little island in a sea of paper.

  Grandad was saying, ‘Jack Farthing – that’s my grandad – he had three children, Young Jack, Bella and George.’

  George, thought Jack: after the Prince George Theatre, where he had his first acting job? Bella. After Mrs Bella Bailey?

  Grandad went on, ‘George was my dad. Young Jack – who would have been my uncle – he was killed in the First World War. A place they called Wipers. He was just turned twenty.’

  Poor Fadge. After all the knocks he’d taken. Picked himself up, dusted himself down. Life, eh? He was going to lose his eldest son. ‘Poor Fadge!’

  ‘Fadge, yes. That’s what they called him. I don’t know why. Something to do with him being so small.’

  ‘A fadge was a farthing.’

  ‘Was it? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘That’s a small brown coin…’

  ‘I know what a farthing is! Kept all Young Jack’s badges he did. And the Bible he gave him.’ Grandad was chewing again, on nothing. ‘There was a great trade in Bibles in those days. Small enough to fit in a breast pocket, just over your heart. Thick enough to stop a bullet. They must be in here somewhere.’ He was rummaging through the stuff at the bottom of the trunk.

  ‘There’s three or four trunks more up in the attic,’ said Jack, starting towards the door. Was it possible he’d met his own great-great-grandad? He wanted proof; proof that he hadn’t just dreamed it all. Made it up out of names and scraps and maybe – yes – even a photograph seen once and then forgotten.

  He caught a brief glimpse of Mum’s back, retreating to the kitchen again, which was maybe just as well, because she didn’t see what happened next. Behind him he heard Grandad still muttering to himself, ‘They’ve got to be here somewhere. Huh? What’s this?’

  Turning, he saw the old man, like a conjuror producing the flags of all nations, pulling something from under the debris at the bottom of the trunk. A knitted scarf. The stripes had faded to greyish-white and bluey-grey, during a hundred years or more. But Jack recognised it, from where Mum had counted the stitches wrong and turned the final ‘L’ to an ‘I’.

  ‘His lucky scarf!’ said Grandad. ‘That’s what he always called it. Odd, though, because he was never a Millwall supporter. He told me once it was something to do with his first acting job.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘I suppose it’s just one of those things we’ll never know.’

  Glossary

  Barrel organ A small instrument, played by turning a handle.

  Cleaver A tool for chopping meat.

  Concertina A small musical instrument.

  Dripping Melted fat from roasting meat.

  Eiderdown A quilt filled with down.

  Farthing A coin; a quarter of a penny.

  Guinea A coin; one pound.

  Home Guard The British Citizen Army, organised to defend the UK against invasion. Founded in 1940.

  Lummox A clumsy, stupid person.

  Sheltered Housing Semi-independent accommodation for the elderly, with some shared facilities and a warden.

  Shilling A coin; twelve pence.

  Siren song The call of something appealing but potentially dangerous.

  Snakesman A boy skilled at entering houses through small spaces, for criminal purposes.

  Wipers (Ypres) The location of many battles during the First World War.

  Historical Note

  At any time during Queen Victoria’s reign there were around 30,000 children sleeping rough in London. That’s not counting those fending for themselves who had somewhere to go at night – which might be just a few square metres of someone else’s one-room flat, screened off by a blanket. Some of them cared for younger brothers and sisters, too.

  If they didn’t work, they starved. So they sold things like flowers, flypapers, peg-dolls, cigars, matches or bundles of firewood; they sang songs or they danced; they scavenged in the gutters and among the rubbish for anything they could sell on for a penny or two: rags, bones, cigar ends, even dog turds (which were used to soften the leather fo
r making gloves).

  The alternative was the workhouse, where conditions were made deliberately harsh, to put off scroungers. Even prison was more comfortable, according to one boy who was sent to jail for a month for begging. The nicest place he’d ever been, he said; next time he’d make sure he was put inside for theft, so they’d keep him a bit longer.

  The London fogs known as pea-soupers happened all through the 19th century and up until the middle of the 20th. By this time they were worse, because the exhaust fumes from cars and buses were added to the brew. The smog in the winter of 1952 caused the deaths of over 4,000 people. In 1956, the Government passed the Clean Air Act, which banned the use of coal fires in London and cut down industrial pollution.

  There was no such person as Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based him and his method of deduction on careful observation of a professor who taught him at medical school in Edinburgh, Dr Joseph Bell. Ever since the stories first appeared, people have written to the great detective at 221B, Baker Street, asking for his help.

  Other books in the series:

  Final Victory • Herbie Brennan

  Across the Roman Wall • Theresa Breslin

  A Candle in the Dark • Adèle Geras

  Soldier’s Son • Garry Kilworth

  Casting the Gods Adrift • Geraldine McCaughrean

  Out of the Shadow • Margaret Nash

  Blitz Boys • Linda Newbery

  Doodlebug Summer • Alison Prince

  A Ghost-light in the Attic • Pat Thomson

  Voyage of the Silver Bream • Theresa Tomlinson

  Mission to Marathon • Geoffrey Trease

  Gunner’s Boy • Ann Turnbull

  First published in 2005 by

  A & C Black

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

  www.acblack.com

  www.damianharvey.co.uk

  This electronic edition published in April 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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  eISBN 978-1-4081-6381-8

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