 Excerpt
from
A House Called Awful End
EPISODE I
Crinkly Around the Edges
In which Eddie Dickens is sent away
for his own good
When Eddie Dickens was eleven
years old, both his parents caught some awful disease that made them turn
yellow, go a bit crinkly around the edges, and smell of old hot-water bottles.
There were lots of diseases like that in those days. Perhaps it had something to do with all that thick fog, those knobbly
cobbled streets, and the fact that everyone went everywhere by horse . . . even
to the bathroom. Who knows?
"It's very contagious," said his
father.
"And catching," said his mother,
sucking on an ice cube shaped like a famous general.
They were in Eddie's parents'
bedroom, which was very dark and dingy and had no furniture in it except for a
large double bed, an even larger wardrobe, and thirty-two different types of
chair designed to make you sit up straight even if your wrists were handcuffed
to your ankles.
"Why are you sucking an ice cube
shaped like a famous general?" Eddie asked his parents, who were propped up
against piles of pillows in their impressively ugly double bed.
"Dr. Muffin says that it helps with the swelling," said his mother. In fact, because she had a famous-general-shaped ice cube in her mouth, what she actually said was "Dotter Muffin schez va it hewlpz wiva schwelln,"
but Eddie managed to translate.
"What swelling?" he asked
politely.
His mother shrugged, then
suddenly looked even more yellow and even more crinkly around the edges.
"And why do they have to be
famous-general shaped?" asked Eddie. He always asked lots of questions, and
whenever he asked lots of questions, his father would say: "Questions!
Questions!"
"Questions! Questions!" said his
father.
Told you.
"But why a famous general?" Eddie
repeated. "Surely the shape of the ice cube can't make any difference?"
"Schows sow muck chew no,"
muttered his mother, which meant (and still means), "Shows how much you know."
His father rustled the bedclothes.
"One does not question the good doctor," he said. "Especially when one is a
child." He was a small man except for when he was sitting up in bed. In this
position, he looked extremely tall.
Then Eddie's mother rustled the
bedclothes. It was easy to make them rustle because they were made entirely from
brown paper bags glued together with those extra strips of gummed paper you
sometimes get if you buy more than one stamp at the post office.
Postage stamps were a pretty new
idea back then, and everyone -- except for a great-great-great-aunt on my
mother's side of the family -- was excited about them.
One good thing about there being so few stamps in those days was that no one had yet come up with the idea of collecting them and sticking them in albums and being really boring about them. Stamp collectors didn't exist. Another good thing about there being no stamp collectors was that English teachers couldn't sneak up on some defenseless child and ask
it how to spell philatelist.
Anyhow, even for those days,
having brown paper bedclothes wasn't exactly usual. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Bedclothes used to be an even grander affair then than they are now.
There were no polyester-filled duvets with separate washable covers. Oh, no. Back then there were
underblankets and undersheets and top sheets and middle sheets and seven different kinds of overblankets.
These ranged from ones thicker than a plank of wood (but not so soft) to ones
that had holes in them that were supposed to be there.
To make a bed properly, the
average chambermaid went through six to eight weeks' training at a special camp.
Even then, not all of them finished the course, and those that didn't finish
spent the rest of their working lives living in cupboards under stairs.
The cupboard under the stairs of the Dickens household was occupied by Gibbering Jane. She spent her days in the darkness, alongside a variety of mops,
buckets, and brooms, mumbling about "hospital corners" and "ruckled chenille."
She never came out and was fed slices of ham and any other food that was thin
enough to slip under the bottom of the door.
The reason why Mr. and Mrs.
Dickens had rustling brown paper sheets and blankets was that this was a part of
the Treatment. Dr. Muffin was always giving very strict instructions about the
Treatment.
The smell of old hot-water bottles
had almost reached "unbearable" on Eddie's what-I'm-prepared-to-breathe scale,
and he held his hanky up to his face.
"You'll have to leave the room, my
boy," said his father.
"You'll have to leave the house,"
said his mother. "We can't risk you going all yellow and crinkly and smelling
horrible. It would be a terrible waste of all that money we spent on turning you
into a little gentleman."
"Which is why we're sending you to
stay with Mad Uncle Jack," his father explained.
"I didn't know I had a Mad Uncle Jack," gasped Eddie. He'd never heard of him.
He sounded rather an exciting relative to have.
"I didn't say your Mad
Uncle Jack. He's my Mad Uncle Jack," said his father. "I do wish you'd listen.
That makes him your great-uncle."
"Oh," said Eddie, disappointed. "You mean Mad Great-uncle
Jack." Then he realized that he hadn't heard of him either and he sounded just
as exciting as the other one. "When will I meet him?"
"He's in the wardrobe," said his
mother, pointing at in the huge wardrobe at the foot of the bed, case her son
had forgotten what a wardrobe looked like.
Eddie Dickens pulled open the door
to the wardrobe, gingerly. (it was a ginger wardrobe.)
Inside, among his mother's dresses, stood a very, very, very tall and very,
very, very thin man with a nose that made a parrot's beak look not so beaky. "Hullo," he said, with a u
and not with an e. It was very definitely a "hullo" and not a
"hello." Mad Uncle Jack put out his hand.
Eddie shook it. His little
gentleman lessons hadn't been completely wasted.
Copyright © 2002 Philip
Ardagh
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