Excerpt
from
Terrible Times
EPISODE I
Explosive News!
In which America is mentioned,
but the author gets somewhat sidetracked
"America?" said Eddie Dickens in amazement.
"You want me to go to America?" His mother nodded. This was difficult because
she was wearing an enormous neck brace, which looked rather like one of those
huge plastic collars vets sometimes put around dogs' heads to prevent them from
licking wounds; only hers was made of whalebone and starched linen.
Before you start crying, "Poor whale!" and
writing off letters of complaint, I wish to point out two things: firstly, these
vents took place in the nineteenth century, when things were very different from
the twenty-first; secondly, the whale whose bones were used to make the frame
for Mrs. Dickens's neck brace had died of natural causes after a long and
fulfilling life at sea, with plenty of singing, which is, apparently, what
whales like doing most.
Okay, it hadn't said, "When I die, I hope my
bones are used to make surgical appliances," but it's better than being
harpooned and killed in its prime in order to make surgical appliances. (I say
"it" simply because I don't know whether this particular whale was a he or a
she. Sorry.)
Not that Eddie or his mother was thinking of such matters as they walked up the drive of Awful End that cold winter's afternoon. She'd just dropped the
bombshell about wanting Eddie to go to America. I don't mean she'd actually
dropped a bombshell, of course. Not a real one. That's simply an expression for
a surprising piece of news. She did drop a real bombshell once, funnily enough
-- actually it was a mortar shell, but it was packed with explosives like a bomb
and did go off, which explains why she was now wearing the neck brace and, oh
yes, walked with the aid of crutches.
She was lucky not to have been more seriously injured. Fortunately for her, when she'd tripped and stumbled with the
shell -- it was like a big brass tube or a giant bullet, not something a hermit crab lives in on the beach
-- she'd tossed it over a small wall dividing the rose garden from the sunken garden. It was the sunken garden that took much of the blast, but it wasn't badly damaged either. A lot of earth flew all over the place and an
ornamental pear tree was destroyed, but little else. Less fortunately, one of Mad Uncle Jack's ex-soldier colleagues
(who'd been sleeping under the rhubarb, which afforded great shade under its huge leaves) was blown to
smithereens (which isn't a small seaside town near Bridlington but means "to
bits"). Eddie's mother was horrified. She felt guilty for days and never ate
rhubarb again for the rest of her life, except in crumbles or with custard . . .
or a light sprinkling of brown sugar. Or white, if there was no brown.
Mad Uncle Jack tried to reassure her by saying
that if the chap had been a half-decent soldier, he would have been heroically
blown up in some battle long ago. And anyway, he strongly suspected that the
fool had been chewing the rhubarb leaves, which are highly poisonous, so he'd
probably have been dead by now whether she'd tripped and tossed the shell over
the wall or not.
Before we get back to Eddie and Mrs. Dickens
crunching up the drive to Awful End and her telling her son about the plans for
America, there may be those amongst you who are interested to know why Mrs.
Dickens was carrying the shell in the first place. Quite simply, it was because
she'd found it in her sewing box. It was summertime (you might have guessed that
from the size of the rhubarb leaves), and she was fed up with the early morning
light coming through the crack between the curtains, so she'd decided to sew
them together. Instead of finding her usual spools of thread, little pot of
pins, her packet of needles, and dried broad beans (graded by size), she found
the brass mortar shell and nothing else.
Puzzled, she'd gone in search of her husband,
Mr. Dickens, who she knew was painting the garden.
Mr. Dickens wasn't painting the garden in the sense that John Constable might paint a landscape or Turner a seascape, with oil paints onto a canvas. No, Mr. Dickens was going around the garden, painting some of the leaves a greener green. As he was getting
older -- and he wasn't that old -- his eyesight wasn't quite what it had
been, and some colors (especially browns and greens) seemed duller, which was
why he was going around with a pot of bright green paint and a badger-bristle
paintbrush. Unfortunately, unlike the whale, I've no idea whether this
particular badger died of natural causes. I'm very, very, sorry.
Having found the shell in her otherwise empty
sewing box and knowing her husband was painting the trees, the garden was a
logical place for Eddie's mother to go and how she came to drop the shell where
she did.
Okay? Okay. I think that just about covers
everything. So let's get back (which is really moving on, because it happened
later) to Eddie and his mother, on crutches, walking up the drive to Awful End
that cold winter's afternoon.
"You want me to go to America?" said Eddie in
amazement.
Copyright © 2003 Philip Ardagh
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