The Eddie Dickens Trilogy Read online

  Foreword

  In which the author thanks a bunch of people you’ve never heard of

  Blimey! Who’d have thought it: a bundle of letters to one boy resulting in a series of six books in total, three of which you now have – as one big, satisfyingly fat, one – in your grubby mitts/beautifully clean hands.

  Eddie’s adventures are now in 34 languages and Heaven-knows-how-many countries. It’s thanks to him that I can now afford a range of beard combs and I get to travel the world.

  As well as my remarkable talent, I have many people to thank for their success, from David Roberts and his wonderful illustrations and Suzy Jenvey who edited the books, to Lynn Gardner at the Guardian who gave me such a glowing early review, and Stephen Page along with just about everyone at Faber (the publisher), plus a whole host of others … not least YOU, the reader.

  So let’s have a group hug, everyone (but don’t spoil it by tugging on my beard) … Now, read on!

  PHILIP ARDAGH

  England

  2011

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  1 Awful End,

  2 Dreadful Acts,

  3 Terrible Times,

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Awful End

  Book One of the Eddie Dickens Trilogy

  A Message from the Author

  At no extra cost

  Awful End was originally written in instalments, which explains why the chapters are called ‘episodes’ and not ‘chapters’. These episodes were sent to my nephew, Ben, at boarding school, where they were – to my surprise – read out loud by his housemaster and housemistress ‘Pa and Ma Brown’. This book is dedicated to them and (in alphabetical order) to: Cordelia, Francesca, Hattie, Henry, Isabelle, Katie and Ted Riley too. May their lives, and yours, be full of silly adventures.

  PHILIP ARDAGH

  England

  2000

  Contents

  A Message from the Author

  1 Crinkly Around the Edges,

  In which Eddie Dickens is sent away for his own good

  2 Even Madder Maud,

  In which Eddie first meets Malcolm … or is it Sally?

  3 Mister Pumblesnook,

  In which Eddie is entranced by a handkerchief

  4 On the Road Again,

  In which Aunt Maud is even more maddening than usual

  5 Big Guns,

  In which we learn that the bearded stranger isn’t either

  6 Orphanage,

  In which geese save Rome

  7 Escape!,

  In which we finally get back to poor old Eddie

  8 Get On With It!,

  In which a chocolate could be a mouse dropping

  9 A Serious Misunderstanding,

  In which we meet the Empress of All China … Well, sort of

  10 Oh Dear! Oh Dear! Oh Dear!,

  In which Eddie wants out

  11 The Final Instalment,

  In which we rather hope it’s all’s well that ends well

  Episode 1

  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 round 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.

  ‘Doctor 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 round 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 defenceless 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 which 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 realised 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 the huge wardrobe at the foot of the bed, in 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, amongst 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’ not a ‘hello’. Mad Uncle Jack put out his hand.

  Eddie shook it. His little gentleman lessons hadn’t been completely wasted.

  Mad Uncle Jack stepped out of the wardrobe and onto an oval mat knitted by children from St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans. Remember that place: St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans. There. I’ve written it out for you a second time. Never let it be said that I don’t do anything for you. Remember the name. You’ll come across it again one day, and probably between the covers of this book.

  ‘So you are Edmund Dickens,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, studying the boy.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Eddie, because his first name really was Edmund.

  Eddie Dickens’s father cleared his throat. He used a miniature version of the sort of brush the local sweep used to clear blocked chimneys. This was all a part of Dr Muffin’s Treatment.

  ‘Edmund,’ said Mr Dickens, ‘you are to go with my uncle and live with him until your dear, sweet mother and I –’ he paused and kissed Mrs Dickens on the part of her face that was the least yellow and the least crinkly at the edges (a small section just behind her left ear) ‘– are well again. You must never wear anything green in his presence, you must always drink at least five glasses of lukewarm water a day, and you must always do as he says. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ said Eddie.

  ‘And, Jonathan,’ added his mother, for Jonathan was the pet name she called Eddie when she couldn’t remember his real one.

  ‘Yes, Mother?’

  ‘Do be careful to make sure that you’re not mistaken for a runaway orphan and taken to the orphanage where you will then suffer cruelty, hardship and misery.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mother. That’ll never happen,’ said Eddie Dickens, dismissing the idea as ridiculous.

  If only he’d listened.

  *

  Mad Uncle Jack wanted to use the bathroom before he went and, being unfamiliar with the house, he found it difficult to get his horse up the stairs without knocking one or two family portraits off the wall.

  The fact that he’d only nailed the portraits up there himself minutes before made it all the more annoying. He took the paintings with him whenever he strayed more than eleven miles from his house. Because his house was actually twelve miles from the nearest place, that meant he always had them with him.

  A key part of the Treatment was that neither Mr Dickens nor his wife Mrs Dickens should leave their bed more than three times a day. Because they had both already been up twice that day, and both planned to get up later for an arm-wrestling competition against their friends and neighbours Mr and Mrs Thackery, who lived over at The Grange, neither of Eddie’s parents could get up to see him off.

  Instead, the bed was lowered from their window on a winch constructed from the sheets that were no longer in use since the Treatment began.

  ‘Good luck, my boy,’ said Eddie’s father. ‘Under such extreme circumstances, I would kiss you, but I don’t want you catching this.’

  ‘Get well, Father,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Be good, Simon,’ said his mother. Simon was the name Mrs Dickens used when she couldn’t remember that his real name was Edmund or that his pet name was Jonathan. ‘Be good.’

  ‘I will,’ said Eddie. ‘Get well, Mother.’

  It had started to rain and the raindrops mixed with the tears that poured down his mother’s face. She was busy peeling an onion.

  * Teachers even thought of a child as ‘it’ back then. Some things never change.

  Episode 2

  Even Madder Maud

  In which Eddie first meets Malcolm … or is it Sally?

  When Eddie Dickens climbed into Mad Uncle Jack’s covered carriage, he found that it was already occupied. In the corner, an elderly woman was stroking a stoat.

  ‘You must be Malcolm,’ said the old woman, with a voice that could grate cheese.

  ‘No, madam. My name is Edmund,’ said Eddie.

  ‘I was talking to the stoat!’ snarled the woman, pulling the creature closer to her. ‘Well?’ she demanded, staring at the animal.

  The stoat said nothing. It didn’t even twitch or blink. The woman seized it by the tail and held it aloft (which is in-those-days language for ‘up a bit’). It was as stiff as a board. ‘Are you Malcolm?’ she demanded.

  It was round about then that Eddie Dickens realised that the woman must be completely crazy and that the animal must be completely stuffed. He took a seat opposite the woman.

  ‘Put that seat back!’ she screamed, so Eddie did as he was told and sat down.

  Just then, Mad Uncle Jack stuck his thinnest of thin heads through the door of the carriage. ‘Ignore her. She’s quite mad,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘Who is she, sir?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘Sally Stoat,’ said his great-uncle.

  ‘Did she get her name from that stuffed animal she’s hugging?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘It was the stoat I was referring to, you impudent whelp!’ cried his great-uncle. ‘That good lady is my wife, Mad Aunt Maud – your great-aunt – and there’s most certainly nothing mad about her.’

  Eddie’s face went beetroot red. ‘I do beg your pardon, Great-uncle,’ Eddie spluttered. ‘And you, Great-aunt,’ he said, with terrible embarrassment. He hadn’t even left the driveway of his own home and he had already managed to offend them both.

  ‘Enough said,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘I despise closed carriages so shall be lashing myself to the roof along with our luggage. I shall see you when we reach Awful End.’

  ‘Awful End?’

  ‘Our home. Your home, until your dear mother and father are cured of their terrible affliction,’ Mad Uncle Jack explained.

  Eddie’s great-uncle clambered onto the roof where Eddie could hear him strapping himself into place next to his trunk.

  ‘Drive on!’ Mad Uncle Jack shouted.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Driver!’ he instructed. ‘Drive on!’ It was then that he must have remembered that they didn’t have a driver. Eddie could hear him unstrapping himself and clambering across the roof above his head to take up position on the driver’s chair.

  Mad Uncle Jack gave a strange clicking noise that you sometimes hear people make to horses moments before they flick the reins and the carriage pulls off.

  Eddie thought he even heard the flicking of the reins, but this was followed by silence except for the gentle patter of raindrops that were falling onto the stuffed stoat that his great-aunt was sticking out of the open window.

  ‘Did you have a good war, dear?’ she asked Eddie.

  ‘What war was that, Great-aunt?’ Eddie asked politely.

  ‘How many have you been in?’ she asked.

  ‘None, as a matter of fact,’ said Eddie. She was as tricky to talk to as
her husband.

  ‘Then don’t be so particular!’ she replied, pulling the stoat back into the dry of the carriage. ‘Was Malcolm thirsty? Was he? Did he like his little drinky?’

  ‘No horse!’ called out a voice that Eddie recognised as belonging to his father, even though it sounded more yellow and crinkly at the edges than usual.

  Eddie stood up and looked out of the window, across the driveway to his parents, who were sitting by the front door in their bed.

  The weather wasn’t doing their bedclothes much good. The brown paper bags looked a darker brown and were positively soggy. If his parents stayed out much longer, their bedding would soon turn to pulp. Eddie suspected that papier mâché wasn’t a part of Dr Muffin’s Treatment.

  ‘No horse!’ his father repeated, pointing to the front of the carriage.

  Eddie climbed out, stepped onto the driveway and looked back at the carriage. He could see the problem. In the carriage sat Mad Aunt Maud with her stuffed stoat, by the name of either Malcolm or Sally, depending on who he was to believe. On the roof of the carriage were Eddie’s trunk and his great-uncle’s family portraits (that went with him always), and at the front of the carriage was his very thin and very mad Mad Uncle Jack, reins in one hand and a whip in the other.