The Eddie Dickens Trilogy Read online

  PHILIP ARDAGH

  England

  2002

  Contents

  Dedication

  A Message from the Author

  1 Explosive News!,

  In which America is mentioned, but the author gets somewhat side-tracked

  2 A Painful Surprise,

  In which Mad Uncle Jack gets it in the end and Even Madder Aunt Maud has an attack of guilt

  3 A Cure for Ills?

  In which Doctor Humple pays yet another visit to Awful End and Eddie goes in search of shiny things

  4 A Brief Family History,

  In which Eddie learns more about his family and the reasons for going to America

  5 Looking Back, Looking Forward,

  In which we learn more of Eddie’s past and more of his excitement at the upcoming voyage

  6 Going … Going …?

  In which Eddie and the reader are almost halfway through the book and neither is sure whether Eddie is ever going to get to America

  7 … Gone!

  In which, to everyone’s amazement, including the author’s, Eddie actually sets sail for America

  8 Discoveries,

  In which Eddie may be at sea, but we seem to spend most of the time amongst familiar faces on dry land

  9 That Sinking Feeling,

  In which both Eddie and Mad Uncle Jack make plans regarding the ‘recapture’ of Even Madder Aunt Maud

  10 Dazzling Events,

  In which not only Even Madder Aunt Maud shows an interest in a priceless shiny thing

  11 Going Overboard,

  In which various characters pick themselves up, dust themselves down and start all over again

  12 Back and Forth,

  In which we go backwards and forwards in order to try to make sense of it all

  Episode 1

  Explosive News!

  In which America is mentioned, but the author gets somewhat side-tracked

  ‘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 events took place in the 19th century when things were very different to the 21st; 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 were 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 which 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 mum 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 rows of cotton reels, 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, whom 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 on to 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 colours (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.

  No, hang on. Wait a minute. I thought I’d just about covered everything in the how-she-came-to-drop-the-mortar-shell incident, but there are two glaring omissions (things left out). Firstly; who put the shell in the sewing box; and, secondly, what it was that Mrs Dickens tripped over, causing her to throw the shell in the first place. Both can be easily explained.

  The shell had been a present to Mad Uncle Jack from a local shopkeeper who didn’t like him. He secretly rather hoped that MUJ would keep it over the fireplace and the heat would cause it to explode, giving Mad Uncle Jack a headache and an expensive repair bill, at the very least. That would teach him not to squish fruit and vegetables when he had no intention of buying them! Mad Uncle Jack had, indeed, put this fine, gleaming, brass mortar shell on display on one of the many mantelpieces in Awful End, but it had caught the eye of his loving wife, Even Madder Aunt Maud.

  Even Madder Aunt Maud was a woman who acted on impulse. The day she first set eyes on a stuffed stoat, whom she later called Malcolm, she fell in love with him and he became her (almost) constant companion. The day she saw the snout of a hollow cow sticking over a hedgerow, her heart went all a flutter once again, and she knew there and then that she would call the cow Marjorie and live inside her.

  When she saw the gleaming shell case, she wanted it. I’ve no idea what for. She never said and, though I give a very good
impression of one once in a while, when I write ‘he thought’ or ‘she wondered’, I’m not a state-registered mind reader. All I know is she wanted it, picked it up and was horrified to see that her hands left fingermarks and palm prints on the nice brass, which might tarnish the lovely gleam which had attracted her to it in the first place. She needed something to carry it in. She went into the nearest room and there, on a stool by the window, sat Mrs Dickens’s sewing box. Not only was it just the right size, it also had a handy carrying handle.

  Even Madder Aunt Maud tipped the contents out of the box, and swept them out of the way with her feet, under an old upright piano, putting the shell in the box. She was just about to carry it out to Marjorie, when she remembered that she’d left Malcolm the stuffed stoat on the mantelpiece. It was as she dashed out to retrieve him that Eddie’s mum walked in and found the shell in the sewing box. It was just a case of bad luck and bad timing. If she hadn’t wanted to sew up that gap in the curtain, or had come in a moment sooner and been able to ask Aunt Maud what she was up to, or come in later, allowing time for Even Madder Aunt Maud to have retrieved Malcolm and taken the sewing box, Mrs Dickens wouldn’t be in the poor state she was in now.

  Which only leaves the matter of what she tripped over, mortar shell in hand: a now-empty pot which had once contained green paint. And I don’t think that requires further explanation!

  Immediately after the explosion, Mad Uncle Jack dashed down the ladder from his tree house, three rungs at a time. Eddie, who was helping Dawkins polish the family silver, dashed out of the kitchen door and around the side of the house. Mr Dickens fell out of a laburnum tree he’d been painting, and Gibbering Jane (their retired/failed chambermaid) stayed under the stairs. Even Madder Aunt Maud was the last to appear, clutching Malcolm under her arm, and still frowning a puzzled frown at the sudden disappearance of the sewing box and shell.

  Mad Uncle Jack, Eddie and Dawkins all ran to assist Mrs Dickens, whilst Even Madder Aunt Maud ambled over to Mr Dickens, who was lying on his back, moaning. She held Malcolm by the tail and prodded Eddie’s father with the stuffed stoat’s nose. ‘What’s all the fuss about, ay?’ she demanded.

  Meanwhile, Eddie’s mum just groaned a lot and looked a bit crumpled. Back then, it wasn’t simply a matter of picking up a phone and calling an ambulance. Dawkins was sent into town, on horseback, to find the doctor and it was a good hour before both men came galloping back. By then, Even Madder Aunt Maud had made the gruesome discovery of the ex-ex-soldier. Death is never nice, even in books. She told Mad Uncle Jack, who was able to identify which of his men it was – he still thought of them that way, and they did often do odd-jobs around the house – by a medal, still hot and slightly melted – in a flowerbed. On it were the words:

  BEST OF BREED

  ‘It was Gorey,’ he said quietly. ‘Poor chap.’

  Doctor Humple took one look at Eddie’s mother and assured her that she’d be fine in next to no time. He gave her the neck brace straight from his bag and arranged for crutches to be delivered, and had her up and walking about in a matter of days. Eddie’s father was less lucky. The fall from the tree had hurt his back and, even as our story starts that following winter, he spent most of the time lying on his back, unable to sit up, let alone walk.

  ‘I don’t think the author likes me,’ he once muttered. ‘I always seem to get injured in these books.’ Of course, none of the other characters had any idea what he was talking about.

  It was soon after the accident that Eddie’s father had a brilliant idea. He’d remembered reading somewhere about a famous artist called Michel Angelo, whom he assumed would have been called ‘Mike Angel’ if he’d been an Englishman – in fact ‘Michelangelo’ was just the artist’s first name, his surname was Buonarroti – who’d painted the ceiling of a place called the Sistine Chapel. Mr Buonarroti had covered it with pictures of clouds and angels, and Adam and Eve and suchlike … but he’d done it all from wooden scaffolding, built to the height of just below the ceiling, and had painted the whole thing whilst lying on his back!

  So, rather than lying around feeling sorry for himself, Mr Dickens had the remaining ex-soldiers build him a wooden scaffolding rig on wheels, and he started to paint the ceiling of the great hall in Awful End. His food was brought up and his chamber pot taken down. Occasionally, Gibbering Jane would clamber up and give him a sponge bath or one of the family would join him for a while to keep him company, or mix him new coloured paints. When he’d finished painting one patch of roof, they’d simply wheel the whole wooden scaffolding rig forward about a foot, and on he’d go.

  There’s a phrase about making triumph out of adversity, which has nothing to do with the saying about making a silk purse out of a pig’s ear (natural causes or no natural causes). It means making something good out of something bad … and that’s exactly what Mr Dickens would have done – produced a work of art when his bad back prevented him from doing just about anything else – were it not for the fact that he couldn’t paint to save his life. Painting leaves on trees a brighter colour was where Eddie’s dad’s talent ended. If he actually tried to paint something to look like a leaf, it looked as much like an angel as his angels did, which was not much.

  The ceiling in the great hall looked dreadful. No, worse than that. If an unsuspecting visitor entered Awful End through the main entrance and saw the ceiling without warning, he might think that either some strange and horrifying multicoloured fungus had spread across it, or he’d eaten some mushrooms that hadn’t agreed with him and was having weird and crazy hallucinations. Mr Dickens’s ceiling was horrible. Today, it’s painted over with several layers of very thick white paint. How very sensible.

  … Which reminds me of the thick white snow on the ground as Eddie and his mother walked up the drive to Awful End and she raised the subject of America.

  ‘America?’ said Eddie in amazement. ‘You want me to go to America?’

  His mother managed a little nod, despite her huge whalebone-and-linen surgical collar. ‘Well, I can’t go like this, and your father can’t even tie his own shoelaces the state he’s still in, so, yes, I’m asking you to go to America for us. Your great-uncle will explain everything.’

  Wow! This sounded the sort of adventure Eddie really could enjoy.

  Episode 2

  A Painful Surprise

  In which Mad Uncle Jack gets it in the end and Even Madder Aunt Maud has an attack of guilt

  Eddie found Mad Uncle Jack in his study, crouching under his large oak desk in the space meant for his knees.

  ‘It’s very roomy in here!’ he announced on seeing his grand-nephew. ‘Very roomy indeed … so roomy, in fact, I think I shall make a room of it.’

  Before Eddie knew what was happening, Mad Uncle Jack had leapt to his feet and was brandishing a small ceremonial sword. Eddie remembered Mad Uncle Jack telling him that he’d been given it by some surrendering foreign general, long before Eddie had been born.

  ‘I shall cut a hole for a window in the back, fit a door to the front and – hey presto – a new room just like that!’

  Eddie knew better than to ask Mad Uncle Jack where he proposed to fit his knees the next time he tried to sit down at the desk.

  ‘How nice,’ said Eddie, instead.

  ‘This is just what I need to cheer me up!’ his great-uncle pronounced.

  ‘Why do you need cheering up?’ asked Eddie. MUJ seemed perfectly cheerful to him.

  ‘With poor Gorey dead, your mother on crutches and your father up that wooden contraption of his, need you ask, dear boy?’ he said, which was a surprisingly sensible thing for him to say.

  Eddie seized the moment of sanity and said what he’d come in for. ‘Mother says you want me to go to America,’ but Mad Uncle Jack was no longer listening.

  He was crawling back under the desk – head first this time – and starting to stab the wooden board at the back with the ceremonial sword. He made a high-pitched whine with every thrust: ‘Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeee!!!’

  At that very moment – I added the word ‘very’ because I suspect I often use the phrase ‘at that moment’ in Eddie Dickens books, so I wanted to disguise it a little – Even Madder Aunt Maud entered the room by opening a window and stepping in, shaking the snow from the elephant’s-foot-umbrella-stand she was wearing as a boot on each foot.

  She took one look at her husband’s posterior protruding – that’s ‘bottom sticking out’ to you and me – from beneath the desk and dashed (as fast as her elephant’s-foot umbrella-stands would allow her) across the study to the fireplace. Grabbing a brass toasting fork from a selection of fireside utensils, she thrust it into MUJ’s buttock. It was his left, I believe, though there were to be conflicting accounts later.

  ‘BURGLAR!’ she cried, so loudly that it almost drowned out the roar of pain and surprise coming from beneath the desk, which is really saying something!