The Eddie Dickens Trilogy Read online

  Even Madder Aunt Maud bounded after it like a dog after a ball thrown by its master. And it should remind anyone who’s read Dreadful Acts of a certain escaped convict who seemed to think he was a hound.

  ‘Well, Master Edmund,’ said the doctor, ‘she’s up and about again, but now what?’

  ‘You’re the doctor,’ said Eddie. ‘Shouldn’t you decide?’

  Dr Humple and Eddie watched Even Madder Aunt Maud dig the bauble out of the snowdrift and hold it triumphantly to the sky.

  ‘Well,’ said the doctor hesitantly, ‘she seems fine to me. Fully cured.’

  ‘Certainly back to her old self,’ Eddie agreed.

  Dr Humple stepped out of the hollow cow. ‘Why don’t you go and tell your great-uncle the excellent news?’ he suggested. ‘And please inform him that I shall be sending him my bill in due course.’

  Eddie hurried off through the snow to Mad Uncle Jack’s treehouse. Once he’d told him about Mad Aunt Maud’s improved condition, he might actually get around to asking his great-uncle about the trip to America.

  Reaching the foot of the tree house ladder, Eddie called up to him. There was no bell or knocker at ground level, just Mad Uncle Jack’s cut-throat razor and a piece of broken mirror, each suspended from hooks in the side of the ladder on bits of hairy garden twine of differing lengths. (Mad Uncle Jack shaved here, at the foot of the ladder, each morning, come rain, shine, hailstorm or snow blizzard.)

  ‘Uncle Jack!’ Eddie called. ‘Uncle Jack?’

  The beakiest of beaky noses appeared through an unglazed window up above. An unglazed window is a window without any glass in it, which means that it’s really just another phrase for a hole. The word ‘window’ actually comes from the Old Norse word vindauga which means ‘wind eye’ – useful for keeping an eye on the wind – and Old Norse windows certainly didn’t have glass in them either.

  ‘Who is it?’ Mad Uncle Jack called down.

  ‘Eddie!’

  ‘What’s the password?’ Mad Uncle Jack shouted.

  Eddie sighed. He’d never needed a password to be allowed up into the tree house before, so why now? ‘I didn’t know there was one!’ he groaned.

  ‘Correct!’ cried Mad Uncle Jack triumphantly. ‘Come on up, my boy! Come on up!’

  A somewhat relieved Eddie shinned up the ladder. (People often shin up ladders in books. Have you noticed that? They sometimes shin up drainpipes, too … but you very rarely get people shinning up stairs.)

  Mad Uncle Jack was delighted to see Eddie. ‘Come in and sit yourself down,’ he said. ‘You’re probably here to ask me about the American trip, aren’t you?’

  Mad Uncle Jack was sitting on one of the elephant’s-foot umbrella-stands that Even Madder Aunt Maud had been using as a boot. ‘Yes,’ said Eddie. He sat himself down on a small upturned wooden crate marked ‘MANGOES’. Behind his great-uncle was a bed and between them a rather wobbly table, and that was about all there was room for in the tree house. ‘And also to tell you that Even Madder Aunt Maud is back to her old self again.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ Eddie didn’t know what to say, so he wisely said nothing. ‘Well, before I explain what I – what we – need you to do in America, I think I should give you a little Dickens family history,’ said his great-uncle, at last.

  ‘Fine.’ Eddie nodded, hoping beyond hope that Mad Uncle Jack wouldn’t get too side-tracked.

  ‘Your Great-uncle George is probably the most famous of the recent Dickenses,’ MUJ began, tilting back on the elephant’s foot. ‘He burnt down the Houses of Parliament in 1834, which is why we have the nice new gothicy one with Big Ben and all …’

  ‘You mean your brother George was a kind of Guy Fawkes?’ gasped Eddie.

  ‘What, the gunpowder, treason and plot chap? I think the difference is that Guy Fawkes planned to burn down the Houses of Parliament and didn’t, and Brother George didn’t plan to burn down the Houses of Parliament …’

  ‘But did!’ said Eddie, in amazement. ‘So it was an accident! Did he get into trouble?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Eddie. He imagined that burning down the Houses of Parliament, by mistake or not, would be a getting-into-serious-trouble offence.

  ‘Because he never told anybody in authority,’ said MUJ. ‘That’s why.’

  ‘So he’s only famous in the family for having done it? Not the history books?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said his great-uncle. ‘But that’s no less an achievement. If it hadn’t been for my brother, we wouldn’t have that fabulous new building with all the twiddly bits.’

  ‘How did he – er – accidentally set fire to the old Parliament building?’ Eddie asked. ‘A smouldering cigar butt, a casually discarded match?’

  ‘Over-zealous stoking,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘It could have happened to anybody. It was the sixteenth of October – George’s birthday – and, as a treat, a friend of his sneaked him into the Parliament’s boiler room to let him help stoke the furnaces.

  ‘Even as a boy, George was mad keen on fire, you know. Nothing he loved more than a smouldering carpet or a blazing curtain. Set fire to local tradespeople on numerous occasions, when we were lads, but always in the spirit of fun! They stopped calling at the house. They’ve always lacked humour, the lower classes.’

  ‘And this friend of his let him stoke the furnaces underneath Parliament?!’ said Eddie, in disbelief.

  ‘As I said, it was his birthday … Anyhow, Brother George over-fed the furnaces. He filled them up with much too much stuff … far too many tally sticks.’

  ‘Tally whats?’

  ‘No, tally sticks. Right up until the twenties, the government used wooden sticks, rather than paper or dried fish, to work out tax. By 1834, the practice was as dead as Private Gorey and they were using them as firewood –’

  ‘And Great Uncle George stuffed too many into the furnaces?’ asked Eddie, trying to get a clear picture of events.

  Mad Uncle Jack tried to suppress a giggle. ‘I’m afraid so. George says it was a beautiful sight, the orange flames and smoke blowing out across the River Thames.’

  ‘Didn’t he feel guilty?’ said Eddie.

  Mad Uncle Jack nodded. ‘Not for long though. He was killed soon after.’

  ‘Set fire to himself?’

  ‘No, as a result of an accident arising from his conviction that he was a fish,’ Eddie’s great-uncle explained. ‘He took to living in a large tank in a rented space near the Manufacturers Museum and – refusing to come up for air one Thursday – he died.’ (Today the museum is called the V & A.)

  Eddie looked around the inside of the tree house made of dried fish, and thought of the rockpool dug into the floor of the study. What was it about the Dickens family and fish? Great Uncle George had died thinking he was one, and Mad [Great] Uncle Jack even tried to pay for everything with dried fish! He wondered whether Grandpa Percy had ever had any fishy habits, too.

  For those of you who might doubt Mad Uncle Jack’s claims – and why not, he’s not been the most reliable of people throughout the trilogy, has he? – I should say that the Houses of Parliament in London were indeed destroyed by fire in 1834 and as a result of overloading the furnaces with tally sticks, though whether his brother really had a part in it I can’t say. From his childhood behaviour, it seems just the sort of thing he would have done, though.

  Fortunately, London had formed its first single fire service the year before the fire. Prior to that, if your house caught alight it would only have been put out by the firemen (they were all men) working for the particular insurance company your house was insured with. Otherwise, they’d just stand there on the other side of the road and watch.

  A couple of important bits of the old buildings were saved: the Great Hall (which was great) and the Jewel Tower (which was good news, too). This was partly thanks to the London Fire Engine Establishment (the fire brigade) and partly thanks to a
chap called Lord Melbourne who happened to be Prime Minister at the time, so was good at being bossy, and told the firemen what to do. These old bits were incorporated into the new building which is still there today (or, at the very least, at the time I’m writing this).

  ‘I met Chance, once, you know,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, picking up the dried swordfish he used as a letter opener from the rickety table, and sticking the tip of its nose into his ear, giving it a quick joggle. ‘An itch,’ he explained on seeing Eddie’s startled expression.

  ‘Who was Chance?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘A dog belonging to the Watling Street Fire Station,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘Born for search and rescue work, he was. No one had to train him. He would dash up the escape ladder into a burning building and start hunting for survivors. If he found someone, he’d sniff out his master and bark to tell him that someone was in trouble. Saved lots of lives, he did. Quite the hero.’

  Eddie looked doubtful but, amazingly, his great-uncle was telling the truth. Chance was a bit of a celebrity in his day and wore a special collar with a message on it which read: ‘Stop me not but onward let me jog, for I am the London firemen’s dog.’

  Chance’s life is just the sort of thing which will get made into one of those children’s feel-good costume-drama programmes they put on television around Christmas time, mark my words. And when it does, you can say, ‘I know where they pinched the idea from; that nice Mr Ardagh and his brilliant book Terrible Times,’ and you can write to the Tff company and demand that I get a special payment for coming up with it.

  What Mad Uncle Jack didn’t mention (and probably didn’t know) and the television programme might, possibly, leave out is that – after his death – Chance was stuffed and shown off at fairgrounds … which wasn’t the most dignified end for such a heroic hound.

  ‘Er … what does your dead brother George have to do with my going to America, Mad Uncle Jack?’ Eddie asked, trying to steer the topic of conversation back on course.

  The empty mango crate wasn’t the most comfortable seat in the world and, anyhow, it was getting cold in the tree house.

  ‘My father had three sons,’ Mad Uncle Jack explained. ‘There was my elder brother George. There was me – if there hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have been my father, now, would he? – and there was my younger brother Percy, who was your grandfather.’

  ‘Father has a picture of him in his room,’ Eddie recalled. His parents’ room at Awful End wasn’t the one they’d first occupied when they moved into the house. That had been damaged in a gas explosion. Though the damage had been repaired, it had been repaired by Mad Uncle Jack’s faithful ragbag of ex-soldiers … which brings the word ‘repair’ into question, if not disrepute. So Mr and Mrs Dickens had moved into another, smaller room and it was there, by their wash-stand, that the small portrait of Grandpa Percy hung.

  He was from the very heavily bearded era of Queen Victoria’s reign. Percy Dickens was more beard than just about anything else. You could just make out the eyes and there was a hint of a nose in there somewhere, but it would be a complete waste of time searching for a mouth, though it must have been somewhere under all that facial hair. Despite being all beard – he needn’t have worn a collar and tie, for example, because the bushiness of the beard hid all of his neck and most of his torso down to his tummy button – he still managed to look stern in the portrait, which is quite an achievement when you consider there was little room for any features. Whenever Eddie looked at the picture, he imagined his grandfather was being disapproving or saying ‘no!’ to something; anything; everything.

  ‘What was he like, Uncle Jack?’ asked Eddie.

  MUJ shook his head, sadly. ‘Percy was a very strange boy,’ he said. ‘He showed no interest in fish, the army, or any of the games George and I played as children. He always had his nose stuck in a book. I don’t mean that he did a great deal of reading. I simply mean that he had his nose stuck in a book … the same book, and stuck between the same two pages for about thirty-two years. He even slept that way, which made him prone to snoring and, if he ever got a cold, you can imagine how soggy that book became after all that sneezing and constant nose-dripping.’

  ‘But why did he do that?’ asked Eddie, wondering if anyone in the world had normal relatives or whether all families were secretly barmy.

  ‘I’ve absolutely no idea, m’boy,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘I never thought to ask him.’

  Eddie sighed. Why did grown-ups never ask the sort of questions any sensible ordinary kid would? ‘Can you remember what the book was?’ he asked.

  Eddie’s great-uncle tilted precariously on the elephant’s foot, the back of his head brushing against the creosoted fish wall. ‘Of course I can!’ he said indignantly, then fell silent. (Why people fall silent rather than go silent is one of those mysteries, like why wire coat-hangers multiply if left alone long enough in a wardrobe: you start off with six and, by the following month, you end up with a tangle of about four hundred and twenty-eight.)

  Eddie waited for Mad Uncle Jack to tell him the book’s title. Nothing. ‘Er, what was it?’ he asked, when he could bear it no longer.

  ‘Oh, Old Roxbee’s Compendium of All Knowledge: Volume Three,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘Of course, I’ve no idea what it was about because I could never get it off Percy. He was too busy sticking his nose in it.’

  Eddie reflected on that generation of Dickenses. Three brothers: George, the arsonist, Jack, the general all-round nutter, and Percy the man with the book on his face …

  What had the neighbours thought? How had they coped in polite society? The truth be told, a lot of the upper classes in those days were a bit bonkers but, because they were upper class, they were called ‘eccentric’ and everyone thought, ‘Oh, that’s all right, then.’

  After another period of silence, Eddie asked: ‘What does your telling me about your brothers George and Percy have to do with your wanting me to travel to America?’

  ‘Good question!’ said Uncle Jack, picking up the stuffed swordfish for a second time, this time employing it as a back-scratcher. (I don’t mean ‘employing’ it as in putting it on the payroll and giving it a regular wage – what would be the point of paying a dead fish? – but employing as in using … which means that if I’d simply employed the word used, or should that be used the word used, I wouldn’t be in this mess now.) ‘In fact, an excellent question!’ he continued. ‘You see our father, Dr Malcontent Dickens, had a number of interests in America, the most important of which was the ownership of a newspaper which was not afraid of telling the news as it really was. It was – and still is – called the Terrible Times and has an extremely high readership, I am informed, on the Eastern Seaboard.’

  Eddie had no idea what the Eastern Seaboard was, so he asked his great-uncle, who had no idea either.

  ‘Sounds rather like a sideboard to me, only larger,’ he said. ‘Everything in America is larger. I’m told the mice are the size of rats and the rats are the size of dogs.’

  ‘What about the dogs?’ Eddie asked, wondering how big they might be (so as not to be confused with the rats).

  ‘What about them?’ asked Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Eddie. ‘You were telling me about the Terrible Times.’

  ‘Was I? I mean, I was. It was originally my father’s newspaper, then, when he was killed by the human cannon ball, it was passed on to us three boys. George never married so, when he died, his share was divided in two and passed on to me and young Percy, so we both owned half the paper. Then, when your Grandpa Percy died, his share went to your father.’

  ‘So you and Father own a daily newspaper in America called the Terrible Times?’ he said, making a mental note to ask him about the human cannon ball another time, because he didn’t want to risk getting off the main subject now.

  ‘Exactly,’ nodded Mad Uncle Jack, his beak-like nose casting an interestingly shaped shadow on the tree house wall.

  ‘And you don’t just mean a
copy of an old newspaper, you mean a company which produces a newspaper every day –’

  ‘Except Sundays,’ his great-uncle interjected (which, in this case, is the same as interrupting).

  ‘– except Sundays – which is read by a large number of people on the Eastern Seaboard –’

  ‘Whatever that might be,’ said Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘Whatever that might be,’ Eddie conceded, ‘in America?’

  ‘Spot-on, my boy! Spot-on!’ cried Mad Uncle Jack. ‘For years everything’s run smoothly, and the editor has been in touch every six months with a report as to how the paper’s been doing and a cheque for the profits to be shared between me and your father … except that we haven’t heard from him of late, and we need someone to go from the family. Your father’s bad back means that he can’t go. Your mother’s on crutches and, like your great-aunt, is also a woman, which leaves you or me, Edmund. I can’t go, because I’m completely mad, so that leaves you. We want you to go to America as the representative of the Dickens family, to find out what’s gone wrong in the offices of the Terrible Times.’

  Eddie actually gasped out loud. What an adventure that would be!

  Episode 5

  Looking Backward, Looking Forward

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

  When Eddie was very little, there was a fashion for sending boys to sea to toughen them up, particularly if they’d ‘gone bad’. Eddie’s parents had sent him to sea – in other words to work on a ship – not because he was a handful, but by mistake. They had meant to send a trunk, containing printing inks, to America by ship and Eddie to a school for extremely-young young gentlemen (him not being old enough to go to an ordinary school then). As it was, Eddie ended up on the vessel, and the trunk had a second-rate education for a boy, but a first-class education for a trunk. It sat at the back of the class and never said or did anything, which meant that it never did anything wrong and it didn’t need feeding either, which made it very popular with the teachers. That trunk got better marks and end-of-term reports than the majority of the boys, so Eddie’s parents were blissfully unaware that Eddie wasn’t at the school (because it was a boarding school and he wasn’t supposed to come home for the holidays either).