The Eddie Dickens Trilogy Page 21

  Matters were made worse by the fact that, in the dim light of Marjorie’s insides, Even Madder Aunt Maud mistook Lady Constance Bustle’s furry muffler for her own beloved stuffed stoat, Malcolm.

  ‘How dare you treat my Malcolm in that way!’ she protested, grabbing the nearest thing – which happened to be the real Malcolm, resting by her pillow – and used him to lash out at the next nearest thing … which, or I should say who, happened to be poor old Mad Uncle Jack. The victim of yet another attack from his wife, MUJ fell to the floor of the cow with a terrible yell.

  Lady Constance, meanwhile, was apologising to Mrs Dickens. ‘Do forgive my hitting you in the face,’ she said. ‘It was a reflex action by my right arm as a direct result of having been hit on the nose by the regurgitated dressing-gown cord. Hitting my nose is like pressing a button. My arm swipes out like a lever. I’m only glad that it was my muffler which hit you and not my fist.’ She said the last word as though she had experience of just what damage her fist could do.

  ‘We quite understand,’ said Mr Dickens hurriedly. ‘I’m only sorry that my wife spat at you first.’

  Eddie, who was helping his poor winded great-uncle to his feet, studied Lady Constance with interest. He was beginning to suspect that there was much more to her than met the eye.

  I can’t actually tell you what part of Mad Uncle Jack got hit by Malcolm – it’s far too rude – but suffice it to say that it hurt a great deal for a while, but he soon recovered and there was no real harm done. It did, however, put an end to the meeting so it was agreed that Lady Constance should stay the night at Awful End and that they discuss the trip the following morning.

  Now it’s time to sort out the smart readers (anyone sensible enough to be reading such an excellent book as this) from the very smart readers. If you were wondering how on Earth Mr Dickens was suddenly able to attend a meeting inside Marjorie when, just a few pages ago, he was spending all his time on his back at the top of a wooden scaffolding rig, you fall into the very smart category. If you didn’t spot that, don’t worry. I write such beautiful prose that you were probably so engrossed in marvelling at my storytelling skills that you didn’t let something as insignificant as how someone got to be somewhere bother you. Well, it’s no big mystery, so let me explain:

  Mad Uncle Jack had thought it important that everyone attend the Eddie-going-to-America meeting, so Dawkins (the gentleman’s gentleman) and Gibbering Jane (the failed chambermaid) had been sent up the scaffolding to lash Mr Dickens to a plank of wood and lower him down to the ground on a pulley usually reserved for the chamber pot. Once on the floor of the hall of Awful End he was tipped upright (still lashed to the plank) and tied to a porter’s trolley – one of those two-wheeled trolleys with a high back that railway porters sometimes still use to carry luggage – and wheeled down the garden to the hollow cow. Even this was harder than it sounded. Dawkins did the wheeling whilst Gibbering Jane ran ahead, gibbering, with a coal shovel, clearing a path through the snow.

  It had been lashed to a plank and a porter’s trolley, parked in the upright but rigid position inside the cow, that Mr Dickens had conducted himself at the meeting as I just outlined. If you think this is ridiculous, I should remind you that, near the end of the 20th century there was a film/movie/flick/motion picture called The Silence of the Lambs based on a book of the same name written by Thomas Harris. In the film (which I have seen) and possibly the book (which I haven’t read) the baddy (played by a very well-respected Welsh-born actor) is, at one stage, wheeled around on a porter’s trolley AND he’s wearing a silly mask, and everyone took that very seriously; so you can understand why, in the oh-so-polite 19th century, Lady Constance Bustle was far too polite to giggle or to ask what was going on … and the others probably just accepted it as perfectly normal. We are talking about the Dickens family, don’t forget.

  With the meeting now over, Mr Dickens was untied from the porter’s trolley, winched back up the wooden scaffolding rig, untied from the plank, which was then slid out from under him, and left in his usual position, staring up at the ceiling. He was in the process of painting ‘Joseph and his coat of many colours’ which, the truth be told – I am informed by someone who saw it before it was painted over years later – looked more like ‘a mutant melting rainbow with a head, and fingers like liver sausages’. See? Just about everything he painted on that ceiling sounds as if it had at least something sausagy about it!

  Mad Uncle Jack retired to his tree house, still winded. Even Madder Aunt Maud drifted off to sleep in Marjorie, dreaming about a pair of giant nostrils, and Eddie and his mother had supper at the kitchen table.

  ‘I made the soup myself,’ said his mother.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Eddie, studying the contents of his bowl. It looked very clear, except for the odd tiny leaf and what might possibly have been a dead fly.

  ‘I used ingredients I found in the garden,’ she said proudly.

  ‘I thought the ground was far too hard to dig up vegetables,’ said Eddie. ‘Frozen solid.’ He tasted the soup. It was like drinking hot water.

  ‘I used melted snow,’ she said. ‘Oh look.’ She took something out of her mouth. ‘Here’s one of Private Gorey’s brass buttons.’ She put it on the edge of her plate like a prune stone.

  Eddie let out one of his silent sighs. He wished he was in America already!

  Episode 7

  … Gone!

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

  In Eddie’s mind, he had imagined saying goodbye to his mother on a quayside and then striding up a gangplank to a ship. When the time came – and amazingly, it did come – only Mad Uncle Jack accompanied him and Lady Constance on his farewell trip, and the ship was anchored at the mouth of an estuary in deeper water. The only way to reach the ship was by rowing boat and climbing up a rope ladder.

  When Eddie first met Mad Uncle Jack, he – Uncle Jack – used to go just about everywhere by horse (inside and out). But then, following Eddie’s escape from an orphanage his horse bolted at the first sight of a giant hollow cow, whom we now know as Marjorie. When the poor frightened creature finally let itself be caught, it was a changed animal. Whereas before it was happy to do just about anything Mad Uncle Jack asked of it, now it dug its hooves in (which is, I suppose, the horsy equivalent of ‘put its foot down’) and regularly refused to gallop upstairs or jump over chimney sweeps … so MUJ spent much more time on foot.

  He had acquired a new horse at the same time; Marjorie having been pulled along by one belonging to Mr and Mrs Cruel-Streak who’d run the St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans, from which Eddie (and the orphans) had escaped. Now it was obvious that the Cruel-Streaks cared more for their horse than the orphans in their so-called ‘care’, but the Dickenses were in no mood to return the animal to such nasty owners, so they kept him. Technically, this was theft but, as someone jolly famous was to announce a number of years later: all property is theft. (Wow! Think about that … You don’t have to agree with it. Just think about it!)

  This particular horse (whom they named Edgar) was so used to being pampered that he spent much of his time sipping a small glass of sherry, reading Bradfield’s Horse & Hounds. (The horse read Bradfield’s Horse & Hounds, not the sherry. Sherry can’t read. Come to think of it …)

  Rather than travelling by pony and trap or horse and carriage, therefore, Mad Uncle Jack, Eddie and Lady Constance had travelled to the port by train.

  Trains were at their most exciting back then. Locomotives made brilliant noises and belched out great billows of smoke from their gleaming funnels, and next to the driver on the open footplate stood the fireman, frantically stoking the furnace with fuel to create the steam to power the engine to turn the wheels.

  Possibly the most famous engine driver of the steam-train era was the American Casey Jones. There are songs about him, a railway-station-based chain of burger outlets was named after him and there was even a long-runni
ng Tff series about him and his heroic deeds … which is a bit strange when you realise that, in real life, he crashed his train, ‘the old 638’, and was killed in a terrible accident which was, according to the official investigation at the time, entirely his fault ‘as a consequence of not having properly responded to flag signals’. Weird, huh? But I digress. Back to Eddie’s train:

  As well as first- and second-class carriages there were third-class ones too, which were usually jam-packed full of slightly grubby people carrying bulging sacks or live chickens. They may not have started out the journey grubby, but – jam-packed with all those other people – they always ended it that way. Some third-class passengers also ended up with chickens they hadn’t set off with. Such people are technically known as ‘thieves’.

  MUJ, Eddie and Lady Constance were in the first-class carriages, which were very different. In the first-class dining car, pink flamingos stood on one leg each in an ornamental pond with plush velvet seats neatly arranged around it in semicircles. The windows in first class had shutters, blinds and curtains – whereas in third class they relied on the grime to keep out the light, when travelling at night – and all the fixtures and fittings were either made of gleaming metal or highly polished wood. In fact the insides of the first-class carriage and dining car were probably a lot nicer than most people’s homes!

  Eddie’s travelling trunk was far too big to fit in the train carriage, let alone put on a rack, so it had been loaded into the guard’s van. Eddie, however, was not so lucky. Mad Uncle Jack insisted that he spend much of the journey lying in one of the luggage racks above the seats.

  ‘It’s to get you used to life at sea, m’boy!’ he explained. ‘They don’t have beds on board ship, you know, they have hummocks.’

  ‘Hammocks,’ Eddie corrected him. (Hummocks are very small hills.) He’d tried to tell Mad Uncle Jack that he’d had plenty of experience of life on the ocean waves and couldn’t he please sit in a seat like anyone else … but failed.

  The luggage rack was uncomfortable enough as it was but when Lady Constance stuck her parasol – a small umbrella designed to keep off the sun rather than the rain – up there alongside him, it was really uncomfortable … but nothing could dampen his excitement of going to America to find out what had gone wrong at the offices of the Terrible Times.

  When they finally reached the port and Mad Uncle Jack lifted Eddie off the luggage rack, the poor boy had mesh-marks all over his clothes and bare arms.

  ‘It suits you,’ whispered Lady Constance.

  Eddie grinned. O, foolish, foolish child. (I’m allowed to say things like that because I know what’s going to happen later.)

  Somehow a porter managed to wheel Eddie’s huge trunk, with Lady Constance’s bags balanced precariously on top, out of the busy station, with one single journey of a porter’s trolley. It was similar to the one that Dawkins and Gibbering Jane had used to transport Eddie’s father to and from Marjorie. They passed a ragbag of street vendors trying to sell everything from newspapers and fresh(-ish) fruit to quack remedies (which are not cures for quacking but so-called cures that didn’t really offer any relief except, of course, relieving you of your money to pay for them). Mad Uncle Jack hailed a cab in his own inimitable way. He rummaged in his coat and, producing a large dried puffer fish from his pocket, he threw it with all his might at a passing cab-driver; knocking the poor man’s hat clean off.

  ‘Strewth!’ said the cabbie, swerving his cab in the direction the projectile had been thrown. I think I’d have said a lot worse if the dried puffer fish had hit me. The puffer fish gets its name from puffing out into a big spiky ball, and note the adjective ‘spiky’. A dried one of those thrown at your head could cause quite an ‘OUCH!!!’

  ‘Who threw that?’ demanded the enraged driver.

  ‘It was me,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘You can keep the change.’ To those who knew him, this made complete sense. He ‘paid’ for everything with dried fish and, by his reckoning, a puffer fish was quite high currency (more of a twenty-pound note than nickel and dime change). Of course, those who knew him also knew to parcel up the fish and send them to Eddie’s father, Mr Dickens, who then sent them actual money in exchange. Those who didn’t know Mad Uncle Jack and his unusual ways thought that he was either someone trying to make a fool out of them, or that he was a nutter. Or both. Which was exactly what the angry cabbie was thinking as he charged horse and cab towards the kerb.

  ‘Do you take me for some kind of a fool?’ he demanded.

  ‘I take you to be a cab driver waiting for a fare and we are a fare waiting for a cab-driver,’ said MUJ, blissfully unaware that he’d caused minor injury and major offence. (A ‘fare’ not only meant payment but also a passenger in the cab.) He patted the cabbie’s horse.

  While Mad Uncle Jack and the cab driver were talking – you can’t really call it an argument because it takes two to argue – Eddie opened a door of the cab and Lady Constance stepped inside and sat down. Next Eddie stepped in and sat down beside her. With more strength than his stick-like body suggested was possible, Mad Uncle Jack helped the porter heave the heavy trunk off the porter’s trolley and on to the roof of the cab, then threw Lady Constance’s luggage up after it, piece by piece.

  The cabbie knew he was beaten and let the thin, beaky man climb inside the cab without further fuss or delay. ‘Where to, guv’nor?’ he asked, which is what they still teach cab-drivers to say at cab-driving school today.

  ‘To the Pompous Pig,’ said MUJ. ‘She’s due to set sail today.’

  ‘To America,’ Eddie added excitedly.

  ‘Aha!’ said the cabbie, obviously pleased to know something they didn’t. ‘She’s too big to dock in the port in this tide, so they’ve dropped anchor at the river’s mouth. You’ll have to get a boat out to it from Muddy Straits. I’ll take you there.’ He swished his horse’s reins and they were off.

  ‘Muddy Straits sounds rather muddy,’ Eddie called out.

  ‘It did indeed get its name on account of the mud,’ said the cabbie, knowledgeably.

  Muddy Straits was a large area of grey, damp mud which birdwatchers so love and which the rest of us find so boring that you’re almost guaranteed that nowadays it would be turned into an area of Special Scientific Interest, with its own leaflet explaining why it was important not to turn this boggy habitat into a new four-runway airport. The snow had long since melted, so the mud was there in all its glory, for all to see.

  ‘It’s a shame this mud can’t be put to some good use,’ said Mad Uncle Jack when he stepped out of the cab and took in his surroundings. ‘Put in a brightly coloured fancy package, with a pretty bow on top, and I’m sure it would appeal to ladies.’

  ‘But what would they use it for?’ asked Eddie, who had paid the driver with real money – he’d been given some for the voyage – before the whole payment-with-fish approach could rear its ugly head and upset the poor man again. The luggage was then heaved to the ground.

  ‘What do ladies do with half the things they own: china ornaments, trinkets, mementoes? They leave them cluttering up the place, that’s what they do. Little packets of mud needn’t be different. They don’t have to be for anything.’

  ‘The skin,’ said Lady Constance, dusting the top of the trunk with a handkerchief, removed from her sleeve, before sitting down upon it and rearranging her dress.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Eddie.

  ‘The skin,’ said Lady Constance. ‘Some types of mud are said to be particularly good for the skin. Ladies have been known to wear mud packs upon their faces. There are even some in society who believe a mud bath to be most revivifying.’

  Eddie hadn’t the foggiest what ‘revivifying’ meant, but he didn’t much like the idea of having a bath in mud … Well, certainly not in the mud around Muddy Straits. It looked gloopy and smelly, with tufts of marshy weeds sprouting out in places, reminding him of the nostril hairs Even Madder Aunt Maud had trimmed from the nose of her stuffed stoat.

&nbs
p; ‘I cannot imagine my beloved,’ (which is pronounced as though spelled belove-ed, as in the name ‘Ed’ short for Eddie, short for Edmund) ‘wearing a mud pack upon her face!’ said Mad Uncle Jack in obvious amazement.

  Eddie could imagine quite the opposite. If anyone was mad enough to smear mud all over her face, then Even Madder Aunt Maud was the one!

  ‘Poor Mrs Riversedge,’ (which is spelled like ‘rivers edge’ but pronounced ‘river sedge’) ‘suffocated whilst wearing a homemade mud pack I had prepared,’ said Lady Constance.

  ‘One of your employers?’ asked Eddie.

  Lady Constance nodded, wiping a non-existent tear from her eye. ‘I’m afraid so.’

  The cabbie, meanwhile, had raised his hat and left them at the water’s edge. It was only when he’d clattered off with his cab that it occurred to MUJ that he’d need a ride back to the railway station once he’d seen off his great-nephew and the boy’s travelling companion on the Pompous Pig.

  ‘Now what?’ asked Eddie. ‘Are we supposed to swim out to the boat?’

  ‘Ship,’ said Lady Constance.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Eddie.

  ‘It’s a ship, not a boat,’ said Lady Constance.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ asked Eddie.

  For all I know, Lady Constance was about to reply ‘about three points in Scrabble with the letters on ordinary squares’ – except, of course, Scrabble hadn’t been invented back then – because she never got to tell Eddie the difference. They were interrupted by a loud whistle.

  ‘Look!’ said Mad Uncle Jack, pointing excitedly at a sparrow passing them overhead. ‘An albatross!’ He never was very good at identifying wildlife and once mistook a badger for a lance-corporal in his regiment. ‘I’d recognise that cry anywhere!’