The Eddie Dickens Trilogy Read online

  Another good way of becoming a saint was by having terrible things done to you, but remaining true to your beliefs. Well, someone called St Horrid doesn’t sound the kind of person who would be kind to anyone or be very saintly at all really … which is terribly unfair.

  You see, over time, names change and mistakes get made. There was once a ship called the Mary Celeste which was found drifting at sea with no crew on board. It was all very weird and wonderful, and people still talk about it and write books about it to this day – except that nine times out of ten they call it the Marie Celeste (with an ‘i’ and an ‘e’) instead of a ‘y’ at the end. Even important reference books, and books written by very brainy people with huge dome-shaped foreheads and thick-lensed glasses call it the Marie Celeste, but they’re wrong. It’s easy enough to find the right name if you go far enough back in the records, but once the mistake was made, it was copied and copied and copied until the untruth became the truth.

  The same applied to St Horrid. St Horrid’s real name was St Florid, and even that’s not strictly true. His real name was Hank, but when he became a saint, he was named St Hank the Florid, and this was shortened to St Florid. Florid isn’t short for Florida, because no one had discovered North America yet, except the native North Americans, who were living there quite happily without Disney World or Burger King. No, the word ‘florid’ means ‘having a red complexion’ and, in even earlier times, it meant ‘flowery’.

  In Hank the Florid’s case, both meanings applied. Hank was a young lad in the days when kings still had silly names such as ‘Ethelred the Smelly’ or ‘Edward the Nutjob’, and he was the son of a woodcutter.(His mother was the woodcutter. The history books don’t tell us what his father did.) If you were the son of a woodcutter way back then, you had two choices in life. You either grew up to be a woodcutter, or you died young.

  There were a variety of different reasons for why you might die. Your lord and master might kill you for treading on his favourite patch of grass … or you might be sent to fight against some nasty foreign folk (who were probably really a lot nicer than your own lord and master, but you’d no way of knowing) … or you might die of some really unimportant ailment, such as a nasty cough, because there were no proper doctors or medicine.

  But Hank didn’t die young and he didn’t become a woodcutter either. He became a saint. The lives of saints are always rather hazy because they were written down a long time after the events are supposed to have happened, but the story of how Hank became a saint is well recorded.

  One day, Hank was out in the fields watering the goat – not that goats need watering, but the history books are very clear on this point so I thought I should mention it – and thinking about beards. Perhaps he was thinking about beards because goats have beards. Perhaps it was because far more people had beards back then, because no one had invented a decent razor blade yet (or, if they had, they hadn’t told anyone else about it). Whatever the reason, Hank was thinking about beards, when he stooped to pluck a single flower from the grass.

  He was putting the flower to his nose and giving it a jolly good sniff at exactly the same moment as a queen bee came in to land on it. The queen bee was out scouting for a new home and, if you know anything about queen bees, you’ll know that where she goes, all the other bees follow. So, before Hank knew what was happening, a huge swarm of thousands of bees came and landed on his chin and set up home there … From a distance, it looked like an enormous beard.

  Just then, a huge enemy army came over the hill, and its leader – some books call him ‘Simon the Fairly Nasty’, and others ‘Simon the Not So Nice’ – came galloping down towards Hank. The army had only recently landed, and Hank was the first person they had set eyes on from this country. When Simon the Whatever His Name Was saw this man with a huge, buzzing beard that seemed to change shape before his eyes, he turned and fled, taking his army with him.

  He’s supposed to have said something clever like: ‘If the ordinary peasant in the field has such a magical and menacing beard, think how mighty his king must be!’ What he probably really said was: ‘Yikes! I’m getting out of here!’

  Whatever he said, Simon and the enemy army were in such a hurry to leave that they all piled into one ship, instead of the five they’d arrived in, and sank to the bottom of the sea.

  Four bees – again, the history books are very clear about this – stung Hank, then the whole swarm moved on (which doesn’t usually happen once they’ve settled), leaving him with a red face and a crumpled flower in his hand … which is how he became St Hank the Florid. The saint part came about because he’d saved his country from an enemy in a mysterious fashion, and there were mutterings about ‘miracles’. A passing monk had witnessed the whole affair.

  Hank spent the rest of his life living in a very comfortable cave called a hermitage, selling pots of honey to passing tourists. All was fine until about 300 years later, when someone wrote down his name as St Hank the Horrid instead of Hank the Florid, and the name stuck. He became known as St Horrid. So people who were nasty and horrid themselves adopted him as their saint, and that must have been how St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans got its name.

  The motto of the home was ‘Work Hard. Get Very Dirty. Be Very Unhappy’ and, from what Eddie could see of his room and the rat, it certainly lived up to it. Apart from the rat and his bed – and himself, of course – the only thing in the room was, if you can remember that far back, a large book with ‘THE GOOD BOOK’ written on the front in faded gold letters.

  In Eddie’s day, ‘The Good Book’ was the name that many people gave to the Bible, so that’s what he expected it to be. But, when he opened the book, he found that it was full of pictures of … Go on. Have a guess. You’ll never guess.

  It was full of pictures of food. There were big, colourful illustrations of cakes and trifles and fruit salads and pies and every other mouth-wateringly slurpsious things you can think of.

  Just looking at it made Eddie feel hungry, and he’d only been in the orphanage a few hours. He wondered how the other poor kids felt – the real orphans – if they had copies of the same book in their rooms. It was like torture, looking at all these good things (lots of them sprinkled with chocolate or with cherries on top), knowing that all you’d get to eat was porridge made from old wallpaper paste, or soup made up from boiling the remains of old leather shoes.(Eddie had been tipped out of his sack and dragged through the kitchens on the way to his room, so he knew what to expect.)

  There were teeth marks on some of the pictures and, in a few instances, whole pictures appeared to have been eaten. Eddie imagined the previous occupant being so hungry that he’d been forced to scoff pictures of puddings rather than the real thing. The previous occupant was, of course, the genuinely escaped orphan for whom Eddie had been mistaken.

  Because the bag Eddie had been delivered to the orphanage in was so dirty – it must have had coal in it before him – once he was tipped out of it, Eddie would have found it hard to recognise his own reflection. None of the staff seemed to notice he was the wrong boy, and he couldn’t rely on his mad great-aunt and great-uncle to get him out of there. What should he do?

  Eddie was just beginning to think that there was no hope, when he heard the scrape of a key in the lock and the door swung open. The biggest woman Eddie had ever seen in his life filled the doorway.

  He looked up at her.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded, anger blazing in her cruel red eyes.

  ‘Not very,’ said Eddie. ‘You see, there has been some terrible mistake …’

  The woman hit him over the head with an enormous wooden spoon.

  ‘WELL?’ she repeated, but in capital letters this time.

  ‘Ouch! My name is Eddie Dickens. There has been some terrible mistake,’ Eddie blurted out, rubbing the lump that was already forming under his hair.

  ‘You know that you are supposed to say “Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, Mrs Cruel-Streak,” every time you have th
e pleasure of my company,’ said the woman. She was trying to speak as though she was the Queen of England, but she sounded more like how Eddie imagined the rat would talk, if rats could talk.

  ‘Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, Mrs Cruel-Streak,’ said Eddie. ‘My name is Eddie Dick –’

  Eddie couldn’t continue because he found he had an enormous hand around his throat and he was being lifted so high in the air that the bump on his head brushed against the filthy ceiling.

  ‘Where’s ya manners, boy?’ snarled Mrs Cruel-Streak, dropping all pretence of being queen of anywhere except this terrible place. ‘Thought you could run away, did you? Thought you’d get away with it?’

  Eddie would have liked to explain that he hadn’t run away from anywhere, but all he could say was ‘ffrbwllfggghh’, which reminded him of his dear mother, who was forever stuffing onions into her mouth, or sucking ice cubes shaped like famous generals. Tears poured down his cheeks.

  Obviously delighted that she’d made the boy cry, and satisfied at a job well done, Mrs Cruel-Streak released her grip around Eddie’s neck, and he fell back down to earth with a bump.

  She then bent down to give the rat a friendly scratch between the ears, in the same way as you or I might pause to stroke a cat. This was a bad move on her part, because Eddie wasn’t like the other boys and girls in the St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans. He wasn’t weak from years of bad food, hard work and no hope. An yone who could survive a coach journey with Mad Aunt Maud and a stuffed stoat wasn’t going to let this bully ruin his life.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, he snatched up THE GOOD BOOK in both hands, raised it high above him and then brought it crashing down on Mrs Cruel-Streak’s head. A look of complete and utter amazement passed across the enormous woman’s face, before she slumped unconscious to the floor – and on top of the startled rat.

  Eddie decided that it was best not to hang about. He closed the door to his room – let’s be honest, it was a cell really, wasn’t it? – behind him and turned the key in the lock. The key was on a large iron ring, and hanging from that ring were dozens of other keys. With these keys he should be able to unlock most, if not all, of the rooms in St Horrid’s. He could go anywhere. He could free anyone. Yes. That’s what he would do. He’d free the other orphans. He’d organise a mass breakout!

  Episode 11

  The Final Instalment

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

  Less than an hour had passed since Eddie had fled his cell, leaving Mrs Cruel-Streak locked up inside it, but the change which had come over the orphanage was incredible.

  St Horrid’s was usually such a gloomy place that it would have been more fun to spend an evening in a coffin with the lid Sellotaped shut, or to gnaw through your own leg, lightly sprinkled with salt and pepper … but not any more!

  There were laughter, whoops of joy and shouting as over a hundred very grubby-looking kids – who wouldn’t have looked out of place in bags of coal, up chimneys or dressed as blackboards at a fancy dress party – were freed from their cells and were now charging all over the place.

  Girls and boys who had spent their whole lives ‘being grateful’, working hard and having a generally rotten time, were now finding out what fun was for the first time. Not that any of them would have recognised the word ‘fun’ if they’d tripped over it. Reading and writing were actively discouraged at the orphanage. They were thought to be a bad influence.

  What use were reading and writing to orphans? All they needed to learn was how to behave, respect their elders and betters, and live on as little food as possible.

  In fact, one of the first places the escaped children rushed to was the kitchens, but not to eat. There was nothing you and I would really think of as being proper food in there anyway. No, they poured into the kitchen like a swarm of ants down a crack between paving stones, to give Cook a message.

  Cook was a very large man with more warts on him than a toad … and the message the orphans gave him was a very simple one. They picked him up as if he weighed little more than a rag doll – there were lots of them, remember – turned him upside down and plunged him head first into a huge vat of bubbling gruel.

  You may be sorry to hear that he survived this ordeal and, amazingly, the hot gruel actually cured him of his warts. But Cook didn’t know either of these things would happen at the time. All he knew was that the horrible little children who were supposed to be locked in their cells – sorry, rooms – were on the rampage, and that he was now stuck in a cauldron. He was very frightened, and wished that they’d go away. And go away they did.

  The army of orphans sensed that victory was in their grasp, but their army needed to arm itself. The obvious weapons were the famous St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans cucumbers. These were no ordinary cucumbers. The worst things you can really say about an ordinary cucumber are that it doesn’t really taste of much, that it can make your sandwiches go soggy, and that slices can sometimes get stuck to the roof of your mouth.

  Not the St Horrid’s cucumber. That was a totally different animal … which is just a saying, like when some people say that something is a ‘totally different kettle of fish’. They don’t really mean that the thing is actually a kettle of fish, and I don’t mean that the St Horrid’s cucumber is actually an animal. When I say that it was a totally different animal, I mean that it was a totally different vegetable. Is that clear? Good.

  These particular vegetables were grown in the poor, stony soil of the St Horrid’s vegetable patch and they were very hard. in fact, they were very difficult to cut. in fact, they were almost rock-solid unless you plunged them into water, brought them to the boil and simmered them for about forty-seven minutes, stirring occasionally.

  But the grubby army of escaped orphans wasn’t interested in plunging them into water, bringing them to the boil and simmering them for about forty-seven minutes, stirring occasionally. They were glad that these cucumbers were rock-hard, because they made very good clubs – rather like the truncheons carried by police officers, who, you may remember, were called peelers back in the days of Eddie Dickens.

  Speaking of Eddie Dickens, what was he up to right there and then? Wielding a cucumber? Stuffing an upturned cook into a cauldron of his own gruel? No, Eddie was working on the next stage of his plan.

  It was one thing to get the Grateful Orphans out of their rooms, but he had to try to help them escape from the orphanage altogether. It was all fine and dandy that they should want to get their own back on all the people who had been so horrible to them over the years, but Eddie was thinking beyond that. He had to get them away from this nasty, nasty place and hide them somewhere where they wouldn’t be found and brought back.

  This is why Eddie was now out in a yard with high brick walls on three sides and a huge locked gate on the fourth. The gate wouldn’t be a problem because Eddie felt sure that one of the keys in the bunch in his hand would open it. He was more interested by what was in the yard. It was an enormous float.

  I don’t mean one of those things that people take into a swimming pool with them when they’re learning to swim, or one of those things that bobs around in the top of a milk shake. i mean a carnival float – a large cart that had been decorated to use in a carnival procession. This float had been made to look like a giant cow.

  Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if the more sensible ones amongst you are wondering what a carnival float designed to look like a giant cow was doing in the locked courtyard of an orphanage. it’ s certainly the sort of question that would cross my mind if I was reading this story and not writing it. Well, I’ll tell you.

  The whole idea of the orphanage was to make money for Mr and Mrs Cruel-Streak, but Mr and Mrs Cruel-Streak couldn’t really admit that, could they? They had to pretend that the whole idea of the orphanage was to care for the orphans. Now, there was a fairly popular belief at the time that strict rules, hard work and not too many baths were good for orphans, bu
t people would have been horrified to learn that the Cruel-Streaks didn’t really care what was good for the children and what wasn’t.

  St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans was paid for by public donations. This meant that people who felt sorry for orphans, or wanted to be seen to care about orphans, paid the Cruel-Streaks to look after them. What actually happened was that Mr and Mrs Cruel-Streak spent nearly all of this money on their own daughter, Angel, or on themselves. The orphans got next to nothing … but the public didn’t know that.

  When you rely on public donations, you have to have fund-raising events, and that’s where the carnival float shaped like a giant cow comes in. For hundreds of years, the countryside had been seen as a rather nasty place, full of wolves and highwaymen and people trying to sell you life insurance for your sheep. People much preferred to live in the conurbations (which is a big word for towns and cities).

  Recently, however, there had been a movement which said that the country air was good for you and that something equally good to come out of the country was milk. So the Cruel-Streaks had their slaves – the orphans, that is – build them a carnival float that was designed to make people imagine that St Horrid’s was a lovely place somewhere in the country, where the lucky little kiddies got plenty of fresh air and milk. Just the sort of orphanage you’d want to give money to, in fact! The float was to be used in money-raising events across the region.

  Less than twenty-three-and-a-half minutes after Eddie had first laid eyes on this giant cow on wheels, and discovered that it was hollow, he had rounded up all the orphans and they were piling inside it.

  Some of the children were sorry to leave, particularly those whom Eddie had found in Mr Cruel-Streak’s office, forcing the poor man to eat blotting paper. They left him tied to his own desk with a cord from his expensive velvet curtains, and with a large paperweight stuffed in his mouth – like a baked apple in a boar’s head at a medieval banquet. He wouldn’t be able to cry out for help in a hurry.