The Eddie Dickens Trilogy

by Philip Ardagh

  But the problem was – and Mr Dickens had put it very well – that there was n-o h-o-r-s-e.

  ‘Your great-uncle left him in the bathroom!’ Mrs Dickens shouted, wiping away a tear from the corner of her eye. If the truth be told, what she actually shouted was: ‘Yaw gway unk-le leff timinva barfroo,’ because she had a whole peeled onion in her mouth.

  A moment later, Mr Dickens’s gentleman’s gentleman led the horse out of the house and hitched him to Mad Uncle Jack’s carriage.

  ‘Thank you, Daphne,’ said Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘Very good, sir,’ replied the gentleman’s gentleman. As a gentleman’s gentleman, he knew that it was not his place to point out that he was not actually called ‘Daphne’ but ‘Dawkins’. No, his place was a large basket in the kitchen with plenty of tissue paper, and he couldn’t complain. Mr Thackery’s gentleman’s gentleman over at The Grange was far worse off. His place was on a small log behind a coal scuttle in the tackle room. Dawkins hadn’t the slightest idea what a tackle room was, but had never thought to ask.

  With the horse now in position, the carriage pulled away and they were off. Eddie waved out of the window at his parents until they became small dots in the distance. Perhaps this was part of their illness, or perhaps it was to do with perspective and it being a very long driveway.

  ‘I think you should remove your clothes now,’ said Mad Aunt Maud, as the carriage bumped along the wheel-ruts of an unmade-up road.

  If Eddie Dickens had been beetroot red with embarrassment before, now he had gone blushing beetroot red. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said, hoping that he hadn’t heard her right.

  He had. ‘I said, I think you should remove your clothes,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Er … Why might that be, Mad Aunt Maud?’ he enquired as politely as possible, wishing that he was anywhere else in the whole wide world than in a carriage with this woman.

  ‘If you wear all those clothes in here, you will have nothing to put on when we step out of the carriage, and then you will be cold,’ said Mad Aunt Maud. ‘I should have thought that was perfectly obvious.’

  ‘But I’ll be cold in here in the meantime, great-aunt,’ Eddie was quick to point out.

  Great-Aunt Maud glared at him. If looks could kill, he would have been seriously injured by this one. ‘Have you ever thought of growing a moustache?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘I’m only eleven –’ Eddie protested.

  ‘Quiet!’ snapped Mad Aunt Mad. ‘I was asking Malcolm here.’ She gave the stuffed stoat a friendly rub between its glass eyes.

  The stuffed stoat said nothing.

  Eddie wondered if he’d be able to survive a whole journey sharing a carriage with this lunatic. At least she seemed to have forgotten about telling him to take his clothes off.

  ‘Now, come on, young man,’ said Mad Aunt Maud. ‘Remove them at once!’

  Eddie groaned.

  To break the journey, Mad Uncle Jack stopped at a coaching inn called The Coaching Inn. It was in an unimaginative part of the countryside and to call it anything other than The Coaching Inn might have confused both the locals and the passing trade.

  Both the locals were there to greet Mad Uncle Jack’s party. They were the landlord and landlady, Mr and Mrs Loaf.

  Neither of them batted an eyelid when Eddie stepped from the carriage wearing nothing but his undershirt and a pair of long johns.

  In those days, wearing nothing but your undershirt and long johns was considered being undressed. You couldn’t really get much more naked than that. If there had been cinemas in those days – which there weren’t – and they had shown a film of someone on the beach wearing nothing but his undershirt and long johns, there would have been outrage. Men with large beards would have set up barricades and there would have been riots in the street.

  Most people went through life without realising that they could actually remove their undershirts and long johns – they simply assumed that they were a part of them, like fingernails and hair. They simply assumed that these undergarments were their skin, made out of a different material from their face, hands and feet, and with buttons on them.

  If anyone had appeared in just a pair of boxer shorts or swimming trunks, the womenfolk would have had ‘an attack of the vapours’ and the menfolk would have exploded in a rage at the indecency of it. What exactly ‘an attack of the vapours’ was is unclear, because there are no such thing as womenfolk any more, and there is certainly no such thing as an attack of the vapours.

  If a person did suffer from such an attack in Eddie Dickens’s day, however, it seemed to involve a high-pitched squeal, a swooning, and a falling to the ground (or floor) with much crumpling of the dress.

  The way to assist a gentlewoman after such an attack was to wave a small bottle labelled ‘SMELLING SALTS’ beneath her nose.

  As with an attack of the vapours, smelling salts don’t exist today either. Nor do bath salts. Everyone uses bubble bath or shower gel instead, which is all very interesting.

  As a result, when Eddie stepped out of the carriage outside The Coaching Inn coaching inn, he felt as naked as you would if you were completely in the nuddy (except, perhaps, for your watch), despite the fact that he was wearing more clothes than the rest of us would wear on an ordinary day at the seaside.

  He, therefore, expected both of the locals – the landlord and landlady, Mr and Mrs Loaf – to be horrified. But not at all.

  ‘This is Master Eddie,’ Mad Uncle Jack explained, climbing down and standing beside his great-nephew. ‘Please arrange to have him stabled, and arrange for two rooms – one for me and my good lady wife, and one for my horse.’

  ‘Very good, Mad Mr Dickens,’ said Mrs Loaf. She obviously knew Mad Uncle Jack well, but it would be rude to call him ‘Mad Uncle Jack’ because she wasn’t one of the family. ‘This way, please … though I do wish you weren’t staying.’

  While his great-aunt and great-uncle – and their horse – were shown to their rooms by his wife, Mr Loaf led Eddie to the stables.

  ‘You’ll sleep in here,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of straw, so you should be warm and comfortable.’

  ‘But why should I have to sleep out here, while the horse gets to sleep in the inn?’ asked Eddie, trying not to sound too pathetic and helpless.

  ‘Perhaps your great-uncle can only afford two rooms,’ the landlord suggested. ‘And then there’s the fact that he’s completely mad.’

  ‘Good point,’ nodded Eddie, shivering a little.

  ‘You know, Master Edmund, that great-uncle of yours never pays his bill,’ Mr Loaf continued.

  ‘Then why do you let him keep on staying here?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘Well, he sort of pays, see, but not with money,’ said the man. He was carrying Eddie’s trunk, which he now placed on a few bales of hay.

  ‘He pays without money?’ asked Eddie Dickens, frantically opening the trunk lid and pulling on the first garment he could find. It was one of Dr Muffin’s chin-to-toe body stockings, which was knitted from coarse black wool and covered him up to his neck. He felt a lot less naked now. ‘Then what does he pay with?’

  ‘Well, usually with dried fish,’ the landlord of The Coaching Inn explained. ‘Two dried hake for a double room – per night – and half a halibut for a single room. I never asked him to pay in fish and I never said he could pay in fish, but pay in fish he always does.’

  ‘So what do you do with all this dried fish?’ asked Eddie, sitting on his trunk.

  ‘I send it to your father and, knowing what rates I charge, and the method of fishology by which his uncle pays, he then converts the fish into money and sends me the exact amount.’

  ‘You know my father?’ asked Eddie excitedly. He had only been gone from his parents for half a day and he was missing them already. This was only the third time in his entire life that he had been away from home and it felt strange.

  The first time he had been away from home was when he had been sent to sea. That was from when he was a y
ear old to when he was old enough to go to school. The second time had been from when he was old enough to go to school until his tenth birthday. No wonder it felt so odd in that strange stable.

  ‘No, I have never had the honour nor the privilege of meeting your father in person, Master Edmund,’ said Mr Loaf, ‘but we do communicate by post.’

  ‘Aha!’ said Eddie. ‘That would explain the strange parcels my father so often takes to his study. I thought they smelt of dried fish.’ His eyes lit up.

  ‘Your eyes just lit up,’ said the landlord in complete and utter amazement.

  ‘No,’ said Eddie. ‘That was just a figure of speech.’

  ‘I thought it had more to do with the body’s electricity,’ said Mr Loaf.

  There was a lot of excitement about ‘electricity’ in those days before electric light, electric fridges and electric eels. That last one was a lie. There were most definitely electric eels way back then. How can we be so sure? Because Mad Uncle Jack would always tip Mrs Loaf with a dried electric eel at the end of each stay at The Coaching Inn. He was nothing if not generous and, as Mr Loaf so rightly said, completely mad.

  Episode 3

  Mister Pumblesnook

  In which Eddie is entranced by a handkerchief

  Eddie found that the warmest place to lie was inside his trunk, but he couldn’t sleep a wink. It wasn’t because he was longer than the trunk, which meant that he’d had to curl himself into a ball. It wasn’t because every ten minutes or so Mad Aunt Maud would burst into the stable, lift the lid of the trunk and scream, ‘Not asleep yet?’ in that terrible grating voice of hers, with wax dripping onto his face from her upheld candle. It had more to do with the fact that a band of strolling theatricals were rehearsing a play in the far corner of the stable.

  Strolling theatricals were a strange breed of men and women who used to roam the countryside forcing unsuspecting yokels – who are locals who say ‘ooh aar’ instead of ‘yes’ – to watch something they called ‘performances’.

  A band of strolling theatricals was always led by a man called an actor-manager. You could always recognise an actor-manager from his large frame, from the fact that he always carried a slightly chipped silver-topped cane, from his booming, ridiculous voice – an actor-manager always used twenty-two words when one would do – and his blooming ridiculous name. Most actor-managers were called Mr Pumblesnook, and Mr Pumblesnook was no exception. He sat on a bale of hay in the corner of the stable of The Coaching Inn, barking instructions.

  ‘Woof! Woof!’ he said.

  ‘Oooh, you weally aw such a funny man, husband deawest,’ laughed his wife, who had a number of extremely irritating habits including pronouncing her ‘r’s as ‘w’s. If you don’t think that’s irritating, just you wait. By the time you reach the end of the next page you’ll probably hate her as much as everyone else did.

  ‘Oooh, you’we the most humowus fellow to have walked this eawth, husband deawest. Thewe hain’t no denying it!’ she added, which is a good example of three more of her irritating habits.

  Mrs Pumblesnook began all her conversation with the word ‘oooh’ – usually with three ‘o’s – as well as sticking ‘h’s in front of words that didn’t need them and – as if that weren’t enough – she always called Mr Pumblesnook ‘husband deawest’ when she was talking to him.

  So that deaf people weren’t spared the irritation she caused, she had a number of awful visual habits too. Her face was covered with some of the reddest blotches ever to have graced the visage of any human being – this was in the days when people still had visages, remember – and Mrs P had the dreadful habit of picking at these blotches with her claw-like nails and putting any loose skin that came away in a special pocket sewn to the front of her dresses. Another awful habit was what she did with the skin later, but no matter how much you beg, you’ll never get me to write that down. Never!!!

  There was some disagreement as to how she came to have these blotches. Some of the strolling theatricals were convinced that she’d got them from drinking her husband’s Eyebrow Embrocation, while others thought they were a result of wearing theatrical make-up every night for over forty years. What no one disputed was that collecting the flaky skin was quite the most repulsive thing imaginable.

  But what of Mr Pumblesnook? He was busy talking his theatricals through a difficult scene of their up-and-coming production.

  ‘Remember! Attention to the smallest detail reaps the largest of rewards, my children!’ he bellowed.

  Eddie groaned. He was never going to sleep, so he might just as well give up. Bleary-eyed and more than a little grouchy, he climbed out of his trunk and wandered across the straw-strewn floor to watch the strolling theatricals at work.

  ‘Observe closely the way in which I remove my kerchief from my pocket and give this simplest of acts new meaning and life,’ Mr Pumblesnook pronounced. ‘See how the production of said kerchief becomes more than a mere action and becomes an interpretation of the action itself.’ Then, with a strange quiver, followed by a dramatic flourish, the actor-manager pulled a handkerchief out of his coat pocket.

  The assembled company – including young Eddie Dickens – burst into spontaneous applause. Eddie had never seen anyone pull out a hanky in such a way … It had been dramatic … exciting … He had cared about that hanky.

  ‘Oooh, we have han audience, husband deawest!’ cried Mrs Pumblesnook, spying Eddie and breaking the magic. ‘We have ha little gentleman hamong us!’

  Mr Pumblesnook fixed a dramatic stare upon the child. ‘What is your name, boy?’ he demanded.

  ‘Please, sir,’ said Eddie, ‘it’s Eddie Dickens.’

  At that moment, Mad Aunt Maud marched into the stable and over to Eddie’s trunk, a guttering candle clasped in her hand. She lifted the lid and, ignoring the fact that the trunk was obviously empty, shouted, ‘Not asleep yet?’ Without waiting for the reply that she wouldn’t have received anyway, she dropped the lid with a ‘thunk’ then marched back out of the stable and into the night.

  ‘Oooh, such a charming lady, husband deawest,’ sighed Mrs Pumblesnook, looking after Eddie’s great-aunt as though she were the beloved queen herself. ‘Such wefinement and such bweeding.’

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed her husband. He turned back to Eddie. ‘You are related to Mrs Dickens, I presume?’

  Eddie nodded. For those readers who are concerned that we shall be lumbered with these oh-so-amusing theatricals for at least the remainder of the episode, fear not.

  Fate would have it that a carelessly dropped match was soon to set fire to the surrounding hay and to the clothing of a number of the less important strolling theatricals.

  Had this actually occurred during one of the ‘performances’, the show would have had to continue right through to the end, no matter the cost to human life.

  One of the rules which such people lived by was that ‘the show must go on’. This, however, was only a rehearsal, so, instead of Old Wiggins and Even Older Postlethwaite being burnt to a crisp, they fled into the courtyard of The Coaching Inn where their fellow theatricals beat out the flames with their jackets then proceeded to dunk them in the horses’ drinking trough.

  In the meantime (and in the stable) Mrs Pumblesnook picked at her facial blotches, and her husband practised rolling his eyes in a manner befitting a gentleman (for his upcoming leading role in An Egg for Breakfast).

  Eddie had been quite forgotten in the excitement.

  With a sigh, he climbed back into his trunk, closing the lid behind him. There he remained until daybreak.

  Episode 4

  On the Road Again

  In which Aunt Maud is even more maddening than usual

  The journey to Awful End began bright and early next morning. Mad Uncle Jack and equally Mad Aunt Maud had breakfasted on devilled kidneys, six eggs, a joint of ham and several glasses of port wine, served up by a jovial Mr Loaf. Eddie had breakfasted on the lid of his trunk. He’d had a slice of stale bread and some mouldy cheese.<
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  When Mrs Loaf had first appeared at the stable with his food, the slice of bread had been fresh – still warm from the oven where she had baked it – and there hadn’t been so much as a smidgen of mould on the generous slice of cheese. When Mrs Loaf realised this, she apologised most profusely (which means ‘rather a lot’ in the kind of language Mr Pumblesnook liked to use) and hurried back into the kitchen.

  She returned with the stale bread and mouldy cheese, and apologised once more.

  ‘Do forgive me, Master Edmund,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t have you go spreading stories about us treating our guests kindly now, can I? That way more people would come to stay and I’d never get a moment’s peace.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Eddie. He wasn’t sure he understood.

  ‘How would you like strangers sleeping in your house … and the moment one lot leaves another lot turns up?’ she demanded.

  ‘But surely that’s what coaching inns are for?’ began Eddie, only to be interrupted.

  ‘It’s all right for Mr Loaf. He doesn’t have to do all that sheet-changing and washing and ironing. Oh, no. All he has to do is drink ale out of a pewter tankard at the bar and shout, “Time, gentlemen, please.” That’s all he has to do.’

  ‘Then why do you work in an –?’

  ‘So I don’t want you feeling welcome, now do I?’ she said, thrusting the stale-and-mouldy replacement breakfast onto the lid of the trunk. ‘Eat this and be grateful.’

  Eddie Dickens noticed that the plate had a large crack in it, clogged up with at least six months’ worth of grime. This woman certainly knew how to make a meal unappetising when she put her mind to it.

  ‘Thank you,’ mumbled Eddie, more confused than ever.

  If it was possible, and despite breakfast, Mad Uncle Jack looked even thinner than he had the previous day. He helped his wife and her stuffed stoat into the coach, shut the door behind Eddie, then clambered up into the driving seat.