The Reluctant Time Traveller

by Janis Mackay

  I felt sorry for Agnes’s gran. If I lived in a caravan I would make up stories too. I’d be telling the world how my other house was a castle. “What’s ‘title deeds’ anyway?” I mumbled, poking the fire with a stick.

  “Something like a scroll of paper,” she said, all excited. “It says on it who owns the house, and land and this den. You know, official documents. And if we want to save this den, we need to find them. Somebody has to own this place.”

  “Dunno,” I muttered. 1914! Jeez! We could land in the muddy trenches of the First World War, then get gassed. We could materialise right in front of a charging horse. We could get a bayonet stuck in our hands and be ordered to fight on the front line. Or we could get the time thing all wrong and end up in ancient history. We could get taken away by the body snatchers. Or get locked in the stocks with rotten eggs flung in our faces. We could catch the plague. We might hurtle back centuries and end up in some gladiator ring. Or get trampled by a dinosaur. Even worse, we could get stuck in in-between time and never get back.

  A pine cone flew above my head and landed in the fire, which snapped me out of my morbid thoughts. I could hear Agnes behind me.

  “Oh well,” she said, breezily, “if you’re so reluctant, Saul, maybe I’ll go by myself. I’ve got the formula too, don’t forget. And I am related to Agatha’s dad, the great time traveller Albert Black.”

  I swung round just in time to see her disappear through the hole in the hedge. “He wasn’t great,” I shouted after her. “Actually he got quite a lot of things wrong.”

  “Well, maybe he did. It doesn’t mean we will. And I care about this place,” she shouted from behind the old garden wall. “I want to save the den!”

  “So do I!” I yelled to the wall.

  “Well, let’s do it then,” she yelled back. “Let’s go to 1914!”

  2

  “Who can tell me this? Hmm?” The history teacher threw me a long look, meaning ‘Saul Martin surely can.’ This has happened ever since I won the history essay competition last year. I wriggled in my seat.

  “Yeah,” Robbie whispered next to me. “Go on mastermind. Dazzle her with your brilliance!”

  The teacher fired her question, “When did the the First World War begin?”

  I relaxed. That wasn’t a difficult question. Even Robbie knew that. He stuck his hand up, panting the way he did when he was desperate to give an answer. But the teacher wasn’t looking at him. “Saul? Will you kindly tell us?”

  “1914,” I answered.

  Robbie couldn’t contain himself. “That was a hundred years ago, Mrs Johnston.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And when did it end?”

  I knew that too. Robbie obviously didn’t because he lowered his hand and stopped panting like a dog. But Mrs Johnston wasn’t looking at Robbie or me. She was staring at Agnes. Agnes was the genius of the class who sat at the back and rarely said a word. But since she joined our gang she’d stopped being invisible, or bullied. People looked at her now as if she was special, instead of weird.

  “The Armistice was signed on November the 11th, 1918,” answered Agnes, quietly, then added into the impressed silence, “at 11 a.m.”

  “Exactly, Agnes,” said Mrs Johnston. “And this year is the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, as Robbie said.” Robbie beamed round at the class, well pleased. The teacher though, looked a bit sad. “It is a fitting time to remember the soldiers, service men and women who died or were wounded.” Mrs Johnston had our attention. It was something about the quietness of her voice, and the sad look in her eyes. “Many soldiers in the First World War were very young,” she went on. “Many still teenagers – the same age as some of your big brothers – when they left their homes and families. Many were killed. Even more suffered injuries that changed their lives. Families lost sons, brothers, fathers, uncles. In Peebleshire alone, over five hundred men were killed in the First World War. That’s like the whole school. Can you imagine? It was a terrible loss of innocence and of lives. Remembrance is about understanding how we cope with sadness and loss.”

  I could hear Robbie rummaging in his bag. He’s famous for his extravagant snacks. I spied a huge packet of crisps. “And why would young men and boys march off to war?” The teacher was looking at me again, but I was thinking about cheese and onion crisps.

  “Dunno,” I mumbled. I had no idea why teenagers would want to sleep in muddy trenches among the rats, knowing that at any moment they might get shot. The teacher scanned the room but nobody answered.

  “Um, to do their duty, maybe?” Nathan said, uncertainly.

  “Yes, that’s one of the reasons.” Mrs Johnston showed us this huge poster with a fierce-looking man pointing his finger. Written underneath was:

  YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!

  “Well, I wouldn’t go,” said Will, “it’s madness.” And that started a bit of an argument with some people in the class saying they would go and most saying they wouldn’t, and ended with the teacher saying it was a very different world one hundred years ago.

  “It is important we remember this war. It is sometimes called ‘the Great War’. ‘Great’ here means big, it means terrible. Young men were so enthusiastic to be a part of it. Not that they understood what it meant at the time. At the beginning, people were saying it would be over by Christmas, but it wasn’t. It went on for four years. Can you imagine? So many young men dying. Others coming back blind and lame.

  “Listen”, the teacher went on, opening a book. “This is the beginning of a famous poem. It was written by Wilfred Owen, a poet and a soldier of the First World War.

  Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

  Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

  Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

  And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

  Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

  But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

  Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

  Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.”

  No one said anything. I think Mrs Johnston was going to go on, but the bell rang for break time. Relieved, we dashed outside into the playground. Robbie wanted to play war games. He wanted us to clamber up the rope assault course. “Bang!” he shouted, pointing two fingers at me. I crumpled to my knees, groaning and clasping my chest.

  Next thing Agnes was on her knees next to me, like she was some kind of army nurse. “Changed your mind, Saul?” she whispered then bit into an apple. I swallowed hard, lying there on the grass next to the climbing frame, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “If we go back to 1914 to find the title deeds for the old house, we’ll also get to understand more about the war. We could find out why all those people went. Why they were willing to die. Don’t you want to know?”

  I shrugged. To be really honest, I didn’t.

  “Hey, don’t look so worried,” Agnes poked me. “This is Scotland, remember. All the fighting happened far away. I’ve read about it in novels. The muddy trenches of the Western Front, the fields of Flanders. That’s like in France and Belgium and those kind of places. We’ll be fine!” She took another bite of her rosy apple then with bulging cheeks said, “Go on, Saul; let’s time travel.”

  “Ok,” I said, reluctantly. Then Robbie ran up and shot me.

  3

  When I got home that day I stared for ages at the photo of me and Mum and Dad in the hallway. That photo had been taken before the twins came along. I was about nine, and grinning, and Mum and Dad had their faces pressed up against mine. I felt a lump in my throat. What if something went wrong and I never saw them again?

  “You ok, Saul?” Mum said at teatime. I had begged for my favourite scampi and chips, thinking there might not be many teatimes left, but now it was in front of me I couldn’t eat it. Normally I love scampi and chips. I remembered Agatha telling me about her favourite food when she was visiting from 1812. My stomach heaved. Pige
ons! There is no way I would eat a pigeon.

  “Feel a bit funny,” I whined.

  “Tell us a joke then, Saul,” said Dad, biting into a chip and winking at me.

  Ellie and Esme had already been fed and were romping around in their playpen. I tried to think of a joke but could only come up with baby ones. “Knock-knock,” I said.

  “Who’s there?” Mum and Dad both chanted.

  “Doctor,” I said.

  Dad speared another chip and whizzed it through the air. “Doctor Who!” he said, laughing.

  “Who’s been in that Tardis zooming through time for over fifty years,” Mum said. “Poor guy doesn’t know if he’s going or coming.” I gulped. “Eat a chip, Saul. You’re probably just feeling nervous about going to France.”

  “It’ll be fantastique!” Dad said, in a funny accent. “You’ll come back asking for frog’s legs. That’s what they eat in France, did you know that, son?”

  I shook my head and gulped again. Suddenly pigeons didn’t sound so bad. I picked up my fork, tried to forget about zooming through time, and stabbed a chip.

  I was allowed to go out after tea. If I was going to get lost in time I wanted to spend as much time in the den as possible. It was the best place ever. I met Will and Robbie at the corner of the street and we headed off. We had about five different ways of getting there, to put people off the trail, just in case they got suspicious and followed us.

  “Can’t wait till we actually get to France,” Will said. We were jumping off walls and doing jumps up and down steps.

  “Too right. Bon jour monsieur,” Robbie said, then he tried to jump over somebody’s front doorstep and tripped. “Ow!” he yelled.

  Ten minutes later we reached the crumbling hole in the wall. We did our usual check over our shoulders. No one was following us. Being the gang leader I went first. Once I was through the hole in the wall I wriggled through a gap in the thick jagged hedge that ran around the abandoned garden. The others wriggled through after me. We slumped on the long clumpy grass. It always felt magical, arriving in our secret garden. It was a pretty big garden and down the end there were a few walls still standing from a falling-down house. That was fenced off with

  CONDEMNED

  and

  NO ENTRY

  signs all over it. It would have been a big posh place once. We all loved our den, even though there was this black cloud hanging over it. It wasn’t only Agnes’s gran talking doom and gloom. Robbie said any day now there would be ‘For Sale’ signs, then bulldozers rolling in. Our den would be flattened along with those last walls of the ruined house; luxury villas would take over all this space, even the yew tree would go.

  But Robbie gets a lot of stuff wrong. So does Agnes’s gran. More worrying was Will saying his granny said the same thing. That’s seriously bad news: Will’s granny is like our prophet. She gets a lot of things right.

  But right now I wasn’t wanting to think about luxury villas, chain-sawed trees and the end of the den. I was the gang leader and we were the coolest gang in Peebles. We had our hut where we hung out, then there was the garden, though maybe ‘wilderness’ is a better word for it. Or Scottish jungle. It’s mostly jagged briars but you can see it was once a proper garden. There’s a huge yew tree in the middle – the one we used when we were getting Agatha back to 1812. I think it helped with time travel because it’s really old. I don’t know how old, but a lot older than 1812, because when Agatha was in her own time she carved her initials in it: AB. Whenever I start thinking that Agatha Black coming here was just a dream, I look at that tree. Yew trees live for hundreds of years, heaps longer than people. There’s one in Perthshire that’s two thousand years old! True. It even says so in Wikipedia.

  Will says his granny told him nobody knows who owns this garden and the house. That’s why it’s gone to wrack and ruin. That’s why the council plan to sell it off. Me and Will and Robbie never go near the creepy old house. It’s just some crumbling rooms, surrounded by barbed wire. Crows and mice live in it. Our den is the old wooden shed on the edge of the garden. Robbie gave it the name Pisa because it leans to the side, like a tower in Italy, he said.

  “Where’s Agnes?” Will asked, once we got our breath back.

  “Probably already in the den scribbling in that secret diary of hers,” Robbie said. “She always gets here early.” He jumped to his feet and ran to the den. “Agnes!” he yelled.

  Two seconds later he backed out of the den, looking a bit shaken. “She’s not here, but… there’s this stuff.”

  I got this fluttery feeling in my tummy, imagining what kind of stuff. Will ran but I hung back, racking my brains for what to tell them. We were a gang. We had all kinds of truth pacts. “What’s this about then, Saul?” Robbie pointed to the corner of the shed. Agnes had been busy. A bowl of earth. A bowl of water. A glass globe. A candle.

  I gulped.

  Will and Robbie, standing over all the time-travel implements, turned to face me. I was in the doorway, struggling. “So, Saul.” Will said, slowly, “you planning on going somewhere?”

  “Without telling us?” Robbie added. They both folded their arms and waited for me to speak.

  4

  I just stood there, at the door of our den, wondering what to tell them.

  “I knew you would go one of these days,” Will said. “I mean, you’ve got the formula. It would be mad not to go. I’m surprised you waited this long.”

  “Rather you than me,” Robbie said.

  I felt this huge relief. They were ok about it. They weren’t mad at me. I grinned.

  “I was going to tell you,” I said, striding into the shed and sitting down. We had done the place up when we first found it and made it our den: crates for chairs and a box for a table. We even had a few old cushions scattered about. Robbie and Will plonked themselves down too.

  “Yeah, send us a postcard from history, won’t you?” Robbie said, then he was reaching over and slapping me on the back, like I was the brave hero. “Jeez,” he said, “Are you not totally terrified? I mean, sometimes I can’t sleep for thinking about those body snatchers.”

  Yes, actually I was totally terrified. I blurted out, “It was Agnes’s idea. She was the one who said we should go. She’s got this idea that we should go back one hundred years. She said it would be the adventure of the century. And not just that – we could save the den. She said, if we could find the deeds of this place – like find out who really owns the old garden – we could stop them building on this land. She said –”

  “She’s going with you?” they chorused.

  “Um… yeah.” Then, because we were a gang, and because it was one of our rules, I said, “Do you want to come too?”

  All for one, and all that.

  They looked at me.

  They looked at each other.

  Then they looked at the ground, and muttered, “Thanks, but no thanks.” That was Robbie.

  “Nah, thanks for asking, but yeah, I mean, no. Yeah, no thanks.” That was Will. “We’ll look after things here.”

  Robbie nodded like that was a genius idea. They were both gazing at me.

  “So, when you going?” Robbie asked.

  Just then we heard three short whistles from the other side of the hedge – our gang signal. We bustled out of the den to see Agnes, with leaves in her hair, wriggling through the hole in the hedge. She had a tin whistle in her hand. The antique song, I thought.

  “Saul has been telling us about the big time travel plan,” Robbie didn’t hang about.

  “Yeah,” said Will, “so, when you going?”

  Agnes looked at me, and shrugged. “Ask Saul,” she said. “He’s the gang leader.”

  I shaded my eyes with my hand and studied the sun, as though I was some ancient astronomer reading the heavens. I pulled at my chin and tried to look casual, but inside my brain was racing. “Well…” I blinked. “Um, soon,” I announced.

  “Tomorrow,” said Agnes, and she smiled at me. My tummy turn
ed over. Then she nipped into the den and appeared two seconds later without her tin whistle. I pictured it lying next to the bowl of water, ready to hurtle us back in time. “So,” she clapped her hands, “while we’re still here, fancy a game of hide and seek?”

  I leant against the den and counted to one hundred. I found Robbie and Will right away, in their usual hiding places behind trees with their elbows sticking out. Then the three of us went looking for Agnes. We tried all the usual spots: behind the den, behind the bushes, under the hedge, behind the trees. We even looked up the trees.

  “Bet she’s in the creepy old house,” Will said, lowering his voice and pointing to the ruin.

  Robbie whipped out his phone to see whether his mum had conveniently texted him to come home. As far as I could see, the screen was blank. “I need to go soon,” he told us. We all stared at the dark ruin. “She knows it’s out of bounds,” Robbie hissed. “It’s condemned.”

  “That wouldn’t stop her,” Will whispered.

  I didn’t want it to stop me either. “As gang leader,” I declared, “I say we look for ten more minutes, ok? We’ll enter the ruin together and check the rooms, or – what’s left of them, ha-ha!” They didn’t seem to find that funny. “If we don’t find her after ten minutes we’ll shout for her to come out.” I shot Robbie a look. “Then you can go home.”

  “Ok,” Will agreed.

  Robbie didn’t look too happy but he grunted, nodded, and off we went.

  “We’re coming to get you, Agnes,” Will sang.