by Jason Ayres
There was a small path leading out of the clearing into a thickly wooded area. If there were any answers to be found, perhaps they would lie at the end of the path. He wasn’t going to get any here.
He started to make his way through the woods. It was slow progress, with the path overgrown in places, and he cursed as he snagged his coat on a stray branch, causing him to temporarily lose his footing. It seemed to take ages to reach the perimeter, even though in reality it was probably only a hundred yards or so.
When he did eventually emerge from the trees, he was encouraged to see a few signs of civilisation. A single-track, narrow road ran alongside the edge of the woods, with a hedgerow and a field beyond which was full of sheep.
The road wasn’t tarmacked and he could see large ruts in the rough terrain that looked as if they might have been made by a tractor or some other heavy-wheeled vehicle. Hopefully these were signs he wasn’t as far back in time as he had initially feared.
He followed the road along the edge of the wood until it turned a corner around the edge of the trees, giving him a panoramic view of the landscape ahead. He paused for a moment, taking stock of the very changed world he now saw before him.
The town he had grown up in was still there, albeit in a much smaller version. He recognised a few of the older buildings, most notably the church, but most of the other infrastructure was gone. There was no Sainsbury’s, no petrol station and none of the out-of-town housing estates that had swelled the population in recent decades. There were no proper roads, only tracks.
He had barely reached the edge of the town in its current guise, yet in his world, he estimated that he would be standing just about where Kwik Fit was.
Where the garage had previously stood, there was now a large, wooden stable that appeared to be attached to an inn about fifty yards further on. These were more or less the first buildings on the outskirts of the greatly reduced town. As he looked up at it, he noted that the inn was named The Fox, which brought back a vague memory. Wasn’t there once a pub of that name in the town? He remembered his dad talking about a famous punch-up there in the 1980s during an England vs Scotland football match.
Pausing outside the stable, Josh heard the sound of a horse neighing inside and a repetitive clink-clink-clink sound which he took to be a blacksmith fitting a shoe.
Deciding against opening the stable door, he decided to press on. The road widened as he reached The Fox, becoming quite recognisable. It followed the same route as the main road northwards towards Buckingham in his own world. This version was devoid of tarmac, traffic lights and anything else that might suggest the invention of the motor car.
He turned right here, heading into the town, passing the church and towards a narrow street, one of the oldest parts of the town. Here there were recognisable clusters of houses, at least in terms of their basic structure. Their exterior appearance, however, was very different. There were no kebab shops, tanning salons or Indian restaurants to be found here.
As he walked on into the market square he could see a huge amount of hustle and bustle going on as the townsfolk went about their daily business. Gazing around in awe, he nearly got himself run over as a horse and carriage came up the road towards him at speed. With the driver clearly having no intention of moving out of the way, he was forced to throw himself to one side, in the process almost falling into the small brook that ran through the town centre.
“Watch out, will you!?” shouted the driver in a strong, rural accent. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” And with that, he rushed on by. Like most of the men around, the driver was dressed very formally in a suit and tie, and donning a hat.
“Come on,” yelled the man, whipping the horse brutally as he passed, in a manner that would be deemed totally unacceptable in Josh’s world.
Recovering his composure after nearly being run down, he continued to walk through the centre of the town and the hive of activity all around him. It was like something out of a period drama. Everything he could see around him suggested he had gone back to sometime in the 19th century.
There were two more blacksmiths on the square, both busy shoeing horses outside their shops, a man driving a small herd of pigs towards the far end of the square, and various other men and women in formal and old-fashioned clothes, some smart, but others tattered and torn. This applied particularly to the grimy children playing all around him, some of whom were shoeless, despite the cold.
Josh felt a growing feeling of desperation gnawing away inside him. Maybe he hadn’t been in the right universe before, but at least there had been the comfort of familiar people and places around him. Here he had been ripped well and truly out of his comfort zone.
If he really had been transported centuries back in time he was going to find himself seriously up the proverbial creek. He didn’t belong here – he knew it and, worryingly, so did the people around him.
He was more than aware that he was attracting a lot of looks from the people in the town. Not only was he a stranger in their midst, but he was also one wearing clothes of a design and fabric unknown to these people. To them, the parka probably looked like a spacesuit.
Thankfully these people didn’t seem hostile, just curious. A couple of young women a few yards away across the square pointed at him, one making a comment that caused both to burst into laughter. This was reassuring in a way. He could cope with people taking the piss out of him – it was infinitely preferable to being burnt at the stake.
Pausing in the heart of the square, he stopped to look around him. This area was fairly recognisable in comparison to his world. The biggest difference was the lack of cars and facilities such as car parks built around them.
It wasn’t just the sights and sounds that were different, but the smells were, too. Rather than the usual exhaust fumes that polluted this area, the air was instead filled with all manner of other smells. These ranged from the pleasant waft of freshly baking bread, to the less pleasant that made the nose wrinkle, manure and a clearly primitive sanitation system.
At the front of the market square was a general store and haberdashery, outside which he could see a small newspaper stand. Yet again, the press would help him identify where he had arrived in time.
He crossed the busy square, making a guestimate as to exactly what period he was in. The complete absence of motor vehicles suggested it had to be before the 20th century. There was no sign of any electric lighting, either, but there were gas lamps in the street.
As he approached the shop, he heard the distinctive toot of a steam train in the distance, so it had to be sometime in the second half of the 19th century. He decided to go for 1875, but as he was shortly to find out, that guess was well wide of the mark.
As he focused on the top of the old-fashioned, black and white newspaper, he discovered that it wasn’t the 19th century at all. It wasn’t even the twentieth. The date on the paper was actually the one he had been expecting to arrive at all along:
Tuesday 5th November, 2024.
The date was right, so what had happened to the world all around him? It was well over a century behind the times. Something seismic on the Gardner scale must have happened to the timeline to cause this much change.
Once he had got over the surprise of finding out the date, his eyes were drawn to the headline below. It was in a modest font, much smaller than the bold and brash front pages he was used to in his world, but it caught his eye nonetheless. This headline alone confirmed he really was in a vastly altered world:
Millions celebrate coronation of King Harold XX
King Harold the twentieth? There had been only one Harold he could remember and that was in the 11th century. If there had been eighteen of them since that time, then things had wandered off at more than a tangent here.
Whilst it was discomfiting to find himself in such strange surroundings, he was at least heartened by finding out that he was in the correct time period. He could jump again once the tachyometer recharged, hopefully to somewhere
resembling something a little more like reality.
But what was he to do in the meantime? He scanned the top of the paper, looking for the price. It was listed as 3d, indicating that they were using the old English money in this universe. The decimalised, polymer notes in his wallet would be useless to him. He was going to be struggling just to fulfil his basic needs, like food and shelter.
Did he have anything of value he could sell? Not really, unless he could trade his coat, and would anyone even want it? A parka was hardly the height of fashion where he had come from, and it certainly didn’t fit in with the dress of people here.
He toyed with the idea of stealing some money, but how? Even if the tachyometer was working properly, there weren’t any cashpoints to defraud. He wasn’t about to try and steal from a shop or an individual. Somehow to him that always seemed worse than stealing from large corporations. Besides, he didn’t fancy being thrown in the stocks, or hanged, or whatever other savage, archaic punishments they might have here for stealing if he got caught.
He wandered up the street towards a large hotel on the corner, a stone, whitewashed building which was also a hotel in his own universe. Engrossed in his thoughts about what to do next, he didn’t notice the woman in the pink, frilly dress leaning against the wall until he was almost at the corner. She certainly noticed him, though, and accosted him in a voice that was vaguely familiar.
“Hey, stranger,” said the woman. “You new in town?”
He looked up at the woman, a sense that he knew her washing over him. She was tarted up with way too much make-up and smelling of strong perfume. It was blatantly obvious what trade she was plying. She was selling her wares, her outfit reminiscent of a good-time girl in a Texan whorehouse.
He was initially surprised by this. Hadn’t people been a lot more puritanical in Victorian times? He couldn’t imagine prostitutes being allowed to conduct their business in broad daylight in his town in those days.
But then, these weren’t Victorian times, he reminded himself. There was not even a Queen Victoria, and probably never had been. Perhaps moral values were a lot more relaxed in this world and prostitutes hanging around on street corners were just a normal part of the everyday scene.
“You want to have some fun?” she asked. “I’ve got a room just upstairs here.”
Suddenly he realised who she was. The tone of her voice was unmistakeable, even masked as it was in the strong, rural accent her counterpart in the other universe lacked. Her clothes and hair were completely different, as befitted her trade, but even under the layers of make-up, he knew that chubby, cheeky little face anywhere.
“Lauren?” he asked.
“No, dearie, my name’s Annie. That’s Annie Watson, at your service. Now, what’s it to be?”
He looked closely at her face again. It was undoubtedly Lauren, or someone who looked incredibly like her. The surname was right, too: it was only her first name that was different, but why?
“Very pleased to meet you, Annie,” he said. “Tell me, how did you get your first name?”
“After the princess of course,” she said. “Princess Annie of Cornwall.”
“There’s a Princess of Cornwall now?” he asked.
Like every world he visited, curiosity was getting the better of him, and he knew now he wouldn’t be able to leave until he had found out more about this so very different world.
“There always has been! Now come on, time is money,” stressed Lauren/Annie impatiently. “What’s your pleasure? Come upstairs with me, and you can stick it anywhere – and I mean anywhere.”
This may not have been the same Lauren as the one he had grown up with, but she was every bit as filthy. He imagined that this version of her probably enjoyed her profession immensely. Recalling their past sexual adventures, he was almost tempted for a moment, but then remembered that he was a married man, even if it wasn’t in this universe. He also didn’t have any money, so couldn’t have done the business even if he wanted to.
“I’m really sorry, Annie, I’d love to stay and play, but I’m a little financially embarrassed at the moment. You don’t know if there’s any work going around here, do you?”
“Try up at the station,” she said. “They’re putting in a new railway line and are always looking for men. There’s plenty of work going – most of the farm labourers have been working up there since the harvest came in.”
“Thanks,” replied Josh. “I’ll check it out.”
“Don’t do your back in,” said Lauren. “I’ll still be here later if you want to come back and spend your wages in me.”
She winked at him theatrically. She really was every bit as incorrigible as the original. He bid her farewell, heading out of the town centre in the direction he had heard the train toot from earlier. Hopefully the station would be in the same location it was in his world.
Getting a day’s work was remarkably easy. Despite his strange appearance and late arrival, the foreman seemed only too happy to have another pair of hands on the job. He offered him a few hours’ work on the spot, which he was delighted to discover was paid daily in cash.
Annie hadn’t been joking when she had mentioned his back. It was exhausting work, laying railway sleepers along a track that would soon connect the town to Buckingham. Chatting to his fellow workers, he got the impression that Buckingham was a much larger and more important town in this universe than in his. Milton Keynes, however, didn’t exist, as he discovered when he asked if the tracks would continue on to there.
He found the men a friendly bunch to work with, surprisingly tolerant of having a stranger in their midst. It seemed there were more jobs going than there were people to fill them, and they were only too glad for the help.
After his Milton Keynes question, he was a little guarded in what else he asked his fellow workers. He didn’t want to ask questions about things that everyone ought to already know. A question such as, ‘Is London the capital of England?’ would make him look seriously strange.
What he did glean from the general conversation was that the lack of workers was down to repeated outbreaks of the Black Death, a scourge that was still killing millions, even in the 21st century. Fortunately, it had been over five years since it had last struck. It would be a sorry end indeed to Josh’s travels if he was to die of bubonic plague.
He had been forced to leave his backpack in the care of the foreman when he had gone out to work, breaking his golden rule not to let the tachyometer out of his sight. Thankfully it had not been tampered with when he returned at the end of the day’s work, with fading light calling a halt to proceedings by late-afternoon.
The foreman doubled as a wages clerk, handing out the pay packets to each man in turn. There didn’t seem to be any paperwork involved: this appeared to be a completely cash-in-hand culture. That suited Josh no end – it made the passing through nature of his existence a lot easier with no PAYE codes or National Insurance numbers to worry about.
The stationmaster was a large, middle-aged man, who was somewhat reminiscent of Barry from the hospital but, unlike Annie/Lauren, this was definitely a different man.
“Let’s see now,” said the foreman. “It’s ten shillings a day but since you didn’t turn up until 11am, you get six shillings. Try getting out of bed a little earlier tomorrow.”
He may not have been Barry, but he had a similar attitude.
“Can I have my backpack?” asked Josh hopefully.
“Ah yes, the mysterious backpack,” said the foreman, lifting it up from behind his desk. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. Tell me, what’s it made out of?”
“It’s a special kind of cotton,” replied Josh, thinking on his feet. “They grow it in America.”
“Where’s America?” asked the man.
“You’ve never heard of America?” queried Josh. This place really was behind the times if they hadn’t discovered America yet.
“Is it near China?” asked the man.
“Yes, that’s right
,” said Josh, knowing he was on safe ground with this blatant lie. He made a mental note that he must find out why this man was unaware of the existence of America. How could he go about doing that? What would people have done in the old days, when they didn’t have Google or Wikipedia to help them? Then the answer came to him.
“Tell me, is there a decent library anywhere around here?” he asked, hoping that these people weren’t so primitive that they were all illiterate. They had newspapers, so surely they must have books.
“We don’t have anything like that here,” replied the man. “But you could try the Bodleian in Oxford.”
Thank goodness, thought Josh. The good old Bodleian exists. There was intelligent life on the planet after all. He would have to go tomorrow, though. It was too late for tonight.
“Are there any trains running to Oxford tomorrow?” he asked. He wasn’t particularly hopeful, given the current state of the tracks.
“We’re not reopening until next week,” replied the man. “I thought as much, you’re one of those academic types, aren’t you? I knew you weren’t one of us, with your fancy coat and special cotton backpack. What do you need a day’s work on the train tracks for, then?”
“Oh, it’s just a bit of research,” replied Josh airily. “It’s for a book I’m writing about the railways.”
“Can I be in it?” asked the foreman.
“Of course,” said Josh. “So tell me, what’s the best way to get into Oxford tomorrow if there are no trains?”
“Try the stagecoach,” replied the man. “Or you could walk. People do, you know.”
“Thanks, you’ve been very helpful,” replied Josh, before turning and heading back towards town. There was no way he was walking all the way to Oxford. He would have to take the stagecoach. He just hoped he had enough money to cover the fare, bearing in mind he also needed to pay for a bed for the night.
He managed to get a room at The King’s Head, where he had encountered Annie earlier, but it cost him four of his precious six shillings. That seemed pretty reasonable in relative terms. You certainly wouldn’t have got a bed for the night for four hours’ work in his universe, not in a hotel this good anyway.
