Pastworld (6 page)

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Chapter 8

Caleb Brown, a slender young man of seventeen with dark hair and sea-blue eyes, stood shaded from the suburban sun by a festive, striped Victorian-style awning. It was decorated in the livery colours of the Buckland Corporation. He stood next to his father, Lucius. They were waiting patiently in line along with many others, to board a Buckland Corporation passenger airship.

Finally their seat numbers were called forward. Costume authentication inspectors lined the route from the departure lounge. It was their job to carry out mandatory spot checks on any travellers going to Pastworld. One of the inspectors stepped forward and with a nod and a sweeping gesture of his uniformed arm politely ushered Caleb and Lucius into an inspection cubicle. These were small areas sectioned off with that same gaily striped fabric as the sun awning and the welcome banners.

‘Good morning to both of you gentlemen on behalf of the Buckland Corporation,’ said the inspector. ‘It is our policy to carry out authenticity checks as far as costuming and other items are concerned before your journey. I am sorry if you have been examined once already today but we like to be thorough here at Buckland.’ He looked both of them up and down, muttering and nodding his head, as if mentally checking certain items off on a list. He tugged the flap of Caleb’s long frock coat open and looked at his tie and then at the tiepin. He pulled at Caleb’s waistcoat.

At that point Caleb’s father reached across and stayed the authentication inspector’s hand. He handed over a card from his own waistcoat pocket. The costume authentication inspector looked at the card, read it quickly, bowed a little and then gave it straight back to him. He straightened then, saluted smartly and pulled aside the cubicle curtain.

‘No need for any further inspection at all, Messrs Brown,’ he nodded to them one after the other, still smiling. ‘Glad to have both of you travelling as guests with us today. A rare privilege indeed.’

‘I passed through this very same system only a month or so ago,’ said Lucius, ‘on my last visit, and you are all to be commended for your thoroughness. It is appreciated, I assure you.’

The inspector saluted once more.

‘You see,’ said Caleb’s father as they walked away. ‘One flick of that card and look what happened – no more fuss. Perhaps your poor old father is not such a useless old duffer after all?’ he said.

‘No,’ said Caleb with a half-smile. He hefted the weight of his Gladstone bag and paused to look up at the looming bulk of the airship above them. It had the word ‘Buckland’ picked out in friendly letters all the way down its soft, bulging flank. He pulled a rueful face, a brief rebellious grimace.
Buckland
, he thought,
always that word, it seems to pursue us
.

His father was distracted by the sheer scale of the airship as it hovered above them.

‘Airships,’ he said. ‘They were all my idea, you know,’ and nodded to himself.

They walked up the steps with a group of excited fellow passengers who were all, like them, dressed to the nines in their Victorian Sunday best. Some waved scarves or bright parasols back at the crowd of onlookers who were lined up to watch, as on every launch. They seemed a long way down below them at the base fence of the docking bay. Caleb noticed the luggage trolley being unloaded into the cabin hold. There were steamer trunks and big brass-cornered campaign cases. There were sets of vintage leather suitcases and crocodile-skin bags, and all were being carefully placed and ordered in neat stacks in the luggage hold. Caleb had a sudden image of them all falling out of the hold. Somewhere perhaps over the park itself, tumbling from the sky and spilling all of their expensive ‘authentic’ contents across the dirty roofs and smoky chimneys of Pastworld.

They were soon ushered into the airship’s gondola. A barman in a dark waistcoat and a long white apron stood behind a polished mahogany bar at one end of the corridor, and a viewing chamber with a huge panoramic window was at the other end near their cabin. A servant in Buckland Corp. livery stepped forward and took their topcoats and hung them carefully on wooden hangers on a coat rack. Their cabin was fitted out as a gentleman’s club. There were a few button-backed armchairs and a leather chesterfield sofa. Hand block-printed paper covered the walls. Chairs were arranged beside the large porthole windows.

A voice on the loudspeaker outside announced the imminent departure of their flight. Many could never afford a trip to Pastworld London, and many would have liked to be sitting where Caleb was now, having that chance to escape the sanitised present even if only for a few weeks. They would have willingly paid the enormous sum if they had it for just the chance to sail so elegantly back into another time.

The airship cabin smelled faintly of leather and cologne and there were traces of cigar smoke. Once in the cabin they were already on Pastworld rules. Here the universal smoking ban no longer applied. Caleb settled himself down, embraced by the softness of the cabin chair. He had to admit to himself a rising sense of excitement, of curiosity. His father sat himself down opposite Caleb, close to the porthole. He politely refused a glass of champagne which was offered by a smiling animatronic steward. Caleb quickly took a glass though and raised the fluted stem and watched the bubbles in the refracted light from the porthole. The champagne fizzed on his tongue. He drank the whole glass quickly and held it out to the robo steward for a top-up.

‘That’s enough, I think, Caleb,’ his father said not unkindly.

‘I thought we were on holiday,’ Caleb said, sipping at the second glass more slowly. His father shook his head and turned his attention to his
Pastworld Gazetteer
. This was an early original edition which he had brought with him. ‘I feel I should remind you, Caleb, that all of the old, harsh Victorian criminal laws in Pastworld apply. Being drunk and disorderly would be a very serious matter.’

‘Two glasses of champagne are hardly going to make me drunk and disorderly, are they?’ Caleb said, his sea-blue eyes flashing and a winning smile on his face.

‘Well, some of your so called “friends” back in Letchworth wouldn’t fare too well in Pastworld. Victorian prisons were not holiday camps, and never forget one thing: they have the death penalty here as well.’

‘Not for drinking this, surely,’ Caleb said, holding out the glass, and laughed.

The airship lifted off, and while it rose majestically up from its mooring pylon soothing music was played into the cabin from an old-fashioned acoustical gramophone. The ghostly, scratchy playing of long-dead musicians filled the cabin with soothing salon waltzes and tangos. The authentic experience, the immersion in the life of the past, had begun.

Lucius conducted the music from his cabin chair, while Caleb, feeling relaxed from the champagne, just looked out of the porthole at the passing constant blue of the sky.

After an hour or so of smooth, steady flight an announcement was made over the speaker system.

‘This Buckland Corporation airship is about to dock at the airlock to the Pastworld skydome. We ask that passengers remain seated during this short procedure. Passengers are reminded that after docking is complete we will be on Pastworld side itself and we would recommend that you make your way then to the panoramic viewing cabin.’

The interior went dark. There was a feeling of suspension, a hiatus. Then after a minute or two the gaslights kicked in, and the cabin was lit differently. It was softer somehow. The sense of forward movement was back too.

‘Come on then, my boy. This will be well worth seeing if it’s anything like my last visit.’ Lucius stood up and Caleb followed him down the narrow corridor to the viewing cabin.

The panoramic window curved across the whole back of the gondola cabin. It stretched from the floor to the ceiling as well, so that the effect was of a great glass wall with just a few narrow glazing bars to support it. The sensation it gave was that of simply hanging quietly in the sky. Below was an empty-looking townscape, a buffer zone of old suburbia that had been cleared during the first great construction phase.

While they stood at the wide window a ragged trail of mist drifted across under the belly of the cabin and hid it all.

Caleb looked at the mist; it thickened as they passed over it. He could clearly see a sudden darker shape of spreading grey, like a rolling shadow, a stain below them.

‘Worth it now,’ said Lucius, noting the reaction of Caleb to the great view spread out below them. ‘The famous artificial fog bank. Just look at it, my God.’ His father’s voice fell to a whisper.

The fog shrouded everything, even the taller landmark buildings. At first, apart from those, there was little else to see but the fog itself. His father, still speaking in a whisper said, ‘Think of it all down there, Caleb, underneath the machined fog, no real mechanised vehicles as you would know them, no cars, only old steam-powered trains, and horses, lots of horses, and all the teeming streets below us are lit once again with gas lamps.’

Caleb continued to stare out of the window at the swirling pattern of fog.

‘Nothing can prepare you for the moment of actually stepping back into the past,’ Lucius said with a sigh.

The airship then drifted lower, until in one sudden movement they were below the thicker fog line, and the whole of the city opened up below them. The other passengers in the cabin burst into spontaneous applause at the sight.

The streets and buildings stretched from one side of the window to the other. Horse-drawn carriages could be seen, crowded pavements, the great dull curve of the river, green squares and parks, and white church spires, grey roofs and dark red railway trains trailing billows of steam. Even Caleb gasped. He hadn’t wanted to give his father the satisfaction of seeing how interested he really was in the city below them, didn’t want him to see that a great flicker of excitement had just at that moment grown, doubled, trebled, as the airship slipped gracefully through the gloomy fog bank and floated over the dream-like city itself.

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Chapter 9

Caleb disembarked and waited to collect their luggage. They had a steamer trunk packed with authentically tailored clothes, they had individual bags packed with unlikely toiletries. There were bottles of pomade for their hair and after-shaving balms with printed paper labels, soft shaving brushes made of real badger hair, ivory-handled toothbrushes and round tins of harsh dentifrice paste, silver-backed hairbrushes, open razors for his father (Caleb had yet to shave often enough to warrant the worry). Caleb could not then have guessed that his father carried one extra little piece of baggage. It felt heavier than any packed steamer trunk. It was a simple white envelope, which he had tucked into his inside pocket. The letter inside consisted of just a single word scrawled across a folded piece of paper. A word which carried with it a burden of fear, guilt and knowledge.

They were finally able to claim their stack of luggage from the efficient baggage reclaim system. A smiling porter in a peaked cap and a colourful striped waistcoat trundled their trunk behind them on a trolley, while they carried their own smaller individual Gladstone bags. They took their place in line in an enclosed arcade on the outer edge of the Pastworld arrivals terminal.

was printed in old woodblock type across a large calico banner suspended above the staircase that led to the exit. After their turn had come to climb the elaborate wrought-iron stairs to join the hansom cab queue, the porter manually pushed at the heavily insulated main doors. The doors were made of thick bronze and were decorated in bas-reliefs of airships. As the big doors slid apart there was a sudden eruption of noise. The sounds of a wild unknown and ancient foreign clamour – rapidly moving horse carriages, distant chuffing trains, steam engines, close vocal shouts and wild street cries. They were confronted at once not only by the noise itself, but also by strong animal and chemical smells. The warp and texture of the very real dirty and noisy life in the city was opened up right in front of them.

The porter slid the trunk out ready on to the pavement outside, which, in contrast to the immaculate terminal floor, was uneven, grubby and wet. Caleb realised for the first time just how far they had come in their short flight.

‘We have truly crossed over,’ his father said.

While they waited, the visitors in the queue practised their new rules of politeness on one another. Hats were doffed, men bowed to their partners, who in turn bobbed curtsies back, dissolving into giggles at the unreality of it all. Lucius and Caleb’s hansom cab soon clattered up beside them. Caleb found himself looking into the dripping muzzle of a dappled grey cab horse. Their porter moved off to load the trunk and cases and at that point a ragged man stepped forward from among the queue of carriages and offered to help. The porter raised his fist and the man stepped back. Lucius looked nervously over at the beggar and the beggar stared back at him from under his sacking hood. The porter loaded the trunks himself and then he doffed his cap. Lucius modestly tipped the porter with one of the many small coins that jingled in his pocket, then, followed by Caleb, he clambered up into the cab. The whole interior rocked on its springs as they settled into the quilted, horsehair seats.

On the journey from the arrivals terminal to their lodgings Caleb became what the local residents in Pastworld called a ‘Gawker’, that is an awed tourist, a rubberneck, a simple eye. There was almost too much to see and gawk at.

For a start there was the rain. Caleb had never seen such grey and louring weather; it was never like that back at home. There were rolling, low clouds that morning, as well as a light artificial fog, and a cold, fine, drizzling rain. Everything was blurred and softened. The outlines of the buildings and the people were hazy. There were pungent smells of burning coal and hot steam smuts, acrid soot and hot oil and working steam engines and, above and over all of that, horse manure, and urine, which caught Caleb unawares, and seemed to linger in the back of his throat.

And no matter how many photographic images of old London and its people he had seen, nothing had prepared him for the experience of actually being there.

He was suddenly immersed in the vivid world of the past.

The images he had seen had been mainly monochrome, either old Victorian or Edwardian photographs. Images that looked as if they had been pickled in malt vinegar or tobacco smoke. Faded-looking pictures in soft yellows and sepia browns. No modern cameras were ever allowed into Pastworld, so there was nothing to prepare for the shock of the colours and the bustling movement. The women’s clothes seemed to be very bright, floral patterned, or plain velvets and silks and all in strong purples, yellows and reds. This contrasted sharply with the dull tones of the men’s clothes. They wore mostly formal black, but there were some local swells wearing checked tweeds and gold-threaded waistcoats. Everyone wore hats. Some of the women wore large creations topped with elaborate swirls of feathers. The men wore shiny top hats, or sombre trilbys and homburgs. There were Buckland Corporation cadets in their red uniforms, and the London policemen, or bobbies, in dark blue, with high, crested helmets.

That morning, during his first immersion, Caleb’s eyes darted this way and that. He was confused by so many things at once. The haste and hurry, the constant noise from the heavy traffic. The clattering and clopping hooves of the horses, the metal jingle of harness. There were steaming piles of grimly unhygenic manure in the roadways and it seemed there was a constant wash of horse piss in the gutters. Caleb could almost feel the germs rising in the steam, crawling over everything, the twisted writhing colonies of bacteria spilling from cobbles to shoes, from shoes to clothes, from clothes to flesh, and he shuddered.

Caleb watched the overwhelming crowds of poor people as they moved among the smarter Gawkers and residents. He was surprised by their noise and robust roughness, by their numbers, by the variety of their skin colours, and by their bewildering speed of movement and confidence as they dodged around each other on the pavements. With all the shoving and pushing, Pastworld already looked a dangerous place. For some perhaps even a terrifying one. To a skinny seventeen-year-old boy from a dull, wealthy garden city there was an immediate sense of lawlessness and adventure in the air. It seemed to Caleb that almost anything might and could, and perhaps indeed should, happen.