The Accidental Time Traveller (36 page)

‘I know, Dad! Let’s go up to The Meadows and see where we’re going to live.’

‘Right you are then.’

Mr Brown turned the engine on. ‘Self starter motor,’ he said proudly. The car hiccuped a bit before we chugged off down the road.

In the weeks I’d been working on
The News
I had never yet been up to The Meadows. The estate was slightly above the town, the new road curving around from the end of the old High Street. Squashed in the back of the car next to Peggy, I couldn’t see much out of the small windows, though I could feel the car struggling up the hill with the four of us inside it. Ahead of us I could just make out a higher bit of hill full of lorries and cement mixers, but Mr Brown turned off onto the bottom road, the first of the new estate. There were just a couple of vans parked there as workmen were doing the last of the decorating or tidying up.

Peggy and I scrabbled out of the back of the car and I had a shock.

The view from The Meadows was tremendous. You could see down over the town, and the fine old parish church. Although the flood level had dropped you could see the river still overflowed its banks. The bottom half of the Market Place was a small lake, and there were fire engines down by Watergate. ‘Still pumping out the flood water,’ said Mr Brown.

The road we were standing in was like a scar on the hillside. The gardens were churned-up mud, but workmen were fitting in fences and the houses looked fresh and new. They hadn’t yet acquired that bleakness so typical of The Meadows as I knew it. ‘Isn’t this grand?’ said Mrs Brown, walking along. ‘They’re lovely houses, so new and clean. And look at the size of those windows! They’ll be lovely and light. No mouldy old cellars here.

‘Proper front gardens, and look, the gardens at the back are a tidy size. Plenty of room for your vegetables there, Frank. And not far to walk into town, Peg. Be a nice walk out when you’re pushing the pram! Oh and look, we’re almost in the countryside.’

True, at the end of the road was a field with horses, and beyond that some woods. ‘What a grand place to grow up. Oh it will be lovely for the baby here. And the air’s so clean. No smuts on your washing up here, Peg!

‘I just hope we get some good neighbours. These houses will be wasted on some of those people from Watergate. Bathroom! They wouldn’t know what to do with one. Keep pigeons in it I expect.’

Peggy laughed, ‘Well there’s you and my dad. Then there’ll be me and George and his mum. And Billy West and Carol and their three kiddies will be moving up here. So that’s a good start.’

I thought of Billy living up here with his family, making a new garden, playing football with his boys, riding his bike down the hill to work, his coat flapping behind him … The thought hurt so much, I bent double.

Peggy and her mum walked up the path of one of the houses and peered in through the windows. They enthused over the size of the kitchen, tiles around the fireplace, the boiler, the concrete shed by the back door. Everything met with their approval and delight.

Mr Brown was poking his toe into the soil in the garden. ‘I’ll get some potatoes in, get that clear, then I think it will do very nicely,’ he said. ‘We could have a bench out here, sit here of an evening and look out over the town.’

‘Come and look, Rosie!’ yelled Peggy. ‘If you look in through this window, you can see into the kitchen and through into the front room!’

Anxious to please and not wanting to dampen their enthusiasm, I started to walk up the path, but my head was hurting and my legs were like lead. Everything was out of focus. I was ill, I realised, really ill.

‘Can we go home please?’ I said quickly in as strong a voice as I could muster, though I knew it came out as a squeak. ‘Can we go home please? I don’t feel very well.’ Somehow I knew I was going to be ill, and I didn’t want it to be here. I didn’t want to spoil their delight and excitement in their new home.

Suddenly they were all fussing around me, squashing me back into the car. Peggy was holding my hand, rubbing it to get warm. I knew I was icy cold. I couldn’t stop shivering and I couldn’t keep my head up. It felt so heavy. As we bumped along in the car, I felt so sick, I didn’t know where to put myself to get comfortable, but I couldn’t move.

The car had stopped, I think. Hands were pulling me, helping me, trying to support me. Voices swirled above my head. They were telling me I’d be all right soon. That I could lie down. Get to bed. Get warm. Sleep. Suddenly I seemed to fall through all those helping hands. Everything was dark, and I was falling, falling, falling … and somewhere in the darkness, Billy was calling to me.

Lemons. I could smell lemons. Definitely lemons. But mixed with something else, something woody. And soap. There was soap in there somewhere too. It was a very clean smell, a zesty smell, a familiar smell.

I knew I had smelt it before, long ago, somewhere. But also that it had been near me a lot recently. I realised it had been there, on the edge of my consciousness for a long time. It had become comfortable, familiar. But I knew it belonged to an earlier time too. Not just now.

I struggled to place it. I knew I knew it and that it would make me happy. But I didn’t know why it made me happy. And it seemed such a long way away. Maybe I could try and go towards it. But it was such a long way away, I didn’t think I could reach it. Everything was such an effort, such a struggle …

The smell was closer now. I was breathing it in. It was filling my nostrils, my head. Maybe I could reach it if I tried very hard. If I just tried a bit harder …

‘Rosie! Rosie! Are you there? Can you hear me?’

If I concentrated very hard, I could open my eyes. I flickered them open. There was someone bending over me. Someone familiar. Billy?

‘Rosie! It’s me, Will. Can you hear me?’

Will? Of course. Lemons. Will always smelt zingy and zesty of delicious woody citrus. Billy smelt of sweat and beer and newsprint. This was Will. Will!

I opened my eyes and smiled at him and he was crying.

‘You’re back! Oh Rosie, you’re back!’

And then I was sick. Horrible vile-smelling dribble. Will whipped a bowl over and caught most of it. I closed my eyes again to get away from the smell of it, the awful all over pain and, yes, the embarrassment.

Then there were all sorts of things going on. People talking, testing, beeps of equipment. There were nurses and a woman in a white coat. And my mum was there and Dad. All those people. I opened my eyes and tried to smile at them all. It was nice to see them. But my head still hurt and I felt as though I had the most tremendous hangover so I closed my eyes again. Just for a little while …

But I could still smell lemons and I knew wherever I’d been, I was back.

I was in hospital. I worked that out. A nice twenty-first-century hospital. It had to be. Mum and Dad were there. And even in this one room, I could tell this hospital wasn’t like the one we took Peggy to. But it was Will I had to be sure about. As nurses prodded and poked and measured and tested and asked me how many fingers they were holding up, Mum and Dad were either side of my bed. Mum was holding my hands and I could feel her trying not to cry. Dad was stroking my shoulder, about the only bit of me that was easily accessible.

My head hurt and I felt wretched, but a nurse cleaned me up swiftly and efficiently, and my mother was murmuring soothing things that made me feel safe. They adjusted one of the many drips that seemed to be plugged into me and gradually I calmed down and felt more relaxed.

Will, meanwhile, was standing at the back of the room, leaning against the windowsill, watching me intently. I knew he must have found my parents and then stepped back to let them be close to me in my newly-awakened state. It was hard to keep my eyes open. The light hurt my eyes. My head felt very peculiar – like one of those diagrams for headache tablets where you see a cross section of a scalp in wildly pulsating colours.

But it was Will, not Billy.

The clothes – well-fitting jeans and polo shirt, the decent haircut, a face less lined, less raw-looking, all gave the game away. But even in my dopey state I realised the big difference.

Will was looking at me with an expression of pure love. And concern. No guilt. No worry. No thoughts about a wife and children. Here life was simple. Despite the pain and the doziness, I felt suddenly light-hearted. I slipped away from the pain and back into sleep. But I knew I was smiling.

It was meningitis. What I thought was a cold and sore throat meeting a huge Monday-morning hangover and the stress of a row with Will had actually been a very serious illness. I was lucky to be alive. Apparently, I’d walked up the path to Mrs Turnbull’s and had collapsed at her feet. Literally at death’s door.

‘Mrs Turnbull’s house?’ I asked, a day or so later when I was well enough to talk and was trying to get things straight in my head. ‘Mrs Brown’s house in Cheapside where I’d been staying?’

‘Cheapside? No,’ said Will, exchanging a glance with my mum. ‘No. Mrs Turnbull’s house at The Meadows.’

‘Ah, the new house, George and Peggy’s new house …’

‘Not that new,’ said Will. ‘It’s been there fifty years, one of the oldest on the estate.’

I think I might have had to go back to sleep again before I could work this one out and ask any more questions. My head was seriously confused. Mum and Dad had gone to get something to eat and I was lying in bed watching the sun set while Will held my hand, rubbing his thumb on mine, the way he did.

‘So I haven’t been in the 1950s house then?’

‘No, you’ve been here, in hospital. You went a week ago on Monday afternoon to interview Mrs Margaret Turnbull at The Meadows. You were meant to be doing a feature on fifty years of The Meadows. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes. I got a taxi because my car was at the pub.’

‘That’s right.’ Will looked relieved. ‘And you’d just rung the bell at Mrs Turnbull’s house, when you collapsed. She opened the front door and found you lying groaning on the doorstep.’

‘No, it was Mrs Brown’s house and she gave me tea and cake and I began to feel better. And I stayed there and I thought it was the 1950s house, and I was looking for the cameras.’

‘No, my love,’ said Will, gently. ‘You dreamt that. The doctors said that your memory would be shot to pieces for a while. But you never went into the house. You never got over the doorstep.’

It was too confusing to argue. So I didn’t bother. I just listened to Will’s version of events.

Mrs Turnbull might have been getting on a bit but she was no slouch. Apparently she took one look at me, realised immediately that not only was I very ill, but that it was meningitis. She didn’t mess about, but got straight on the phone and told them precisely what was wrong. The ambulance was there in minutes and had whisked me here. If it hadn’t been for Mrs Turnbull’s quick actions, I would not have lived to tell the tale. Which takes some getting your head around, believe me.

As it was it had been touch and go.

I had been in hospital for over a week, they told me, and Will and my mum and dad – and my brother Dan too –had been at my bedside pretty much all the time.

‘So I haven’t been living in the 1950s?’ I asked Will.

‘No, just nearly dying here in the twenty-first century.’

‘And the farmer didn’t shoot himself?’

‘Not any farmer I know.’

‘And there haven’t been floods and you didn’t borrow a boat from the boating lake?’

‘Not guilty. No floods. No boat. No boating lake.’

‘And … and … you’re not married to Carol? Caz? And you haven’t got three children?’

Will laughed gently. ‘No, last time I looked I definitely wasn’t married to Caz and I have no children at all.’

‘You’re not married to anyone?’

‘No, no one at all.’

‘And it’s all right to love you?’

‘It’s very all right to love me,’ he said, kissing my hand and smiling.

‘That’s good,’ I said and fell back onto the pillows, trying to avoid the sore bits on my head.

The next day my mum was helping me wash, oh so gently sponging me down. I couldn’t wash my hair yet, or get in the shower, but already some of the wires had gone and at least I could put on a proper nightie, and not the hospital issue open-backed thing.

‘Oh, Rosie, I thought we’d lost you,’ she said as she eased the cotton nightie over my head. It was one of my old ones she’d brought from home, I realised, and it smelt of soap and sunshine and warmth.

‘I felt lost. In my head I’ve been away for six weeks or more. I thought I was living in the 1950s. I was working on
The News
but it was all different. It was very real.’

‘Of course it would be, you were very ill. Your brain was swollen and you were full of goodness knows what drugs. Being somewhere else sounds very sensible to me. Though I think I would have chosen somewhere more exotic than the 1950s. A nice warm bit of foreign coast might have been nicer.’

‘It was … interesting. Do you remember the 1950s, Mum?’

‘Not much. I was born just after the Coronation. I remember wearing hand-knitted cardigans and Clark’s sandals and watching
Muffin the Mule
and
Roy Rogers and Trigger.
And your gran wearing a pinny all the time. Except for going to the shops when she would take the pinny off and put a hat and coat on.’