The boys bring home a souvenir

Mary Dunwich writes:

I wasn't feeling too well on Saturday. Some bug has been going round the school, and I must have picked it up at the "Parents' Whinge" meeting on Thursday. Honestly, if it weren't for the free tea and slices of Battenberg I wouldn't bother going. I didn't manage to get a word in edgeways. The whinges this term were: homework is hard, P.E. kits get dirty, the teachers are too strict. And this is just from the parents. Heavens knows what the kids find to complain about.

I was tucked up on the sofa with a pot of tea and a plate of buttered malt loaf, when the door opened and a selection of the Younger Generation slouched in. I noticed hazily that they were grubby, and smelled of soot, woodsmoke, tobacco smoke and....my nose signed off before it reported anything that might distress me.

"Mmmmfff!" I mumbled from beneath the duvet.

"Oh, cheers, Mum!" said James and grabbed my plate of malt loaf. "We're starving!"

"Where've you been?" I sat up and tried to focus.

"London," mumbled Stanley through a mouth of cake.

"Again?" I asked, pouring myself another cup of tea.

"Last week we did the Great Fire of 1666," Stanley answered. "Today we wanted to see Guy Fawkes blowing up the Houses of Parliament in 1605."

"But the thing about the Gunpowder Plot," I said, sipping tea and struggling to concentrate, "The important thing is...it failed. The Houses of Parliament didn't blow up, so there was nothing to see. Er...oh. You didn't make the plot succeed, did you? I think you could do some serious damage to history there."

"Oh, no!" said James cheerfully. "That would have been a bit naughty. We would have ended up killing lots of people. And if we changed history then Stanley's Scouts pack might not hold their bonfire and fireworks display this November 5th, which would be a shame. No, we went to warn Guy Fawkes so he would call off the plot and they wouldn't all get tortured and then hanged, drawn and quartered. That was really evil, what King James had done to them."

"Mmm," I responded. I don't hold with meddling with the fabric of recorded history, but you can't deny that my son's heart is in the right place. "So what did you do?"

"We went to London in March 1605," said Stanley, sitting on my duvet and getting some soot onto it. "I've read this cool book about the plot. Guy Fawkes rented a cellar beneath the House of Lords and by March he had hidden thirty-six barrels of gunpowder in it. They wanted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the Autumn and kill King James, but a member of their gang gave the game away when he warned his brother-in-law to stay away from parliament. We thought it would be easy to find Fawkes in London in the Spring and warn him off."

"But we couldn't get in," continued Jay, who had settled himself on the beanbag. "There were all these guards. We couldn't get anywhere near the Houses of Parliament. We went all round looking for a way in. We looked for ages, until I needed the toilet."

"We told him he could go in the street," chimed in James. "Other people were. There were poos everywhere. But he wouldn't go unless there was a proper toilet. So I thought of going into the nearest pub. Pubs always have toilets. And I thought we might find Guy there, or someone who knew him."

"And they let us in!" said Stanley with astonishment and wonder in his voice. "They let us into a pub, and we're only eleven. People were drinking beer and smoking and everything in there!"

"I don't think there were a lot of laws about taverns in those days," I murmered, trying very hard not to imagine the scene. Of all the places I could wish my boy not to see, a seventeenth-century tavern in London would be fairly high on the list. "What was it like?"

"Dark, smoky, smelly. The toilet was just a bucket in a shed. It didn't flush or anything!" complained Jay. "It was really hard to go."

"He was gone for ages," said Stanley. "While he was gone we got talking with these sailors."

"They were hard to understand," said James. "Funny accents. I think they were Dutch. Albert could understand them a bit. They were really friendly. They shared their dinner with us. Sausages and beer and rum. They let us have a smoke of their pipes too. It wasn't very nice."

"Their breath stank, and their teeth were really horrible, all brown and stumpy," said Stanley. "Maybe it was scurvy. They said they ate ships' biscuits most of the time when they were at sea. They weren't used to eating proper food."

"We gave them a Mars Bar and they got really excited!" said James. "They asked to see all the things we had on us. Luckily Stanley had his rucksack with our provisions in it. We did a trade."

"What did you give them?" I asked with fascination and some concern.

"Golden syrup sandwiches, three bottles of Fruit Shoot, three bananas, a bag of Fangtastics, half a packet of polos, a biro, my best Doctor Who rubber, my sports watch and a mobile phone," answered James promptly. "And the rucksack."

"My Mum's not going to be pleased about that," moaned Stanley. "It's my Scouts one, I need it for our camp-out next month."

"Jay's Mum won't be pleased about the mobile phone," I countered. "You've only just got it back from 1969."

"Oh, that's all right!" said James cheerfully. "It wasn't his mobile phone, it was yours."

"WHAT?" I shrieked.

"You told me to take it," he said innocently. "You told me to get pictures as evidence that we'd really been to the past."

"You have given my mobile phone to a seventeenth-century Dutch sailor," I said as calmly as possible under the provocation. "That's going to give archaeologists nightmares for years. It's not even going to be much use to him. The battery will run down in a couple of days and it will be useless."

"Yeah, he was more excited about the watch," admitted James. "I told him it was waterproof, never needed winding, and was accurate to within about a minute a year. He thought it was great!"

I thought about what I had read about the Dutch exploration of the East in search of spice routes. Anyone with a reliable time-piece would have an absolutely collosal advantage on the sea. They would be able to work out their longitude, and therefore their position, better than any of the explorers of their day. They would be space-time travellers of the seventeenth-century.

"That watch would be worth an absolute fortune in 1605," I mused. "I hope you got something good in exchange?"

"We left it in the kitchen, Mum!" answered James.

The doorbell suddenly started playing "I'm the Laughing Gnome!" and we all jumped.

"Quick Jay, Stanley, James, upstairs for a quick wash and brush-up before Stanley's mum sees you!" I commanded. "I can keep her talking for about five minutes. Come down looking respectable or you'll get grounded again!"

They thumped and crashed their way upstairs, and I opened the door to Lizzie Higgs-Boson. Luckily she was quite happy to grumble about the "Parent's Whinge" meeting, so I didn't have to delay her by forcing her to have some tea and cake while her son and Jay cleaned themselves up. A quarter of an hour later I was free to go into the kitchen, to wash up my tea things. That was when I discovered the grubby, maritime-looking (and smelling) hessian sack on the floor by the dishwasher.

I prodded it cautiously. The sack stirred. Remembering the rat that Stanley had brought back from 1666 I felt suddenly nervous. What living creature would my son and his friends consider to be a fair swap for their sandwiches and some twenty-first century technology?

Rather shakily I untied the top of the sack and opened it up. A beady yellow eye glared at me reproachfully. It was attached to an enormous bird, about the size of Stanley's little brother Ivor. It had pigeony grey feathers, a curved and pointed beak some nine inches long, absurd little stubby wings, short, fat yellow legs and a tuft of big curly feathers for a tail.

"Aargh!" I yelled and jumped smartly backwards, hitting my head on the extractor fan. "Oh my Gods! You're a....!"

"Doo-doo!" said the dodo.