Just a bit of fun

You know how the damned things start; it was the same for all of the books… The day was perfect.  A zephyr barely disturbed the leaves on the trees, their leaves that wondrous shade of green of the newly awakened tree.  Small, white, fluffy clouds hung dazzling in a sky of astonishing blue. Not too hot and not too cold, the day foretold yet another…

Well, it bloody would it?  I mean, I was fifteen in 1941 and 83 years later, here I am, still fifteen and still in those bloody stupid stories beloved by every moronic, half-witted child across the entire bloody universe. And they want to rewrite them. God!  Why?

But that’s swearing.  And as a Child-Of-The-Five, I would never resort to swearing, would I?.  And look at we Five: a cherubic blonde girl of ten, a half wit of a boy just younger than me who is so nice that I want to strangle him with my bare hands, a girl who thinks she’s a boy – eighty-three years before any of the other little sods thought of trying it on – and a dog that stinks, that everyone, apart from, me loves. 

Me?  I’m stuck in a time warp.  A groundhog day where everything is perfect, in a world which has values only of pure black and pure white.  Where the bad guys are obvious because of the clothes they wore and the fact that they were those pig-ignorant working-class people that people like me used to clean our houses and serve us in shops.  Bad was bad (them) and good was good (like us).

And it’s not just me; the chaps in the dorm were fed up as well.  ‘Grow up Julian,’ they would snap. ‘Get out, get laid, and for God’s sake… GET US OUT OF HERE!’ So, I told them of us five; and the adventures.  And how, with mother being ill and father living abroad, we had to go and say with our Uncle Quentin and Aunt Fanny. Big mistake.  ‘Aunt Fanny!’ they’d chorused.  ‘Aunt Fanny?  You know what a…?’  Yes I did, but what about the picnics with loads cakes, and cucumber sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer?

The chaps were not impressed.  They wanted out of the time freeze.  Okay, so I tried.  And it was only the other… God!  I can’t recall when exactly.  It was my turn…  Yes, I, let me think …  Matron had just called into our dorm and said goodnight.  Well, it was the first time that I’d really paid attention to her.  But she was quite… well, I think that the word tasty seemed to fit.  It was my turn, too, as I said.  It was still only half past nine.  Yes, I know that I should have been asleep. But as soon as Matron turned out the lights, torches went on and the other chaps were making silent words at me telling me to get a shift on.

I pulled on my clothes, quietly opened the dorm window and… of course there was..  there was a branch from the adjacent  oak tree which rested just under the window ledge.  I straddled the branch, shinned down the tree, raced across to where I’d left my bike and pedalled to the local Offie.

It was Molly’s night on.  She knew me.  And I mean, she knew me.  And she already had the bottles on the counter ready.  ‘Have we got time for…?’ she whispered in that … tone.  Tempting, but what would the chaps say if I’d delayed their…?  Three bottles of extra strong cider and a small bottle of gin.  Not a bloody Ginger Beer in sight, thank god. I shook my head and, leaning over the counter, gave her a lingering kiss before scarpering with the loot.  Not the sort of thing that the brats would read in Five Go Off to Camp, but Hey!  After eighty-three years…  I ran out to my bike, pushed the bottles into the saddle bag, got my leg over (not…, I thought sadly) and pushed off. It was the lights, the bright lights.  The crash; the crump.  Police constable Dodd said, ‘Nothing to see here, move along please,’ and that was all I remembered.

Until now. My fate had caught up with me again.  The books had subsumed me; had resumed me, into their relentless grip, and I was off again into another idyllic day into another adventure where four idiotic children laid low the forces of evil, almost losing out only to be rescued by a scruffy dog that that had apparently more intelligence than the local university AI supercomputer. Whatever the hell that is!

But I felt different. I felt less like a … God I couldn’t even remember my age.  Was it fifteen? Or should it have been closer to a hundred?  I closed my eyes and went with the flow.

I opened them.  I was in a train, slowing down with the screeching of metal-on-metal brakes.  There was a sigh, a release of steam and the train shuddered to a stop. ‘Withseas Halt,’ a porter on the platform cried out.  That was our stop.  I started to rise out of my seat, the others bounding out of theirs with an enthusiasm that made me want to kill them.  Timmy the dog did a backward somersault before jumping up and adoringly licking George’s face.  Surreptitiously, I kicked the mutt whilst no one was looking. The dog’s tail dropped between its legs.  It gave me a ‘look’ and slinked of out of range of my nicely polished brogues.

We jumped from the carriage, and I stared at the little train.  One tiny puffing steam engine and a single coach.  We were the only ones to alight from the train. The porter came up to us, a huge beam on his simple, working-class face.  He doffed his cap.  ‘’Pony and trap at the gates, young sirs and miss,’ he said in a magnificently obsequious way.  The train’s whistled blew and with much puffing and clanking, the little train eased itself out of the station. I had the urge to kick the crawling bastard, but he was way bigger than me and I resisted the temptation.  ‘What year is this?’ I asked suddenly.  Why?  How the hell should I know?  I just did, okay?

‘1947,’ he said, his subservient look giving way to one of surprise.  I shrugged and pointed to our bags and left the man to struggle with them out to the little cart outside the Halt.

There was a man on the driving board – it was Perkins, Uncle Quentin’s rather sinister-looking valet.  He snarled at us as we crawled aboard, next to the luggage.  A bad’un I thought, realising that this man was already in the frame of our next adventure.  He looked evil, was working class and so fitted the criteria.

I stared at the others.  They were all chatting happily; it was only me that was silent and a little morose.  But there was something about them that was different, too.  They were all a little… bigger?  Dick’s voice had broken, and Anne seemed to have developed a figure at some time.  When? 

The little cart drove on for a few minutes before dropping down a steep track leading to a large, stark-looking house.  The house was perched on the edge of a steep cliff overlooking a sea of such a beautiful blue that it was almost heart stopping.  Kirin Island was just off the coast and there was a small, pretty, yacht in full sail approaching the beach that only George knew the approach to. The swine had better not land there or George will be furious.  She was a nasty little sod at the best of times.  No wonder she wanted to be a boy!

We dropped from the back of the cart and made our way into the rear of the huge house.  Elspeth, the new cook, gave us a dark look.  She, too, was working class and thus an immediate candidate for being a villain.  But Aunt Fanny was there.  ‘Oh, children,’ she sobbed.  ‘Your Uncle Quentin has cut his finger on one his scientific papers.  He will need to be hospitalised and so I’m going to have to leave you in the hands of Elspeth, our new cook and Perkins.  But I’m sure that you might be all right on your own for a week.’ 

With that, she hurried from the house and into the powerful big black car that Uncle Quentin had just backed up to the house.  She jumped in and the car, wheels spinning, sped up off up the track and was soon out of sight. In dismay, we stared at Elspeth and Perkins who were now giving us the most evil looks that I’d ever seen.  We were now alone and totally in their power.  And they were working class, too!  What on earth was going to become of us?  Our Five Adventure had got off to a bad start, already.

George stared at the car that his/her mother and father had driven off in.  He/she/it hadn’t seen them since she’d been sent off to school at the end of the last hols.  I guessed that she/her/him/they was already heart broken. I was right.  With a sigh, George reached over to her small travelling bag that Perkins had dropped onto the kitchen floor, rummaged in the bottom and pulled out a packet of twenty Senior Service – untipped.  Pulling one out, she put it in her mouth before handing the packet round to the rest of us. Perkins looked shocked, his sinister face showing displeasure.  ‘Don’t just stand there,’ George snapped, ‘Get me a light.’ Cowed, Perkins did as he was told.

There was the sound of a vehicle tortuously making its way down the track towards the house.  I went outside to see what it was; it was an old 1930’s flat-bed truck.  The load area was filled with crates of something and sat on them was a whole gaggle of young - and common, working-class people.  What was happening?  These people should be back where they belonged – in the slums. We all stared at George.

‘I knew the old farts couldn’t stand the thought of us coming for the hols and would want to bugger off asap,’ he/she/they, it said.  ‘So, I organised a party.  On that truck, there’s enough booze and fags to keep us bladdered for the whole week.  Gang, this is going to be the best Famous Five adventure ever.’

Dick had rolled his own cigarette with cigarette papers that he’d had in his pocket.  He crumbled something into a tobacco mix he had, rolled the joint and lit it.  He took a drag, aromatic smoke filling the air.  His eyes partially closed, and he took on a dreamy look about him. Now  what the hell was he smoking, I wondered?

A young thug came into the kitchen and put his arm around Anne.  She lit her own cigarette, with her own cigarette lighter, inhaled deeply and blew a perfect smoke ring.  She saw me staring at her in astonishment.  ‘For f***k’s sake, Julian,’ she snapped.  ‘You are such a bore.  Why don’t you just F***k off and grow up!’

As if!  The pain was there, my head hurt.  People were talking.  ‘He’ll come round in a moment.’ Someone was saying.  ‘That was a bad accident the lad had outside the Off license.  He’s Julian from the Famous Five, you know.  He’ll be off on an adventure soon; you wait and see.’

My heart stopped; my head reeled.  At what stage did reality stop and… reality resume?