Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera Read online

  How long has it taken you to read this story? Couple of hours (half that, if you skipped the bits like this)? But it took seven months to happen, and you were outside those months in your couple of hours.

  And it isn’t finished yet. That’s another thing about stories—they have ends. Time doesn’t. Happy ever after? Ever after? Till the stars fold in on themselves, the way they will one day—only there won’t be any days because long before that the sun will have gone giant and swallowed the earth and then it will have gone small and become a spinning dot, hurtling round hundreds of times a minute, only there won’t be any minutes …?

  All right, all right, stories have ends. Let’s finish.

  I took the mice back and we all heaved a sigh of relief. Then I went away for a break, telling people I was going into a rest-home because I’d had some sort of a breakdown brought on by overwork getting the clock finished in time for the opening. (That was to account for my dealings with Lilith and Michael.) I showed George Baff’s nephew how to wind the weights up and told him he wasn’t to touch another thing.

  I went home and fussed over my cats, who I’d been neglecting. Then I found a lawyer, a really bright woman who got my drift at once and told me what to say. I went back to Branton good and ready to have it out with the Town Clerk.

  I caught him on the hop. Michael must have told Lilith about me going gaga, and Lilith had told her dad, so he wasn’t expecting to find me with all my marbles in place and every penny counted. It came to a tidy sum.

  They never like spending money, Town Clerks.

  I couldn’t ask him to settle Granddad’s bill—that was too late, in law—but I said I wanted to see some sort of justice done. I still had Granddad’s plans, and I was the only man in the world who understood how the clock worked. (I wasn’t lying. Tracy’s a mouse, and female with it.) I was getting on, I said. They’d need me to teach someone how to take care of the clock when I was gone, right?

  A very fair bargain I offered him. They’d settle my bill without question, and I’d put the money into a Trust. I didn’t need it—I’m rolling, thanks to some of the things my dad invented for his airships. The airships themselves were a flop, but some of the bits and bobs turned out really useful for other things—the pump that pumps the hot water round in your central heating, and the special switches on the traffic-lights at the end of your road, for instance …

  Where was I?

  Oh yes, the Trust. The clock itself went into the Trust, and the plans, and the money they owed me, and the money they’d get from marketing T-shirts and things and letting the clock be used in telly-ads, and so on. Minnie and me were trustees, being Granddad’s heirs, with power to appoint our successors, and—this is what really mattered—power to choose a clock-keeper.

  It was only a part-time job but more than forty people answered our ad. We chose the likeliest four and took them up to the going-chamber in turn, pretending it was to let them see what the job involved. There was one young woman, Donna Lacey, a single mum with twins. She didn’t know a thing about clocks but I liked the look of her and Minnie liked the sound of her.

  She stood in the going-chamber and stared at the dancers, all of them still in their between-strikes poses.

  “Ever since I was tiny I’ve wanted to come up here and see them close,” she said. “I was born just across the square. I used to watch them from my bedroom window when I was supposed to be asleep. I still think Lady Winter’s the most beautiful thing in the world. And I suppose this is Old Joe.”

  “Fetch him a biff,” said Minnie. “Don’t be afraid. Harder than that.”

  Donna did as she was told and thumped the dead metal with the side of her fist, and the bell woke and answered with its intertwining voices, something I could never make happen though I’d hit it pretty well every time I passed.

  “She’ll do,” said Minnie. “She was born with his ringing in her bones.”

  “But I told you I don’t know anything about clocks,” said Donna. “I just wanted the chance to come and look at the dancers.”

  “You don’t have to know anything,” I said.

  I opened Lady Summer’s back and Tracy skipped out on to my hand and I took her round and put her on Lady Winter’s shoulder. I stood Donna where she could look into Lady Winter’s eyes.

  Nothing happened for a bit. Then she laughed.

  “I see,” she said. “She’s going to be the clock-keeper. I’m just the assistant.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  She chatted away to Tracy for a while, telling her about her children.

  And Tracy told her about her brother Kevin untying one of the balloon-seller’s souvenir balloons and nearly getting carried away to Gloag, and her Uncle Will starting to build a grand piano, and how she was going to marry Sebastian next week, and Uncle Gerald having a fight with old Peter Hickory over Madeline …

  I haven’t room for all of it. Tracy’s a lovely mouse, but she does talk. Donna took to the idea at once. She seemed to find it much easier than I did—I was never any good at foreign languages, when I was at school.

  “Enjoying yourself?” I said.

  “Oh, it’s so exciting!” said Donna. “I never imagined. Only don’t they think quick!”

  “They’ve got to,” I said, and I explained about mouse time.

  “I see,” said Donna. “Only, well, what happens … I mean, how long does a mouse live?”

  “Ordinary mice, about three years. But old Ezra Hickory’s five. Don’t worry, Donna. Tracy will teach one of her kids about the clock. Did she tell you she’s marrying Sebastian Dock next week?”

  “She’s asked me to the wedding,” said Donna. “I’ll have to get a babysitter. I said I’d make her some cheese straws. Isn’t it lucky I’m not afraid of mice?”

  LAST ESSAY ON MICE, CLOCKS, BELLS, PEOPLE, SCIENCE, ETCETERA, ESPECIALLY ETCETERA

  It came to me in the middle of the night. My age, you wake quite a bit. So I was lying there with my head full of nothing, when all of a sudden I began to wonder if the Branton Town Hall Clock wasn’t a bit like this old earth of ours, with its seasons, and the way it’s all got to balance to keep going, and bits of it we’ll never understand, and us messing around with it not knowing what we’re doing, and us sharing it with things like mice, and it needing them as much as it needs us, and all that.

  Maybe that’s what Granddad meant, building his clock the way he did.

  Think about it.

  A Biography of Peter Dickinson

  Peter Dickinson is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird, hooting voice—in fact, he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf’s crazy twin, but he’s just rather absentminded, thinking about something else, or daydreaming.

  He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. Baboons sometimes came into the school playground. When people went swimming in the Zambezi they did it in a big wooden cage let down into the water so that the crocs couldn’t get at them. For the hot weather the family went south to his grandfather’s sheep and ostrich farm in South Africa.

  When Peter was seven the family came back to England so that he and his brothers could go to English schools, where they taught him mostly Latin and Greek. He didn’t have an English lesson after he was twelve, and nobody ever told him to write a story. He was fairly good at games.

  He’s led an ordinary kind of life—not much by way of adventures, but some silly things. Such as? Well, when he had to join the army just after World War II, they managed to turn him into two people, so he was bashing away at infantry training at a camp in Northern Ireland when two seasick military policemen showed up and tried to arrest him for being a deserter from a different camp in the South of England, where his other self was supposed to be bashing away.

  He was tutoring a boy in a huge old castle in Scotland wh
en the butler (it was that sort of household) said to him at breakfast one day, “Ah, sir, it’s a long time since we heard screams coming from the West Wing!” (Peter’s screams, not the boy’s.)

  And he was knocked down by a tram on his way to the interview for his first job with the magazine Punch and arrived all covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job because he was the only candidate. He stayed there seventeen years.

  He and his first wife had two daughters and two sons, and he now has six grandchildren. He and his second wife, the American writer Robin McKinley, live in an almost-too-pretty country town in the South of England.

  Peter says he didn’t become a writer. He just is one and always has been, ever since he can remember, the way a goldfish is a goldfish and can’t be anything else. Go to a zoo and look at one of the big birds, a condor, say, a creature made to soar above the Andes. They’ve probably clipped one of its wings so that it can’t hurt itself trying to fly around its cage, but it’s still a creature made to soar above the Andes. If you somehow stopped Peter writing, he’d still be a writer.

  But he was a poet and a journalist before he started on books. He tried a murder story first, but got stuck halfway through. Then he had a science fiction–y kind of nightmare and decided to turn it into a children’s story, mainly to see if writing it would unstick the other book. (It did. That book won a prize for the best murder story of the year, and the children’s book was made into a TV series.)

  Since then Peter has written almost sixty books, most of them on a little old portable typewriter—one draft to see what he’s got and what else he needs to know and so on, then a bit of research, then a complete rewrite, beginning to end, and then, if all’s well, only a bit more tinkering. Sometimes it used to take a few months, sometimes a year or more. A few years back he moved over to a PC. It makes writing seem a very different kind of process—easier in some ways, harder in others.

  The ideas come from all over the place—daydreams, sometimes, or a kid on a long car trip saying, “Tell us a new story, Dad.” Or something he’s heard or read—a voice on the radio saying, “Even a hardened government soldier may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child.” For the best of them it feels as if the book had knocked on the door of Peter’s mind and said, “Write me.” Then he’ll spend half a year or more letting the stranger in and finding out who or what it is.

  Peter has written all sorts of books—crime mainly for adults, though some of these are almost straight literary novels. For children, he has written fantasies, historical fiction, modern adventure, science fiction, and so on. There won’t be many more. They used to come gushing out of the hillside like a mountain stream. Then he had to lift them up bucket by bucket from deeper and deeper wells, but now the wells are empty. He says.

  Peter Dickinson was the second of four sons of a British colonial civil servant and a South African farmer’s daughter, born December 16, 1927, in the middle of Africa, in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

  Here are Peter and his brother Richard as children in Africa, where many of Peter’s books take place. In fact, he used this photo as a pivotal clue in Perfect Gallows.

  The family came “home” in 1935 so that the boys could go to British boarding schools, but within a few months, when Peter was seven, their father died suddenly of a strangulated gut, leaving their mother with very little money. Their British relations were close knit and supportive, and in 1936 Peter was sent to Saint Ronan’s, a prep school in Worthing with a charismatic headmaster named Dick Harris. Pictured here are Peter (in the red jersey), age eight, with his mother, elder brother, Richard, and younger brother Hugh.

  This is a photo taken in 1936 during a family holiday at Stutton. The Fisons had been very good friends with Peter’s father and stayed close to his family after his death. They invited the Dickinsons to stay with them for several vacations at their house on one of the Suffolk inlets. They would spend most of the day in boats on a local pond or on the nearby beach. Here you can see the kids lined up on the beach from tallest to shortest. From left to right: Elizabeth Fison, Peter’s brother Richard, Peter, Gay Fison, and Peter’s youngest brother, David. Peter doesn’t remember why his brother Hugh is not in this picture. Perhaps he was taking the photo.

  Here’s a picture from 1937. One of Peter’s aunts had a home on the Sussex coast at Littlestone, and Peter’s family used to go there during school vacations. Peter remembers that they used to play a lot of games there, including a family version of hide-and-seek. Here you can see them taking a break for some ice cream. From left to right: Peter’s cousin Anthony Butterwick, Richard, Peter, and Hugh. David was too young then to play these sorts of games.

  When the German invasion of England looked imminent, St. Ronan’s was evacuated to Bicton Park, a great red-brick Georgian house in the idyllic setting of a large deer park in Devon. Peter’s novel Hindsight is based on his time here. The curriculum was mainly Latin, Greek, and math, with some French, history, and geography, and only one English class a week. Peter was never asked to write a story, either while at St. Ronan’s or later.

  In 1941 Peter took the scholarship exam for Eton against the advice of Dick Harris, who thought he wasn’t up to it. But his math score saved him, even though he was the bottom scholar in a bad year, just as his father had been, and he was accepted. After an uncertain start at Eton, Peter enjoyed his time there. He turned out to be fairly good at the bizarre versions of soccer they played, and was elected to Pop, the equally bizarre society of school prefects chosen not by the authorities but by the students themselves.

  In 1948 Peter went to King’s College, Cambridge, on a closed exhibition (a minor sort of scholarship, exclusive to Etonians). He feels he wasted his time there and worked ineffectually, having taken little part in the many extracurricular activities on offer. After a year he switched from classics to English studies. He failed to get the hoped-for first in his finals, but the college gave him a bursary to study for a PhD. Halfway through this, he walked into the dean’s office. The dean looked up from the letter he was reading and asked, “Would you like a job on Punch?”

  Peter Dickinson at an editorial meeting at Punch in the early 1950s. (Photo credit: Picture Post, Bert Hardy)

  Peter and Mary Rose Barnard (1926–1988) were married at Bramdean, Hampshire, on April 26, 1953. She was the daughter of a naval officer who was senior enough to ride a white horse along with the other Lords of the Admiralty in the coronation procession for Queen Elizabeth. Peter and Mary set up house in an apartment in Pimlico, he continuing at Punch and she working in the display department of Heal’s furniture store.

  In 1955 Philippa Dickinson was born at Wingrave, near Aylesbury, Bucks; Polly arrived thirteen months later in a small house behind Harrods in London; John came five years after that; and James followed eighteen months after John in the terrace house in Notting Dale, London, where the family lived for the next twenty years. Here the family is pictured at the weekend cottage on a hill above Crondall, Hampshire, with a marvelous view northeastward over the village and across miles of countryside. This is the setting for The Devil’s Children, the third book in the Changes Trilogy.

  Peter loved reading to his children at bedtime and carried on doing so long after they learned to read for themselves. Here he is reading to John and James in 1967.

  Peter’s author photo from the jacket of The Seventh Raven, taken by Faye Godwin in 1981.

  In 1990 Peter was asked to give a talk at a conference in Boston and arranged to take advantage of the free Atlantic flights by seeing various people in New York the following week. Vastly underestimating the distances involved, he invited himself to stay with Robin McKinley, author of The Red Magician, in Maine for the intervening weekend. The result was like a car accident, changing lives. Within ten days of his return, they had arranged by telephone that she would lease her house and come and live with him in England. They married on January 3,
1991.

  Peter and Robin love traveling with their dogs. They have often explored the outer fringes of the British Isles, taking the dogs with them.

  Peter’s wonderful family during Christmas in 2002.

  In 2009 Peter was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to children’s literature in the Queen’s birthday honors list.

  Peter currently resides in southern England with Robin. He now has six grandchildren.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by Peter Dickinson

  Illustrations copyright © 1993 by Emma Chichester-Clark

  Cover design by Andrea Worthington

  978-1-5040-2511-9

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com