The Reluctant Time Traveller by Janis Mackay Read Free Book Online

and stunned, like we had dropped from the moon. I glanced down at my wet jeans and trainers and baggy skateboarding T-shirt. Agnes had on cut-off jeans and a bright yellow T-shirt. We didn’t look that bad.
    “Ow,” he whimpered. No wonder – I could smell TCP.
    “Would you like a painkiller?” Agnes asked, and that really freaked him out. I guess they might not have the word ‘painkiller’ in 1914. Maybe Calpol hadn’t been invented yet. He dropped his wet cap, jumped to his feet, made a lunge for a dented tin mop-bucket behind us, and bolted off between two of the outbuildings. As he ran, I saw the soles of his boots were coming away. “Please, don’t worry,” Agnes called after him, “I didn’t mean…”
    But he was off, him and his clanging bucket and his broken boots. His cap was lying on the cobbled ground. I bent down and picked it up. “It might come in handy,” Agnes said, stuffing her first-aid kit hastily back into the rucksack. She glanced about like she expected other servant boys to come crashing into us. But all was quiet again. The poor guy had disappeared.
    Agnes looked me up and down then examined her knee-length jeans. I knew she was really proud of these shorts. She had cut them herself and fringed them around the knee, and even put in a few more rips and things. But next to the poor guy in the brown jacket, our clothes definitely looked out of place. “You’re going to have to find something more old fashioned to wear,” she whispered, rummaging about in her rucksack. “You should have thought of that. I brought something.” Then she shook out this piece of brown material that looked like a baggy sack. Next thing she pulled it on. “I made a dress,” she whispered, tugging it down. All of a sudden, Agnes Brown looked the part. “Pretty awful, eh?” She grinned. It was. But she did look right. She had even done something to curl her hair. In all the rush I hadn’t noticed.
    “Nice historic hair, Agnes,” I said.
    “Thanks,” she said, shaking it about.
    A bell rang inside the house. “We need to get out of here,” I said, and we ran over the cobbles the opposite direction from where the guy had gone, round the stables, into the garden and over the grass. My jeans were wet and sticking to me, but it felt good to be back in our garden, even though it was different. The grass was all smooth and freshly mown, no tussocks, no bare patches. We found a tree. I think it was the oak tree we often climbed in 2014, only not as big. Agnes was up it in a flash, even with the bulky rucksack on her back. I wanted to check out the den but this didn’t seem like the moment. I heaved myself up onto a thick branch after her.
    Agnes had found a good sitting place and I squeezed in next to her. Up in the safety of the tree she wedged the rucksack between two branches. “Good thing I brought some chocolate,” she announced, unwrapping a huge bar.
    She was right about that. This was the kind of thing we would do in the gang: hang out in trees and munch onchocolate. It felt kind of comfortable up there. We polished the chocolate off pretty fast.
    “How much have you got in there, Curly?” I asked her, picturing a whole sweetie shop in her rucksack.
    “That was it, Soggy,” she replied, with a smile. “Starvation ahead.” Then I laughed. My jeans were damp, and a bit of branch was poking into my ribs, but it’s amazing what half a bar of chocolate can do for your mood. I was actually starting to feel excited about being in the past. And there was something magical about Agnes’s rucksack, like everything we needed would miraculously come out of it.
    As if on cue she said, “I’ve made a plan,” and fished her diary out. She opened it but didn’t actually read it. She obviously knew her plan off by heart. “First: find out where we are.” She grinned across at me, her eyes shining in the flickering sunlight that was straying in through the leaves. “We got that right, didn’t we