The Secret of Platform 13 (2 page)

The Queen was absolutely besotted about her son and the King was so happy that he thought he would burst, and all over the Island the people rejoiced because you can tell very early how a baby is going to turn out and they could see that the Prince was going to be just the kind of ruler that they wanted.

Of course as soon as the child was born there were queues of people round the palace wanting to look after him and be his nurse: Wise Women who wanted to teach him things and sirens who wanted to sing to him and hags who wanted to show him weird tricks. There was even a mermaid who seemed to think she could look after a baby even if it meant she had to be trundled round the palace in a bath on wheels.

But although the Queen thanked everyone most politely , the nurse she chose for her baby was an ordinary human. Or rather it was three ordinary humans: triplets whose names were Violet and Lily and Rose. They had come to the Island as young girls and were proper trained nursery nurses who knew how to change nappies and bring up wind and sieve vegetables, and the fact that they couldn’t do any magic was a relief to the Queen who sometimes felt she had enough magic in her life. Having triplets seemed to her a good idea because looking after babies goes on night and day and this way there would always be someone with spiky red hair and a long nose and freckles to soothe the Prince and rock him and sing to him, and he wouldn’t be startled by the change because however remarkable the baby was, he wouldn’t be able to tell Violet from Lily or Lily from Rose.

So the three nurses came and they did indeed look after the Prince most devotedly and everything went beautifully – for a while. But when the baby was three months old, there came the time of the Opening of the Gump – and after that nothing was ever the same again.

There was always excitement before the Opening. In the harbour, the sailors made the three-masted ship ready to sail to the Secret Cove; those people who wanted to leave the Island started their packing and said their goodbyes, and rest houses were prepared for those who would come the other way.

It was now that homesickness began to attack Lily and Violet and Rose.

Homesickness is a terrible thing. Children at boarding schools sometimes feel as though they’re going to die of it. It doesn’t matter what your home is like – it’s that it’s yours that matters. Lily and Violet loved the Island and they adored the Prince, but now they began to remember the life they had led as little girls in the shabby streets of north London.

‘Do you remember the Bingo Halls?’ asked Lily .

‘All the shouting from inside when someone won?’

‘And Saturday night at the Odeon with a bag of crisps?’ said Violet.

‘The clang of the fruit machines in Paddy’s Parlour,’ said Rose.

They went on like this for days, quite forgetting how unhappy they had been as children: teased at school, never seeing a clean blade of grass and beaten by their father. So unhappy that they’d taken to playing in King’s Cross Station and been there when the door opened in the gump, and couldn’t go through it fast enough.

‘I know we can’t go Up There,’ said Lily . ‘ Not with the Prince to look after. But maybe Their Majesties would let us sail with the ship and just look at the dear old country?’

So they asked the Queen if they could take the baby Prince on the ship and wait with him in the Secret Cove – and the Queen said no. The thought of being parted from her baby made her stomach crunch up so badly that she felt quite sick.

It was because she minded so much that she began to change her mind. Was she being one of those awful drooling mothers who smother children instead of letting them grow up free and unafraid? She spoke to the King, hoping he would forbid his son to go, but he said: ‘Well, dear, it’s true that adventures are good for people even when they are very young. Adventures can get into a person’s blood even if he doesn’t remember having them. And surely you trust the nurses?’

Well, she did, of course. And she trusted the sailors who manned the ship – and sea air, as everybody knows, is terribly good for the lungs.

So she agreed and had a little weep in her room, and the nurses took the baby aboard in his hand-woven rush basket with its lace-edged hood and settled him down for the voyage.

Just before the ship was due to sail, the Queen rushed out of the palace, her face as white as chalk, and said: ‘No, no! Bring him back! I don’t want him to go!’

But when she reached the harbour, she was too late. The ship was just a speck in the distance, and only the gulls echoed her tragic voice.

Mrs Trottle was rich. She was so rich that she had eleven winter coats and five diamond necklaces and her bath had golden taps. Mr Trottle, her husband, was a banker and spent his days lending money to people who already had too much of it and refusing to lend it to people who needed it. The house the Trottles lived in was in the best part of London beside a beautiful park and not far from Buckingham Palace. It had an ordinary address but the tradesmen called it Trottle Towers because of the spiky railings that surrounded it and the statues in the garden and the flagpole.

Although Larina Trottle was perfectly strong and well and Landon Trottle kept fit by hiring a man to pummel him in his private gym, the Trottles had no less than five servants to wait on them: a butler, a cook, a chauffeur, a housemaid and a gardener. They had three cars and seven portable telephones which Mr Trottle sat on sometimes by mistake, and a hunting lodge in Scotland where he went to shoot deer, and a beach house in the South of France with a flat roof on which Mrs Trottle lay with nothing on so as to get a sun tan which was
not
a pleasant sight.

But there was one thing they didn’t have. They didn’t have a baby.

As the years passed and no baby came along, Mrs Trottle got angrier and angrier. She glared at people pushing prams, she snorted when babies appeared on television gurgling and advertising disposable nappies. Even puppies and kittens annoyed her.

Then after nearly ten years of marriage she decided to go and adopt a baby.

First, though, she went to see the woman who had looked after her when she was small. Nanny Brown was getting on in years. She was a tiny, grumpy person who soaked her false teeth in brandy and never got into bed without looking to see if there was a burglar hiding underneath, but she knew everything there was to know about babies.

‘You’d better come with me,’ Mrs Trottle said. ‘And I want that old doll of mine.’

So Nanny Brown went to fetch the doll which was one of the large, old-fashioned ones with eyes that click open and shut, and lace dresses, and cold, china arms and legs.

And on a fine day towards the end of June, the chauffeur drove Mrs Trottle to an orphanage in the north of England and beside her in the Rolls Royce sat Nanny Brown looking like a cross old bird and holding the china doll in her lap.

They reached the orphanage. Mrs Trottle swept in.

‘I have come to choose a baby,’ she said. ‘I’m prepared to take either a boy or a girl but it must be healthy , o f course, and not more than three months old and I’d prefer it to have fair hair.’

Matron looked at her. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have any babies for adoption,’ she said. ‘There’s a waiting list.’

‘A
waiting list
!’ Mrs Trottle’s bosom swelled so much that it looked as if it was going to take off into space. ‘My good woman, do you know who I am? I am Larina Trottle! My husband is the head of Trottle and Blatherspoon, the biggest merchant bank in the City and his salary is five hundred thousand pounds a year.’

Matron said she was glad to hear it.

‘Anyone lucky enough to become a Trottle would be brought up like a prince,’ Mrs Trottle went on. ‘And this doll which I have brought for the baby is a real antique. I have been offered a very large sum of money for it. This doll is priceless!’

Matron nodded and said she was sure Mrs Trottle was right, but she had no babies for adoption and that was her last word.

The journey back to London was not a pleasant one. Mrs Trottle ranted and raved; Nanny Brown sat huddled up with the doll in her lap; the chauffeur drove steadily southwards.

Then just as they were coming into London, the engine began to make a nasty clunking noise.

‘Oh no, this is too much!’ raged Mrs Trottle. ‘I will
not
allow you to break down in these disgusting, squalid streets.’ They were close to King’s Cross Station and it was eleven o’clock at night.

But the clunking noise grew worse.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to stop at this garage, Madam,’ said the chauffeur.

They drew up by one of the petrol pumps. The chauffeur got out to look for a mechanic.

Mrs Trottle, in the back seat, went on ranting and raving.

Then she grew quiet. On a bench between the garage and a fish and chip shop sat a woman whose frizzy red hair and long nose caught the lamplight. She was wearing the uniform of a nursery nurse and beside her was a baby’s basket . . . a basket most finely woven out of rushes whose deep hood sheltered whoever lay within.

The chauffeur returned with a mechanic and began to rev the engine. Exhaust fumes from the huge car drifted towards the bench where the red-haired woman sat holding on to the handle of the basket. Her head nodded, but she jerked herself awake.

The chauffeur revved even harder and another cloud of poisonous gas rolled towards the bench.

The nurse’s head nodded once more.

‘Give me the doll!’ ordered Larina Trottle – and got out of the car.

For eight days the nurses had waited on the ship as it anchored off the Secret Cove. They had sung to the Prince and rocked him and held him up to see the sea birds and the cliffs of their homeland. They had taken him ashore while they paddled and gathered shells and they had welcomed the people who came though the gump, as they arrived in the mouth of the cave.

Travelling through the gump takes only a moment. The suction currents and strange breezes that are stored up there during nine long years have their own laws and can form themselves into wind baskets into which people can step and be swooshed up or down in an instant. It is a delightful way to travel but can be muddling for those not used to it and the nurses made themselves useful helping the newcomers on to the ship.

Then on the ninth day something different came through the tunnel . . . and that something was – a smell.

The nurses were right by the entrance in the cliff when it came to them and as they sniffed it up, their eyes filled with tears.

‘Oh Lily!’ said poor Violet, and her nose quivered.

‘Oh Rose!’ said poor Lily and clutched her sister.

It was the smell of their childhood: the smell of fish and chips. Every Saturday night their parents had sent them out for five packets and they’d carried them back, warm as puppies, through the lamplit streets.

‘Do you remember the batter, all sizzled and gold?’ asked Lily .

‘And the soft whiteness when you got through to the fish?’ said Violet.

‘The way the chips went soggy when you doused them with vinegar?’ said Rose.

And as they stood there, they thought they would die if they didn’t just once more taste the glory that was fish and chips.

‘We can’t go,’ said Lily , w ho was the careful one. ‘You know we can’t.’

‘Why can’t we?’ asked Rose. ‘We’d be up there in a minute. It’s a good two hours still before the Closing.’

‘What about the Prince? There’s no way we can leave him,’ said Lily .

‘No, of course we can’t,’ said Violet. ‘We’ll take him. He’ll love going in a swoosherette, won’t you my poppet?’

And indeed the Prince crowed and smiled and looked as though he would like nothing better.

Well, to cut a long story short, the three sisters made their way to the mouth of the cave, climbed into a wind basket – and in no time at all found themselves in King’s Cross Station.

Smells are odd things. They follow you about when you’re not thinking about them, but when you put your nose to where they ought to be, they aren’t there. The nurses wandered round the shabby streets and to be honest they were wishing they hadn’t come. The pavements were dirty, passing cars splattered them with mud and the Odeon Cinema where they’d seen such lovely films had been turned into a bowling alley.

Then suddenly there it was again – the smell – stronger than ever, and now, beside an All Night garage, they saw a shop blazing with light and in the window a sign saying
FRYING NOW
.

The nurses hurried forward. Then they stopped.

‘We can’t take the Prince into a common fish and chip shop,’ said Lily. ‘It wouldn’t be proper.’

The others agreed. Some of the people queuing inside looked distinctly rough.

‘Look, you wait over there on the bench with the baby,’ said Rose. She was half an hour older than the others and often took the lead. ‘Violet and I’ll go in and get three packets. We’re only a couple of streets away from the station – there’s plenty of time.’

So Lily went to sit on the bench and Rose and Violet went in to join the queue. Of course when they reached the counter, the cod had run out – something always runs out when it’s your turn. But the man went to fetch some more and there was nothing to worry about: they had three quarters of an hour before the Closing of the Gump and they were only ten minutes walk from the station.

Lily , w a iting on the bench, saw the big Rolls Royce draw up at the garage . . . saw the chauffeur get out and a woman with wobbly piled-up hair open the window and let out a stream of complaints.

Then the chauffeur came back and started to rev up . . .

Oh dear, I do feel funny , thought Lily and held on tight to the handle of the basket. Her head fell forward and she jerked herself awake. Another cloud of fumes rolled towards her . . . and once more she blacked out.

But only for a moment. Almost at once she came round and all was well. The big car had gone, the basket was beside her, and now her sisters came out with three packets wrapped in newspaper. The smell was marvellous and a greasy ooze had come up on the face of the Prime Minister, just the way she remembered it.