Frozen in Time

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© Ali Sparkes 2009

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First published 2009

First published in this eBook edition 2011

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ISBN: 978-0-19-275769-2

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To Fred (Freddy) and Pauline (Polly) Sparkes

Many thanks to the listeners of BBC Radio Solent and readers of the
Southern Daily
Echo
for sending me their memories of growing up in the 1950s (and to Julian Clegg and Dave King for helping that to happen). Also to Freddy and Pauline Sparkes and Vera and Bert Warner for their memories and photos and guidance. Thank you, also, Ralph Montagu, for digging out a very special edition of the
Radio Times
, June 1956 …

Oh—and thank you very, very much, Enid.

The man in the dark grey trench coat walked briskly along the Embankment, cursing the cold and his lack of gloves. It had been years since he’d been called out to a secret rendezvous—he was past this kind of thing. But the name rang a bell. Made him curious. Astonished, in fact.

The old boy was waiting under Westminster Bridge, as promised, his thick coat cut like a Russian’s. He didn’t try to shake hands, but nodded slowly, several times, when he saw his old, old colleague.

‘By God, it
is
you, Dick. I can’t believe you have the nerve—even after fifty years!’

Dick smiled. A miserable smile. ‘I came to give you information. About Henry. I have to clear my conscience. It wasn’t him … it was me. I was your man—not Henry. He had no choice. That’s all.’

The man in the dark grey trench coat shook his head. ‘What do you want?’

‘To be here again, in England, for the rest of my life … It won’t be long.’

‘And Henry? And his children? What about
them
?’

‘His
children
?’ The old man looked shocked.

‘You didn’t take them?’

‘ … Didn’t you?’

The satellite falling to earth changed life for ever for Ben and Rachel Corder. It was catastrophic.

One day their world was full of colour and light and sound—and the next, in just a few terrible seconds, it was grey and swarms of insects engulfed it.

‘No! No! No! No!’ wailed Rachel, panic rising through her, while Ben aimed the remote at the TV and pressed the buttons again and again, as if this could make a difference.

‘We should never have let Uncle J put it up,’ said Ben. ‘Satellite dishes should be put up by the men from Sky, not by random uncles! Now we’ve only got the old aerial. Press the TV button … see if there’s anything coming through at all.’

Rachel crawled across the room and prodded the TV button below the screen, which switched the system to the old free terrestrial channels … if there were any left these days. It was a desperate measure. Only minutes ago they could have watched hundreds of different channels, from music to documentaries to cartoons … Pop divas wiggling their hips at the camera, ravening dinosaurs plunging through realistic CGI swamps, real people arguing spitefully with other real people in live reality shows, unreal Disney teenagers with perfect teeth, singing and dancing … and now … what?

The tall ancient oaks which surrounded the house made it barely possible to get even BBC1 through on the old aerial. BBC2 was slightly better and Channel 4 would come and go. Forget the rest.

By 11 a.m. Ben and Rachel were slumped back in their usual position—the position they’d been in for almost all that wet, wet, wet summer, sprawled across the old parquet flooring in the sitting room, propped up on their elbows, watching a repeat of a 1970s detective series.

‘We’ll have to ask Uncle J to phone up Sky,’ sighed Ben. ‘It’ll take him for ever to get around to it though.’

He absent-mindedly scored the damp dark stain on the floor with one fingernail, while Rachel toggled a loose woodblock up and down, and they both squinted at the 1970s detective who was solving crimes through a relentless attack of bees. The bees were not part of the plot—it was just
really
bad reception. There was a hot, dusty smell coming from the overworked set, but they were both too dull and damped down that morning to do anything about it.

They would have liked to go outside, but the endless rain made playing in the huge and wild garden almost impossible. A deep valley of overgrown shrubs and trees, it had become a vast mud bath, especially on the lower lawn by the stream, where they usually liked to play. You’d go in up to your ankles there.

Sadly, playing inside, when Uncle Jerome was working, wasn’t easy either. Ben and Rachel would tend to get noisy, and then he’d tend to get angry, because he couldn’t concentrate. Uncle Jerome wasn’t bad really. He was just very brainy and intense and when he was caught up in his work upstairs he had no patience for anything else. It was easier when Mum and Dad were around, but this summer, like most summers, they were away again, on tour. They were a magic act. Truly. Ben and Rachel’s dad could eat fire and sawed their mum in half on a regular basis. They were very good and much in demand—and their high season was always May to September, and Christmas, of course. Right now they were on a cruise ship somewhere.

This meant that Uncle Jerome, who lived with them all in the large old house on the outskirts of town, became their guardian whenever high season came around. He was quite a good guardian, in the way that he didn’t really care
what
his thirteen-year-old nephew and twelve-year-old niece did—as long as it didn’t end in death or, worse, a lot of noise.

‘Do you think he’d notice if we were dead?’ Ben mumbled, resting his chin in his hands and staring at the Seventies TV detective, speeding along in his open-topped car, through the swarm.

‘Who—Uncle J?’ said Rachel, rolling onto her back and staring at the high, ornate ceiling with a lacklustre yawn. ‘Not for a few days, probably. Unless we managed to be dead
and
very noisy at the same time.’

Ben grinned. ‘Maybe if I fell on the remote control with my last breath and pinned down the volume button. If
Scooby Doo
was on and the weight of my corpse made it go louder and louder and louder.’

Rachel giggled. She was too floppy and bored to stop herself. ‘Or if I got caught up on the ceiling fan in the dining room,’ she improvised. ‘If it was strong enough to hold a dead body, that is. And if it was switched on—I could just go round and round, over the table, with my dead feet kicking the biscuit tin every time.’ She laughed, limply. ‘You’d have to switch the fan on for me before you fell dead by the telly.’ They both started giggling helplessly.

Then the telly blew up. There was a blue flash and a loud bang, and the sharp smell of singed dust hit them both on a sudden draught of air. They both sat up and stared at the dead screen for a moment, before Ben jumped up and ran to the socket and pulled the plug out.