Alice Falls Again Read online

  DJ STONEHAM

  ALICE

  FALLS

  AGAIN

  AuthorHouse™ UK

  1663 Liberty Drive

  Bloomington, IN 47403 USA

  www.authorhouse.co.uk

  Phone: 0800.197.4150

  © 2018 DJ Stoneham. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

  Published by AuthorHouse 11/15/2018

  ISBN: 978-1-5462-9987-5 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5462-9988-2 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5462-9986-8 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018913535

  Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

  Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  This book is dedicated to my parents. To my late mother, Pat, who brought children’s stories to life and awoke in me a love for fantasy. And to my father, Don, whose love of nature gave me a boundless environment for my own creations to come alive in.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Creating this book was mostly pure pleasure (writing), sometimes hard work (editing) and occasionally both at the same time. Can’t wait to do it again!

  My heartfelt thanks goes to “the team”; Laurel Colless, for the encouragement, advice and sparring you gave me throughout the process; Heather Ross-Sirola for being so professional, positive and honest at the editing phase (you were honest, weren’t you?); Juhani Pitkänen, for rescuing my illustration ideas and pulling a rabbit out of a hat (several in fact); the master himself and continued source of inspiration, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), for discovering Wonderland; and the dedicated group of nursery rhyme researchers.

  Thanks to my amazing wife and best friend, Johanna, for putting up with my bizarre ideas and compulsive writing disorder (might not be quite over, dear). My gratitude also to family and friends - you unknowingly keep me sane (well, sane enough); Wayne’s Coffee at Myyrmanni shopping centre (for never running out of skinny latte); and my two golden retrievers, for warming my feet and never once being negative about my writing.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 The Daisy Chain

  Chapter 2 The Weir-Wolf

  Chapter 3 Moor Is Less

  Chapter 4 The Funny Farm

  Chapter 5 All About Town

  Chapter 6 The Unfair

  Chapter 7 The Council House

  Chapter 8 Home Sweat Home

  Chapter 9 All Ends If Not Always Very Well

  Index Of Nursery Rhymes

  About The Author

  If only I could see the way you do.

  The perch glided slowly towards Alice, allowing her just enough time to regret not feeding the fish earlier. One, two, three, four, five, once I caught a fish alive.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE DAISY CHAIN

  Alice was feeling down. Down where, she wasn’t entirely certain but she was sure it wasn’t down the rabbit hole again. She’d know if it were. It would be much, much darker.

  The sudden thought of Wonderland and those strange places and people she had encountered all those years ago made her stomach churn. She’d been too busy of late to waste time on those memories. But now and again, they crept up on her like ghosts from the shadows, with clammy fingers. She also found herself wondering if strangers were called so because they were strange. It was indeed true of Wonderland but of people in the real world she had too little experience to say for sure. All that was about to change.

  Concentrate on what you will pack in your suitcase tonight, she told herself. Red shoes or blue? Or both? Black would be the sensible choice, she could almost hear her mother say. I’ll take all three, Alice decided. One can never have too many shoes. “Of shoes and ships – and sealing wax …” the Walrus said.

  Truth be told, the idea of returning to Wonderland both fascinated and terrified Alice. It was an impossible combination, rather like jam and gherkin sandwiches. An oxymoron perhaps, though Alice wasn’t entirely sure. It brought to mind what her two aunts sometimes said about Uncle Percy, who, on returning home from the war, had apparently left a part of himself behind at the front line. That is, in addition to his right leg. Despite his ordeal, Uncle Percy yearned to return to the front line. Alice hoped that he would one day have a chance to search for what he had left there, though she doubted that the line was visible any more.

  It was a hot hazy afternoon on a late summer’s day. Alice lay by the riverbank, her toes dangling in the cool water, both teasing and terrifying the minnows. They wanted food, probably some white bread and butter, but all they got were Alice’s toe jam. At the other end of her body, her hair twined like ivy around the cowslips and the daisies. The air was thick with the scent of meadow and earth, yet not quite masking the faint sweet odour of rotting grass. The low constant hum of honeybees was interspersed with melodies from finches, song thrushes and a solitary blackbird. Yet Alice knew this orchestra was also made up of wasps that stung and blowfly that carried disease.

  To tell the truth, which was the only way she told things, Alice knew why she was feeling down. It was because the long summer vacation had come to an end. Schooldays were over for good. Tomorrow, she would leave home and board a train for London to study History at college. She wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about this radical change. On the one hand, she was excited by the prospect of a new life. She was fed up with her boring life at home, where one day drifted unnoticed into the next. She was glad to leave behind the household chores, the ignorance that came with being a child, along with the stuffy attitudes of her home tutor and parents. Adults were forever sharing their “wisdom and experience” by ordering her about and dishing out annoying sayings, like “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. On the other hand, the enormity of the change scared her. Now that she had grown up, she realised there had been a beauty to the innocence of childhood, a carefree existence she would never be able to recapture. Nowadays, she was “expected to know better” and “realise the consequences of her actions”. It was funny how they expected her to behave like an adult but still spoke to her as if she were a girl.

  Leaving home also meant she would miss things that she had taken for granted; the old house (despite the Chippendale furniture her parents were so obsessed with); her sisters (not so much her brothers); and her ageing cat, Dinah, which she swore talked far more sense to her than any human. She would miss familiar faces. Even that of the good-looking boy at church, who had stared improperly at her while singing Onward Christian Soldiers off-key last Sunday. Living in London would be fraught with challenges, dangers even. Just the notion of it made her heart beat faster.

  If she could make no sense of her feelings then they were obviously nonsense and she should focus on the facts. The fact was, tomorrow would be the start of her new life. New places and faces. One of her father’s favourite (and most annoying) sayings was: “Look on the bright side.” Admittedly, he had said it less of late since contracting a serious disease, though he still put on a brave face and would not hear a word said against Alice going away to study (when his memory didn’t fail him). She knew her mother wanted her to stay with the family but who would deny what might be her father’s last wish? Alice felt guilty about not postponing her studies. She didn’t even know if she wanted to read History. As her sisters said, it was all in the past. There again, her father wanted her to become more independent, be educated and live life to the full. She would therefore try to see the bright side of leaving. Life in London would be exciting. Why, the train journey alone was bound to be an adventure.

  Alice had done her homework. She had already learned most of the new London Underground routes and stations off by heart, just in case she got lost in their dark and windy tunnels (Alice was understandably afraid of tunnels). By contrast, the stations sounded like marvellous places, even if some of them were not yet open. Alice imagined that the people at Bayswater and Ealing all had boats and liked fishing; Baker Street must have the loveliest of aromas; Shepherd’s Bush must be quite rural, as was perhaps Moorgate: the people of Aldgate were clearly elderly; the inhabitants of Barbican, Cannon Street and Gunnersbury sounded aggressive, whereas the people at Elephant & Castle must be positively batty. She was sure she would like those people most of all.

  As Alice was recalling the station names in her head and conjuring up a fanciful picture of London, she heard the piercing whistle of a distant train. It was somehow out of place in the gentle murmur of the summer countryside. It sounded wrong and it startled Alice out of her daydream. The noise was followed by a rustle in the undergrowth nearby. There was no telling if it was a bird, a hedgehog or even a fox. Or something more dangerous that shouldn’t be there. Alice knew some of the names of the surrounding plants - green spleenwort, mountain melick and hart’s tongue fern – and could easily imagine a wolf or goblin creeping through such menacingly-named vegetation. Or a white rabbit. She shook her head and laughed at herself for being so jittery, whil
e deep down reassuring herself that the creature making those noises had nothing at all to do with Wonderland. As if to answer her fears, a large jackdaw hopped across the meadow and stopped to stare at her.

  Would she return to Wonderland given the chance? With all its nonsense and lawlessness? With all the disbelief and torment from her siblings and parents afterwards? Not forgetting the images that still came to her in her sleep. Would she cross the line if invited? Like Uncle Percy?

  The train blew its whistle again, a faraway echo, yet so clear one would think it were within arm’s reach. This time the noise didn’t stop. Alice sat up, her heart beating just that tiny bit faster. Why did the sound linger? As she waited for her head to clear (the head often finds it disagreeable when the body decides to sit up quickly) she caught sight of a movement in the water behind the reeds. A water snake appeared to be winding its way slowly across the surface of the river. Or was it a snake?

  Alice rubbed her eyes as one does when something appears to be out of place and looked again. This was no snake. There, about six feet from the riverbank, was a tiny train; a black steam engine with the words “Brighton Express” on the side, pulling a dozen or so carriages along behind it. It was drifting along, though judging by the amount of steam coming out of the funnel, the train seemed to be trying to fight the current.

  The spectacle itself was strange enough, yet could have been explained by a boy having dropped his toy train into the river. What was more difficult to comprehend was the sight of tiny heads and arms leaning out of the carriages and faint but desperate cries for help.

  The scene was quite beyond belief. And as Alice had first hand experience of what lay beyond belief, she felt inclined to jump up and run home as fast as she could. But Alice was also very curious. And she wasn’t the type to walk away from someone in danger, as these poor people clearly were.

  Alice jumped up, crouched by the water’s edge and leaned forward to take a closer look. Sure enough, there were scores of frightened passengers in the carriages. The more she stared, the more detail she could make out, as if the train were growing larger or she were getting closer to it. It was like looking at something down a telescope, without the telescope.

  It unnerved Alice to know that the train was a good six feet away, while simultaneously feeling like it was within an inch of her face. She could see the panic in the people’s faces; the fear in their wide-open eyes that said they had no idea what was happening to them or why. Their screams became clearer and she was sure she heard a tiny voice shout “Crazy train!”. It was a crazy train for sure.

  There was an important decision to be made; whether to run away or try to help those poor people. Alice being Alice meant there was no real choice at all, so grasping a clump of sedge in one hand, she leaned out towards the train. As she focused her eyes on the carriages, she saw that the tips of her fingers were within a few inches of the outstretched hands of the passengers and, somewhat frighteningly, appeared to be the same size. She pushed her face closer still to the train and felt the wind and spray in her face as the locomotive sped across the water. She heard the roar of the steam engine’s pistons as they fought the current.

  Alice wasn’t sure whether it was the shock of touching one of the passengers’ hands or the realisation that the sedge had become uprooted from the riverbank. Whichever it was, she became aware that she was falling. Any doubt about where she was falling to was washed away by the sudden and complete change in her surroundings, from warm air and yellow sunshine to a murky green world of ice-cold water.

  Knowing the river was barely a foot deep near the bank, Alice tried to stand up on the river bed but her feet only found more water. In fact, the current was so strong that, if anything, it was dragging her further down, billowing out her white dress like a jellyfish. The noise of both the swirling water and steam engine nearby filled her ears. As bubbles of air escaped her mouth, Alice was sure she began to see her life flashing before her eyes. As it turned out, it was a flash of silver as two giant minnows shot past her.

  It seemed she was destined to drown, become fish food or both, so it was rather peculiar that Alice found herself worrying instead about the red shoes that she had left back on dry land. Her mother had bought them for her the day before as a going away present and she would be cross should Alice lose them so soon. She could hear her mother’s voice even now: “You must face the consequences of your actions.”

  The minnows lost interest in Alice as fast as they had appeared and the cause was soon revealed. A huge curtain of river weed swayed like poplars in the wind, then parted as the head of a hungry perch came into the open water. It glided slowly towards Alice, allowing her just enough time to regret not feeding the fish earlier. One, two, three, four, five, once I caught a fish alive. Six, seven …

  Alice was out of breath, literally. With a rush of adrenalin, she found the strength to kick her feet wildly and propel herself a short way towards the sunlight above her. Another two kicks and she bobbed to the surface like a fishing float. She wanted to tread water and catch her breath but she knew the cruel perch was hot on her tail. A quick look around told her she was half way between the riverbank and the train. The problem was that she no longer had the strength to swim to either, let alone outpace a hungry fish.

  The solution to her predicament came in the shape of a large white lifebelt, which landed nearby with a slap on the water. She looped it over her head and as she felt herself being reeled in towards the train, two thoughts struck her; firstly, what would the effect of bait skimming across the surface have on the perch and secondly, what was a lifebelt doing on board a train?

  In no time at all, several pairs of hands pulled her up the side of the carriage and in through an open window. She landed in a wet heap on the floor and a make-shift curtain of coats and blankets rose up around her. A single hand holding a bundle of clothes appeared from behind the curtain and a rather shaky voice belonging to a lady said in a West-Country accent: “Here you go my dear. Change into these dry clothes. They’ll be too small for you because they belong to my grand-daughter. But at least you won’t catch cold.”

  “Don’t fuss so,” said a male voice, “she’ll have to learn to stand on her own two feet some time.”

  This was easier said than done. As Alice shed her wet white dress and put the clothes on, the train rocked from side to side. While she did this, she became aware that the train’s whistle was in fact the combined noise of the shrieking passengers. Thank goodness they’ve stopped screaming in this carriage, thought Alice, imagining she would otherwise go quite deaf.

  She soon found herself clothed in undergarments and a yellow dress two sizes too small. Just the type of clothes my mother buys me, thought Alice, too small and child-like. But she had to admit that at least her new clothes were dry and made her feel instantly warmer. She rubbed her hair dry and carefully sipped a cup of hot, sweet tea that had seemed to appear from nowhere. Once she was dressed, the curtain dropped to reveal a very bizarre group of people indeed. They were all very old with distinctive and highly unusual features – bulbous or long noses, large flat or pointed ears, beady or saucer-like eyes, thin or broad faces. Not one of them came even close to being normal. They stood or sat in a circle around Alice.

  The carriage they were in, like its travellers, had seen better days. The leather upholstery of the seats was worn and the rugs that covered the old wooden floorboards were fraying at the edges. A musty smell of wood and tobacco filled the air.

  “Are you all right my dear?” said the woman who had apparently handed her the clothes. She was an old lady with tight white curly hair and small rimmed glasses, which sat on the end of a long, broad nose. She wore what appeared to be a white sheepskin coat and a little too much jewellery. She reminded Alice of a sheep – one that was trying to look younger than her days. Her voice trembled as she spoke. “That was quite a fall you had.”