Category: Serialised

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It was, without argument, the event of the week. Though, truth be told, it was the only event of the week, unless one counted Mrs Longbottom’s ongoing feud with the seagulls, which most did not, since the seagulls were still winning.

By tea time, the villagers would gather along the cobbled lane that led from WackyTurner’s Cooperage down to the harbour, a modest stretch that smelled perpetually of salt, smoke, and the occasional dead herring. Fishermen, washerwomen, schoolchildren, and even Mr Isosceles, the maths teacher, would line the route, their anticipation sharpened by the knowledge that something almost resembling excitement was about to happen.

Mr Isosceles was a risk taker, with a ridiculously pointy chin and a habit of always wearing a Yorkshire flat cap. He claimed that his weekly attendance was a necessity, because he was continuing his studies of probability. And he refused to believe that it was illegal to wear a Yorkshire flat cap in Lancashire. He was impossible to reason with, because he didn’t understand reasoning. He was convinced that if all donkeys were quadrupeds, then all quadrupeds must be donkeys.

At the top of the lane, a handful of freshly made barrels, big, round, and perilously eager to escape, waited like restless animals. Their handlers, stout men with faces weathered by the wind and boredom, stood ready with ropes, and far too much confidence. The contest was simple. Each barrel was marked with a number, and the locals would place modest wagers, buttons, chickens, or an occasional ha’penny, on which barrel would reach the harbour first, intact or otherwise.

At the ringing of the school bell, borrowed for the occasion and tolled by young Miss Minnie Chaos, the barrels were released. Down they thundered, wobbling and leaping over the cobbles, scattering chickens, alarming dogs, and occasionally flattening the odd wheelbarrow. The crowd roared, cheered, and ducked for cover in equal measure.

Inevitably, calamity followed. A barrel would veer off course and crash through Mrs Metaphor’s front gate!

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song, dance, music, stories, magicians, comedy skits or anything really.

The name is borrowed from the old days when pubs might have had an “open mic” session. Not that many people know exactly what a microphone is … or was!

Michael Rafone is the Master of Ceremonies for the evening, and on a Saturday everybody’s allowed to call him “OpenMike”. On a Sunday he’s back to being Mr Rafone when he helps with the local Sunday League. The local archery practice! He says that citizens have to be good at archery. When faced with threatening raiders from Worringfolk it’s no good kicking an inflated pig’s bladder at them he says!

MaxChaos is a brilliant archer, and occasionally he too helps with the local Sunday League. On other Sundays he’s off into the forest hunting deer. A side hustle which brings in a welcome bit of extra cash. A big carcass is worth a lot, the meat, the hide, and even the bones are tradeable goods.

Having a night out on a Saturday is a tradition throughout Wolfland. Even on board ships things usually stop at 19:00 on a Saturday, for anyone and everyone to take their turn to entertain.

The ship’s navigator JumpingJack is the first person to perform a skit this evening. A gregarious fellow, and a regular performer, JumpingJack reminds the crew that “laughing at my jokes is compulsory!” Then, with not a moment’s pause he immediately launches into his latest, hastily composed fisherman’s tale.

The Dubious Story of The Barrel of Laughs

Back in the mists of time, long before The Decimation, back when the coast of Wolfland was very different to the way it is today, there was a small sleepy village … called Blackpool …  where nothing ever happened. As predictable as the tide, but twice as noisy, the village came alive every Saturday evening for its one and only weekly spectacle The Great Barrel Roll.

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If people want butter, they buy it on the day that they need it, because ordinary homes have limited access to electricity and nobody has fridges. Hence Saturday is cake day. The traders use massive zeers to keep their butter cool, and there’s even a market stall which will happily sell shoppers a smaller zeer for use at home. The ancient Middle Eastern device will keep things cool for several hours, long enough to have all the cooking under control for the weekend.

In spite of her initial reluctance, SilverCloud doesn’t have a lot of choice. It’s MaxChaos or nothing! Good, able bodied seamen are in short supply and her crew is already operating at a skeleton level. Finding trustworthy support staff at the last minute is never easy. Especially on a Saturday.

Cargo ships are not pleasant places to live and work, so finding any staff for the merchant navy isn’t easy. The Garrison always has the best sailors, and it has the best galley staff. That’s because the pay is better. The Garrison pays even when there’s no active duty.

The merchant navy is different. Officers may have a full time salary, but everybody else is paid only for the work that they do.

And right now, at short notice, MaxChaos is the only person available for the week long trip calling at Amlwch, Conwy and Rhuddlan. He can turn his hand to anything, and he claims that he can cook. The crew is little more than a dozen people, that’s all, so how hard can it be?

He’ll miss “OpenMike Night” this evening, but that’s a minor issue when confronted with the prospect of one week’s paid work!

On Saturday evenings Mr Rafone hosts “OpenMike Night” in the Great Hall at the Noble Coliseum. He’s a volunteer who’s there regularly on Saturdays helping out generally, helping orphaned children with their school work, helping them with some fun stuff, and he’s somebody they can just talk to confidentially if they want to. In the absence of cinemas, and other old fashioned social entertainment “OpenMike Night” is the city’s biggest multi purpose event, a variety show, with

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Chapter 15
A Barrel of Laughs

“MaxChaos? As cook? Are you out of your mind? He’s a walking disaster! Do you want the whole crew to come down with food poisoning? And if he doesn’t poison us, he’ll set the ship on fire! Who else can we get?”

SilverCloud became the captain of The Frabjous Joy only recently, but she’s been a sailor long enough to know that you can’t always get what you want; but if you try sometimes; well you might find; you get what you need!

What she needs right now is to have her freighter ready so that it can sail on the high tide later this afternoon. That’s a tall order, because today is Saturday. Cargo vessels don’t usually set sail during the weekends, and the docks are generally quiet with very few workers on site. The normal crowd of misfits hanging around looking for casual work, is simply not here today.

On a Saturday the whole of Lancaster city centre is buzzing with the merchants, the markets, and most of the population focussed almost entirely on shopping! Whatever produce is available in the local area is almost certainly on sale across the various street markets and retailers today. On a Saturday people can buy all manner of clothing, linens and household goods, fruits and vegetables, fresh meat and game, rabbit and pheasant and the like, and even live goats and live chickens.

And butter! On a Saturday people can buy butter! And cheese, and sugar, and flour, and all sorts of sweet and savoury things.

This is the special day of the week for Franklin. The paper was printed and distributed on Friday. On Saturday Faraday and NutJob are left to churn out the comic books which are due at the shops before Thursday morning. Now Franklin can relax. For her, Saturday is baking day and the only question is what sort of cakes or fancies is she going to bake today? Not only that, she has to buy the ingredients and have all of the baking finished before “OpenMike Night” starts at 19:00 this evening.

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“Small, nimble fingers you see,” says Mme. Troyes, “just like you Dave.”

“Not so nimble now,” he says, “I’m getting too old for leather work. Dave, Kristal was telling me you make model aircraft? So you’re a bit of a craftsman too?”

“Balsawood gliders mainly. I find it strangely satisfying. Small propellers are tricky to make though. And the only way to control powered models is to circle them on the end of a piece of string. I’d love to do radio control like the old days, but that’s impossible now. Clockwork motors are my next step to get increased flight times. But then it gets expensive, so I stick to gliders, mainly.”

“There are several watchmakers in town you know? You should get in touch with one of them. Maybe they have Saturday jobs?”

“One of my friends is apprenticed to Harrison Time Pieces. He left school a couple of years ago, he loves it there!”

“When we have more time, you’ll have to introduce me to your hobby. Leatherware is tough and heavy. Balsawood’s soft and light, it could satisfy my need to tinker, and keep my brain active.”

KristalClear smiles at NutJob, and knowing that her parents are not demi-psychic she tries reaching out on the wavelength again.

« You’ve done it Dash, you’ve struck the right chord, this could not have gone better. »

He has no idea what the message is, but he can pretty much guess.

M. & Mme. Troyes have no idea what the message is either. Nor do they have any idea where their daughter picked up her demi-psychic powers.

Some people are born with a sixth sense. Some are not.

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So he was released after just six weeks. And there was no proper resettlement program. Not like there is now.”

“But he was good with horses, and by 2200 everybody was using horses. More stables were being set up across London and he found lots of casual work. He learnt English properly, and he was aiming to settle in London. But sea levels kept rising though! Everything was becoming intolerable, and when fresh drinking water became really scarce, he left London, and headed towards Oxford.”

Mme. Troyes finishes the family history.

“He didn’t keep a diary though. It was roughly five years before he started writing down his memoirs. He was in Oxford by then, recording some notes on paper, but it still wasn’t a proper diary. We know that before he left Oxford in 2225 he was married and had two children. The family moved further north. And that’s how Henry’s ancestors finally found their way to Lancaster. Now you have to skip a few generations! And that’s how I met my future husband. The charming French descendant with a Lancashire accent!”

Astonished, NutJob says, “he was actually a pirate at one time?”

“Maybe he was,” says KristalClear, “but he was a reluctant pirate. He was a stable hand. And the horse tradition has remained in the family ever since. That’s how Maman and Papa met!”

“I’m a teacher at Willowdene Primary School,” explains Mme. Troyes.

“One day, many years ago, one of the mums had me go with her to Henry’s shop. She was getting a saddle made for her son. The little boy was beyond joy in the shop. And something clicked. And I was beyond joy when I met Henry.”

“Maman became the homemaker when I was a baby, because Papa had to keep the momentum going with his new shop. He had only just made the switch from craftsman to retailer. And as we said, he still can’t stop being a craftsman. That’s what makes his shop unique.”

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“OK, not very far then!”

Having been listening to the conversation from the kitchen, Mme. Troyes picks up the story.

“Paris was awful then. Everywhere was awful. Without enough food, people killed their animals and ate them. One day when he was walking on the far side of the paddock, Monsieur Troyes saw the mobs arrive, the rich family fled immediately, two of them managed to mount their horses, and the rest fled on foot. The mob killed the remaining horses and dragged off the carcasses. By now, Monsieur Troyes was hiding in the woods, he had seen enough, and he knew that it wasn’t safe to stay a moment longer. He fled with nothing more than the clothes he was wearing.”

Henri Troyes continues, “Monsieur Troyes was a young, single man, fit and healthy, and he ran. He went north. I don’t know how many days it took him to reach Dieppe, but when he reached the coast he worked as a fisherman for about three years. And then he was press ganged. Forced to join the pirates. Or the Navy. Or the pirates. Or something! We’re not sure what it was by then. Maybe the military had been infiltrated by pirates, or the pirates had recruited a lot of ex servicemen.”

“So he became a pirate?” asks NutJob.

KristalClear feels able to join in again, now that the conversation has moved on to ships rather than horses, “he was a pirate, but he wasn’t a pirate. He just ended up working as a sailor trying to steal anything he could from the ships along the coast of Sussex. There was still a Royal Navy back then. Better trained and better equipped than the French pirates. So his capture was inevitable really.”

“Escaped death three times,” says M. Troyes “wasn’t caught up in the rebellion in Paris, didn’t die in the famine, and miraculously he wasn’t killed in the Second Battle of Hastings. He ended up in a military prison in Woolwich.”

“Oui Papa, je l’ai déjà dit.” says KristalClear, before turning her attention to NutJob once more, “the government didn’t have any money for prisons, or food for the prisoners.

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really happy there. Then it all went wrong. No petrol for cars. Trucks couldn’t deliver goods to the shops. People couldn’t buy food. The black market took over … and … and …”

KristalClear’s eyes are beginning to well up with tears. Not because of what happened to M. Troyes, but because of what happened to the family’s horses.

“Oh Maman! Tea! Lovely!”

Mme. Troyes had been rifling through the kitchen cupboards, “sorry about the noise my lovelies! I had to go to the back of the top shelf, to reach the nice tea cups.”

She sets a tray down on the coffee table. The teapot is a bulbous, old fashioned, white one, decorated with intricate swirls and patterns in Royal blue. It’s surrounded by four ornate tea cups with elaborate curved handles. The pattern on the cups matches the tea pot, and inside the rim the cups have a neoclassical meander.

If there was a broken cup or a broken saucer back in the kitchen, then it wasn’t one of these fancy ones!

“Milk and sugar?” asks Mme. Troyes, looking directly at NutJob.

“Ooh! Milk! We hardly ever have milk in our house!

“No, nor do we!” says Mme. Troyes, with a knowing smile. If the youngsters didn’t realise that this was an extra special occasion, they do now!

“Black please, no milk, no sugar.”

“This is a lovely Darjeeling from Mannin,” says Mme. Troyes. She places a pretty, delicate metal tea strainer on NutJob’s cup and begins to pour some tea from the pot, “they say that Manx tea is just as good, if not better than the tea that we used to get from India.”

M. Troyes can be heard coming down the stairs, light footed, but clearly audible. He enters the front room, now dressed in lightweight khaki chinos and a short sleeved, buttoned, white cotton shirt. He’s wearing nothing on his feet, and he cheerfully says, “how far did we get?”

With a light tremble in her voice KristalClear says, “horses, Paris.”

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he’s been forced to meet her parents before he was mentally prepared for it!

A bit displeased, but not raging, he uses his demi stern voice with his teeth clenched together.

“I can’t do the wavelength you know! I look at your face and your hands, and I can only guess what’s going on!”

“You’re doing fine,” she says, “they like you!”

Relaxing the tenseness of his teeth, he muses, “and they call you Mademoiselle?”

“Usually they only do that when they’re upset with me! They start by saying Mademoiselle Troyes, if you … something, something, something. This time I think Maman was doing it just for emphasis, to show that we have French heritage. She’s actually 100% Wolfie. Papa’s the one who’s 2% French. Or something like that.”

“So you’re 1% French?”

“It doesn’t feel like that! I’m just the same as everybody else here. In our case, you have to go back 300 years to trace the original Monsieur Troyes.”

“Why did he leave France?”

“The Great Famine!”

At that precise moment a minor crashing noise is heard from the kitchen. As if somebody has dropped a plate on the floor, breaking it into four or five pieces.

“The Great Famine? In 2162?”

“2162 was the year of The Decimation. The famine came a little bit later. Anyway, he was trying to find a better life, away from Paris, and he ended up in the Navy. He was captured in the Second Battle of Hastings, imprisoned in Woolwich, and on his release he chose to go into London rather than go back to France.”

“Why did he join the Navy, why didn’t he stay in Paris?”

KristalClear knows the story well, but has never had to lead a discussion like this before.

“Originally, he had a good job, with a good family, working as a groom in their stables. Papa says they had lots of horses, and Monsieur Troyes was part of a big team. He was

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KristalClear’s father runs a store in town “Troyes & Co Chandler of Equestrian Wares”. Henri Troyes started work as an apprentice saddle maker, became a GuildMaster, and did that for several years.

It was heavy duty work.

In order to ease the discomfort in his hands he then moved into retail, selling saddlery, tack, boots and clothing. However, he can’t stop himself from fiddling with bits of hardware, making little repairs to things, and tidying up some of the secondhand goods which find their way into his shop.

Henri Troyes has a reputation for always being able to supply tack for all sizes of horse, especially smaller ponies. That makes him particularly popular with people who want a tiny saddle to suit an infant. He will either adapt something, or he’ll tailor make one. Beyond the counter, beyond the displays, he’s arranged his workbench so that it faces into the shop. That way, he can fidget with things to his heart’s content whilst still being instantly attentive to any customers in the shop.

NutJob is aware that Henri Troyes still upholds some French traditions. He’s not sure if he should call him Henry, as suggested, or according to French etiquette address him as Monsieur Troyes. Side stepping the direct approach, NutJob chooses a topic which he knows the family likes.

“Kristal was going to tell me how your family came to settle in Wolfland.”

“Yes, fascinating history. Weird history actually! We were pirates, but we weren’t pirates. I need to change out of my work clothes, Kristal will tell you more.”

“Yes Mademoiselle,” says Mme. Troyes, “you tell, Dave, the story of the French connection, and I’ll get that tea sorted.”

With dad upstairs, getting washed and changed, and with mum in the kitchen making a disproportionate racket with cups and saucers and things, NutJob and KristalClear are alone and have some breathing space.

NutJob looks a bit exasperated and he hasn’t even been in the house five minutes! He looks at KristalClear, she smiles at him in such a way that he can’t be angry with her. Even though

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