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    Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera
    Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera
    Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera
    Ebook162 pages1 hour

    Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera

    By Peter Dickinson and Emma Chichester Clark

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    When the town clock stops, a colony of telepathic mice comes to the rescue

     Unthinkable! The Branton Town Hall Clock has stopped! The intricately carved turret clock had attracted tourists from all over the world. Every day six small bells would chime at precisely fourteen minutes and twenty seconds past the hour. And out would come a procession of prancing lambs followed by a shepherd playing Pan-pipes and, finally, old Father Time himself.
     
    The impressive clock tower is also home to a group of Clock Mice, extraordinary rodents who are twice as bright as rats and just as smart as humans. They speak their own complex language of mind-pictures and elude Juno, the clock tower cat. When the clockmaker’s grandson fails to repair the town’s beloved clock, will the Clock Mice be able to save Time?
     
    Filled with unforgettable characters, including the Hickory, Dickory, and Dock mouse families and some eccentric humans, Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera is a whimsical tale of mice, magic, cats, clocks, science, people, and the nature of time.
     
    This ebook features full-color illustrations by Emma Chichester-Clark and an illustrated personal history of Peter Dickinson including rare images from the author’s collection.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJan 5, 2016
    ISBN9781504025119
    Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera
    Author

    Peter Dickinson

    Peter Dickinson is one of the most acclaimed and respected writers of our time and has won nearly every major literary award for his children's novels. THE KIN, his first book for Macmillan, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal in 1999, as was THE ROPEMAKER in 2001. Peter is currently writing the sequel to THE ROPEMAKER, due October 2006. His most recent book for Macmillan, THE GIFT BOAT, was described by Books for Keeps as 'a masterpiece, gripping, the work of a major writer at his very best.' Peter was one of the three shortlisted candidates for the first Children's Laureate. He lives in Hampshire.

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    Book preview

    Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera - Peter Dickinson

    Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera

    Peter Dickinson

    Illustrated by Emma Chichester-Clark

    START HERE

    I prized the hatch loose. Inside was a deep hollow, with crank-rods running from the floor to pivots and joints near the top. On the floor, to the right of the rods, was a mouse’s nest.

    Now, you don’t want mice in the works of clocks. They’re dirty creatures, their droppings and leavings clog things up and they tend to gnaw around at random. I’ve often trapped mice, and put poison down, but when I’ve found actual nests with babies in them I’ve never been able to bring myself to destroy them.

    The mother’s run off, of course, so I scoop the nest up with the babies in it and tuck it away somewhere and hope she’ll find it. Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t. I don’t worry much, either way.

    But this nest was different. For a start, the mother hadn’t run off, though she must have heard me forcing my way in. She was terrified, gazing up at me, quivering. She’d withdrawn her milk and her tiny blind babies were nuzzling uselessly at her teats.

    The nest was the neatest I’d ever seen. The floor was so clean it might have been swept. Against the wall, near the rods, stood several of those plastic cylinders you buy camera film in. They held stores, bird-seed and raisins and bread-crusts.

    And then I saw it wasn’t just the way this mouse did things that was different. She was different.

    It was the eyes. If you look at an ordinary house mouse you’ll see it has bright, slightly bulgy eyes. They look quick and cunning. But then you realize it’s all on the surface. They’re like shiny pebbles. You can’t see into them at all.

    But this mother mouse had stayed with her babies. She kept things tidy. She stored food in containers. And you could see into her eyes. They had depth, like people’s eyes. We stared at each other for a long, long while.

    OK, I whispered. Good luck with the family. Just don’t let them muck around with the works.

    I inspected the cranks and pivots, gave them a touch of grease, closed the hatch and left the mother mouse to it.

    So that’s how I found out there were such things as Clock Mice. And that’s how I knew from the first that they were different.

    FIRST ESSAY ON MICE

    The books say there are six kinds of British mouse.

    They’re wrong. There are seven.

    The books will tell you about House Mice, which are very common. There must be millions of them. And about Wood Mice, which are the same as Field Mice, which are common too. So are Yellow-necked Mice. Harvest Mice used to be fairly common, but are getting rarer.

    They’ll tell you that Dormice aren’t really mice, because they have furry tails and are halfway to being squirrels. They’re getting rarer too.

    The books will even tell you about Fat Dormice, which are pretty rare, but you’ll know if you’ve got them because of the way they thump around in the attic. You can eat them, but the books don’t tell you how to cook them.

    That makes six kinds of British mouse.

    The seventh kind is Clock Mice. They aren’t in any of the books, because no-one has noticed them so far. They’re very rare indeed—there were eighty-three last time I counted. They all live in the Branton Town Hall Clock.

    They’re different.

    FIRST ESSAY ON CLOCKS

    There are hundreds of kinds of clocks.

    There are pendulum clocks and spring clocks and quartz clocks and water clocks and cuckoo clocks and Mickey Mouse clocks and turret clocks and lots and lots more.

    The Branton Town Hall Clock is a turret clock. All that means is that it’s a big clock in a tower, like a church clock. There are plenty of those. But there is only one Branton Town Hall Clock.

    It’s different.

    Tourists come from the other side of the world to see it, and to photograph and film and video it as it strikes the quarters. It’s pretty impressive even when it’s not striking. It has dials which tell you the time of day (of course) and the date and the year and what the moon’s doing and high tide at Branmouth Pier and where the planets are and when Halley’s Comet is next due round and things like that, but what makes it really special is the way it strikes the quarters.

    At fourteen minutes twenty seconds past the hour, six small bells tinkle a tune. A door opens on the right, below the moon dial, and two lambs prance out on their hind legs,

    followed by a shepherd playing Pan-pipes, followed by Lady Spring in a yellow dress with a circlet of flowers in her hand, then another shepherd and two more lambs. They stop at the centre of the tower and twirl around while four bells strike the quarter, and then they begin to move away towards a door which has opened on the left.

    But that’s not the end of it. Before they reach the door, Old Father Time comes rushing out of the right-hand door with his scythe held ready to strike. He moves faster than they do, so you can see he’s going to catch them just inside the door—in fact, his scythe is already swinging towards them as they all move out of sight. Tourists—people who’ve seen the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids and the Grand Canyon and the Great Wall of China—still gasp with amazement the first time they see the Branton Town Hall Clock strike the quarters.

    (They bring a lot of money into Branton, those tourists.)

    The half-hour and the three-quarters work the same way. Lady Summer wears a blue dress and has milkmaids and calves to dance with her. Lady Autumn wears gold and has harvesters and (I don’t know why) rabbits. But Lady Winter …

    She’s magical, I think. She wears a cloak of green leaves and her face is as brown as a fallen leaf. Woodmen and foxes dance with her. Beyond them waits a grim-looking man,

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