Time Travel and the jet-lagged mind...

I am writing this in the bathroom at 4am in the morning.  I have jetlag and don’t want to wake up The Mister or the baby so I’m killing time in here.  We’ve been travelling 23 hours but my brain won’t switch off and has taken me back to various childhood holidays and how we’d kill time then instead. 

When I was a child we spent a couple of weeks every summer at my Grandparents by the sea. They were what I’d call ‘Proper Grandparents’, in that they were old for as long as I can remember. There was no chldrens’ TV allowed and the set didn’t go on until the 6 o clock news while we ate our dinner.  But we went on drives in the country to see odd places with farm animals or rescued dogs, or spent days at the beach with Gran in a deckchair, and most importantly, as soon as we got there , my Gran always took us round to the library to get a temporary membership card.  I have no idea if public libraries still do this, but it was a brilliant idea. We could take out up to 8 books for a fortnight and in those books lay my escape from potential boredom!  My sister and I tried to learn ballroom dancing from a book with drawings of all the steps.  (As an avid follower of Strictly Come Dancing now, I don’t think our quickstep was particularly accurate but we had fun in the garden…)  and I learnt several magic tricks to wow my friends and I can still remember them now.

I was, however, primarily obsessed with ghosts and time travel.  In the library I made a beeline for anything with ‘ghost’ or ‘time’ in the title. And this is how I found two of my favourite children’s books of all time: ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ by Madeleine L’Engle and ‘The Ghosts’ by Antonia Barber.  

I loved them for a number of reasons, especially their explanations of space and time travel.  I had a bit of a hidden desire to be an astronaut when I was 8 and I think this played to that nicely.

In A Wrinkle in Time (1962), a clever and awkward girl must rescue her scientist father with the help of her young brother and friend as well as Mrs Who, Mrs Which and Mrs Whatsit.  It’s a great story about good versus evil and conformity but as I say, I was most interested in the space/time travel dimension of the book.  L’Engle  explains the use of  a Tesseract to cross through space.  L’Engle’s characters propose that the world is made up pf 5 dimensions, the 4^th being Time and the 5^th the dimension you travel through.  She described space as a kind of vast expanse of cloth. For an ant to crawl from one point to another would take an age. But if you ‘wrinkle’ the fabric, two distant points can come together.  This she called a Tessering.  Written in 1962 it was progressive for its time. Some of the maths is considered ‘wrong’ now but the concept of a Tesseract or hypercube has stood the test of time and research.  Either way, this book sparked a real interest in science, time and space for me and thousands of other kids and that can never be a bad thing! 

  

The Ghosts by Antonia Barber is a slightly different deal.  Set in the Edwardian period, two children go with their widowed mother to a derelict mansion house devastated by fire. She is to be the housekeeper.  A mysterious old gentleman named Mr Blunden arrived at their door in Camden and offered her the job personally, asking the children if they would be afraid if they saw a ghost... 

Not to give too much away, the two children have to travel in time to save the day. It’s all thrilling fun and adventure, but again the bit that always struck me was the way the author explained the time travel part.   In this book time is described as being like a wheel.  All points in time are therefore linked by the spools and, given the right circumstances, a person could travel along one to the centre of the wheel (where time is still like the eye of a tornado) and travel across to another time point on the wheel.   In my mind this made complete sense.  As a child I would try and concentrate really hard and see if I could separate my mind from my body and go back in time.  Needless to say it never worked. But again, it sparked my imagination and kept boredom at bay.  

Anyway, thats my rambling done for now.  I highly recommend you check out these books, if not for you then for your kids or your classes.   So thanks Gran and Grampy for switching the telly off and making us read!

Right - I'm off to find something else to read...