Miles Byfar: And the Christmas Spirit

By Robin Bennett

A festive adventure for 7-10 year-olds: Myles, who lives with his grandparents and does not get to see his parents much, finds out his computer does things that it really shouldn't. Transported to Lapland, he discovers that he's forgotten his slippers and secondly that someone has stolen the Christmas Spirit and Myles has to steal it back. In doing so, he goes on an exciting, sometimes terrifying journey that takes him from England to the perfect beaches of the West Indies, New York in a snowstorm and the Himalayas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monster Books
• Release date: May 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9780957456556

Robin Bennett

Robin Bennett has set up and run over a dozen successful businesses from dog-sitting to tuition to translation. The list is quite exhausting. Robin is married with three young children. He spends his time between Pau in the Pyrenées and Henley-on-Thames.

Book preview

Prologue

Late afternoon in the library

‘I’m not always in the middle of things,’ said Fred, quite suddenly and for no real reason. It was coming up to Christmas, and he was sitting with Kit, his best friend, Polly, who was Kit’s Spaniel puppy, and Wellington; a cat of No Known Origin.

‘Really, you surprise me,’ said Kit, keeping her nose firmly pointed at the large book she was reading, on Garden Fairies (illustrated with 504 plates, by the Very Reverend A. Gibbon). At that point in time, her nose could reasonably be described as red. She had a bad cold, and Fred was sitting with her in the library in front of a roaring fire - to keep her company- or so he said. Kit suspected that he had only come for the large cake that Mrs Bee, the housekeeper at Creake Castle, had made, and the fact that he had a captive audience. Her.

‘Did I ever tell you about my second cousin, Miles?’ he said.

‘Here we go,’ she thought. ‘Fred, how many relatives do you actually have?’ She looked up to see Fred pouring another cup of Kit’s cocoa into Kit’s mug and taking a big gulp.

‘Hundreds,’ he said, absentmindedly wiping the chocolaty froth off his mouth. ‘Maybe thousands. We Longshanks are anything but impudent.’

‘I really don’t think you mean that.’

‘Probably not. Anyway, do you want to hear about my cousin

Miles, or don’t you?’ Outside, the pale winter sun was slipping below the trees at the end of the park, and frost was beginning to gather on the tips of the grass. Kit glanced around the library, at the roaring fire, the comfy cushions stacked on the ancient sofa and at Fred’s bright face. She closed her book and smiled at him.

‘Why not?’

Chapter One

Wendover Backwoods

Now quite a number of years ago, Miles Byfar, my second cousin, lived in a modern bungalow, near a town called Wendover Backwoods. It is the sort of place that has a multi-storey car park, a bus station, one large roundabout and about a million hairdressers.

A bungalow isn’t a bad place to live for a number of reasons, although all very different from Creake, I would imagine. First of all, there is no chance of falling down the stairs on dark nights by mistake, and secondly a bungalow can be useful for getting places quickly. In fact, Miles very rarely used the front door. He just climbed out of his window, straight into the back garden, and went to school.

This upset Miles’s grandparents, Dot and Reg, who both lived in the bungalow with him. His father had moved out when he was very young, and his mother refused to talk about him or even say where he was living. Sometimes this made Miles so angry that he felt almost dizzy; other times he just felt grateful that his mother hadn’t left him too, and that just made him feel pathetic. His mother worked for a computer firm, selling software, and she was away nearly all the time, driving up and down the country from one large town to the next. Miles’s knowledge of towns in Britain was probably better than his Geography teacher’s, Ms Geelong, from ‘Sunny Australia’ as she was found of saying on less than sunny days in England.

When Miles’ mother did come home, it was only for a few days at a time, and it was usually to bring Miles presents and take him to McDonalds, followed by a walk around the zoo.

To be honest, Miles was fed up with the zoo, but he never quite had the courage to say anything, in case his mother got her feelings hurt and stopped taking him, and then he would have even less time with her to himself.

All things considered, though, Miles’s life was generally okay. Dot and Reg were always very kind to him, although they were quite quiet and a bit boring. Home was all right, if you didn’t mind gnomes and plastic flowers all over the place. Even school wasn’t so bad - it was only about ten minutes’ walk away, and although he didn’t like the majority of his lessons, he had roughly the right amount of friends, and most of the time the teachers just about remembered his name and left it at that.

One thing that he had to admit was pretty good, though, was the presents his mother got him.

Out of all the kids at his school, St Dunstone’s, he got the best computer-related presents by a long, long way. Last Christmas, his mother had bought him a computer from her company that was incredibly fast, so powerful he could store his whole games collection on the hard drive, and had more than enough gadgets for Miles not to have to leave the house for a year. He honestly wouldn’t have minded if there was a nuclear war and he was stuck underground for months, just as long as no-one turned the electricity off. His mother had even got him a broadband connection.

Of course, Miles knew the expensive presents were to make up for the fact that she was never exactly there to spend quality time with him, and what’s more he knew that his mum knew this too. He wasn’t stupid and nor was she - but when he thought about it for a bit, he came to the conclusion that it was sort of a secret that they both shared and, in a way, Miles quite liked that. He sometimes thought that the presents and the unspoken secret about the presents were the only things that he had in common with his mother anymore, or at least the only things he shared with her that no-one else did.

I mention all this because it is important. Miles was basically a normal kid but one who was a bit lonely perhaps and who missed his parents, certainly.

Everything usually happens for a reason. If Miles had had a mum to shout at him more and give him pointless jobs to do, and a proper dad who went to work and came home every day, probably grumpy - and, what’s more, if Miles himself had spent less time looking pointless things up on Google, and more time reading mind-improving books, then none of the strange and incredible things I am about to tell you would have happened. Anyway, he didn’t, so they did. So here goes.

Chapter Two

You’ve got Mail

It was mid-December. Pretty much Christmas.

The trees had finally completely given up on looking nice, and now stood about the park in little groups, looking leafless, damp and sad. The local shopping centre had put its decorations up in late August, but Dot had only just bought hers. As usual, it was just a circle of holly sprayed silver and gold, which Reg was busy nailing to the front door when Miles arrived home from school.

‘Mello Miles,’ he said through a mouthful of nails. ‘Mood mday gat schoom?’

‘What?’ said Miles, stopping his bike and getting off.

‘Snorry. I mean, sorry,’ said Reg, finally getting rid of the last one and banging it in with a thump that made next door’s dog bark under the fence, ‘.. .had mouthful of nails.’

‘So I saw,’ said Miles. Reg had a habit of stating the obvious. Things like: ‘I went to the shops today and got soaked to the skin. It was raining,’ as if you might have thought that someone at the checkout had chucked a bucket of water over him.

Miles inspected the silver wreath that now hung from the door. He didn’t much see the point of decorations. They didn’t generally come with software. ‘Do you want a hand putting up anything else, Granddad?’ he asked, turning around. But Reg already had his back to him, busy bending down polishing one of the gnomes next to the ornamental pond.

‘No, son, that’s all right. I shan’t be a minute, your grandmother has made a pie and she won’t want it getting cold.’

‘All right,’