The Time Travellers Club

By Mark Roland Langdale

An entertaining book full of humour, science and history

Children can learn in a fun way about history with more time travellers

than you can throw a Flux-capacitor at!


The story starts in a gentlemen’s club in London in 2061 and follows the main character, Benjamin Digby Esq.


He relives his days as a ‘quantum’ scientist at the Crick institute in London in 2021 by telling his circle of friends his extraordinary tale about travelling in time. He travels back to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 Victorian England where he meets Isambard Kingdom Brunel.


Benjamin’s aim is to pick up inventors and scientists for his Time Travellers’ Club: Einstein, Da Vinci, Brunel. He gets more than he bargained for when he gets chased through time and space and encounters Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli. There are more twists and turns in this than time itself – expect the unexpected!


The Time Travellers Club is Mark’s fourth Matador children’s book, and will appeal to science fiction lovers and fans of his former books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788034944

Mark Roland Langdale

Mark Roland Langdale has had a varied life and career. He has worked with children and teenagers, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in an effort to fundraise, travelled down the Amazon and is a longtime member of Greenpeace. Mark likes to write modern day fairytales with an undercurrent of real life issues such as mental health, environment, dyslexia which he suffers from himself, and autism.

Book preview

The Time

Travellers’ Club

Mark Roland Langdale

Copyright © 2018 Mark Roland Langdale

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781788034944

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

I dedicate this book to the following: Esther Rose Harvey, Rachel, Gilly, Josephine, Jackie, Lindsey, June, Benjamin, Alex and Jeffrey Smith, my brother Neil Vernon Langdale, his son Fraser and his daughter Briony, and all the time travellers out there both real and imaginary, as in my book travelling through time in the mind makes one a bona fide time traveller.

"Time is simply an illusion" – Albert Einstein – Physicist

"Time is out of joint" – Hamlet – William Shakespeare – Playwright

"Time travel, it’s just a matter of time" – Mark Roland Langdale – Storyteller

Just for the record I have reimagined parts of the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci in this imaginative work of fiction.

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1

Introduction

In which Benjamin Digby, Esq travels back in time in the mind machine.

Timeline 7th July 2061 8.30 PM Greenwich Mean Time

‘Einstein and Newton are late again, probably wasting their time on some theory that won’t fly in a million years,’ I said raising an eyebrow or two.

‘I would imagine, so they could do with help of Leonardo da Vinci,’ said a man the spitting image of the great seer Nostradamus.

‘And where is Houdini?’ enquired a man who was a dead ringer for Archimedes.

‘Tied up swinging from a rope suspended from a bridge I’d imagine. I hope it’s not Tower Bridge in London on Halloween night as it may well open and spoil Mr Houdini’s trick,’ replied the Nostradamus lookalike.

‘If my memory serves me correctly, Houdini died on Halloween Night,’ I replied in a sardonic tone.

‘I’m afraid we will have to start the meeting without these great luminaries,’ the chairman replied looking earnest, the chairman being Herbert George Wells or Bertie to his close friends and family, known to most as the writer H.G. Wells.

‘Digby, Digby wake up,’ exclaimed a man named Caruthers nudging his friend and fellow time-waster.

‘Sorry, miles away,’ Digby replied smiling sheepishly.

‘Where was this miles away?’ Caruthers enquired, mildly curious as to how far the man had travelled in his mind this time.

‘Constantinople; I was attending the Annual General Meeting of the Time Travellers’ Club, although Einstein and Newton were late on parade,’ Digby replied sheepishly slightly embarrassed he had been caught mind travelling for the umpteenth time. Digby had heard that Nils Boer, the quantum scientist, friend and rival of Albert Einstein, once upon a time had said to Einstein that before departing this earth his final gift to mankind should be a theory on time travel. But Digby wasn’t sure if this story was fact or far-fetched science fiction.

‘Imagining again, Digby? If you’re not careful one of these fine days you’ll imagine your life away or what’s left of it, none of us have got time for such flights of fancy anymore,’ a man named Battersby joked, twirling his thin moustache theatrically as if he was the surreal artist Salvador Dali. For Digby, his whole life had been a surreal experience even though his friends and family had no idea how surreal; in fact, Digby thought his life was as surreal as any quantum theory, or quantum fairytales as he liked to think of them.

‘Can’t blame Digby, time’s dragging its feet tonight along with Old Father Time,’ an old gentleman said, fidgeting in his well-worn red leatherback chair.

‘That’s what the Gentlemen’s Club’s for: dragging out time as long as humanly possible before we have to go back to the real world and our wives. I’m sure that’s why Old Father Time’s dragging his tired feet: can’t bear being enclosed inside a giant clock with Old Mother Time one more minute than is absolutely necessary!’ another old gentleman chortled as he puffed on a large Havana cigar.

‘Perhaps we should wind Father Time up, tell him he’s looking old!’ Battersby replied, smiling to himself.

‘I wouldn’t if I were you, otherwise he may turn up with the Grim Reaper in tow and tell you your time is up!’ the cigar-smoking man said, blowing three smoke rings one after the other into the stale air. In truth the air needed recycling like the old gentlemen of the club. The sooner the Crick Institute finds the cure for ageing the better and it better be soon otherwise everybody inside this room will be swapping the Gentlemen’s Club for that infamous London club, The Ghost Club!

One would have imagined this conversation happening at a gentlemen’s club some time around the turn of the nineteenth century and not the twenty-first century. Time seemed to have stood still in this London gentlemen’s club as if it were the famed Reform Club in Jules Verne’s fantastical tale Around the World in Eighty Days. For some of the older gentlemen of the club, it took eighty days to circumnavigate their way from their homes to the club and back again. Several of the wives of these gentlemen had reported them missing to the police only to be informed that they were simply lost in a world of their own.

‘I’ve got a secret that I’ve never told anyone before,’ Digby piped up, although funnily enough he’d put down his pipe to speak.

‘A secret, how intriguing, do tell dear boy, do tell,’ the cigar-smoking man exclaimed in an excited manner as he leaned forward in his chair so far he almost fell out onto the floor.

‘Watch out, old man, you’re not skydiving now!’ a gentleman with a hand of cards in his hand said in jest, a gentleman who once upon a time was a magician, the Great Bondini. This was before his hands became so crippled with arthritis he could no longer perform magic anymore. Old age: that was a cruel trick all right, and one, believe it or not, the Crick Institute in London were trying to find a cure for!

Although Benjamin Digby, the man with the secret, was younger than most of the men in the club, he was still no spring chicken, certainly no boy, being well into his sixties, but he liked the company of the other men and it made him feel younger to be around them.

‘Yes, do tell, Digby, anything to pass the time, otherwise we’ll have to play another infernal game of ‘I spy’ and there are only so many objects in this room. However palatial the club is, it isn’t Buckingham Palace!’ the cigar-smoking man laughed, almost choking himself to death in the process.

‘I do love a good story, I even love a bad one as long as it doesn’t send me off to sleep,’ chortled Caruthers as his eye widened.

‘Before I tell you my secret, gentlemen, I must warn you that you will not believe a word of it, not one single word, which in part is why I have never told this story to anyone before now,’ Digby said truthfully with a look of deadly seriousness on his face.

‘The whole point in a secret, Digby old man, is never to tell it, for as soon as you do you feel like you have parted with something priceless,’ exclaimed a man with an ear trumpet in his hand being wheeled closer to the storyteller in a bath chair by the club butler so the man could hear the storyteller with more clarity. Now this man was a man of science and one who wanted as much detail and information as humanly possible so he could make his own mind up as to whether the story was a truth or, like most stories, mere fabrication. For this old gent, the storyteller must be as methodical as Mr Phileas Fogg, Esq or the great detective Mr Sherlock Holmes, for he knew information was the key to unlocking the mystery of life, the universe and everything.

‘Don’t tell him that, Battersby, or he’ll never tell us his secret and we’ll be bored to death and I don’t know about you but that’s one thing I do not want to die from, boredom; that surely is a fate worse than death!’ a rotund man with a ruddy face exclaimed as the circle of friends all joined in with his infectious laughter.

‘I will tell you my secret, my story, as I would like someone to know the truth before I pass over to the other side even though, as I said before, you will not believe it. In truth, paradoxically, you not believing my story will keep this secret as a secret, for even if you do believe me, nobody else will!’ Digby said as a faint smile flickered across his countenance as he thought of the line from chapter three in the novella The Time Machine: An Invention, and he was one hundred and ten per cent sure his circle of friends would think his story was an invention:

I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt like you saw all round him.

Digby didn’t think he was such a man who was too clever to be believed and you could not see round him. However it could be said of the cigar-smoking man that you could not see round him, for he was a good twenty stone plus.

‘The other side? Joining the enemy, the Labour Party? Or are you moving to the other side of the Thames, Digby?’ the cigar-smoking man said in jest.

‘Well, as long as you don’t start the story with ‘Once upon a time,’ otherwise I’ll think I’ve regressed to my childhood where mother sends me off to sleep with a fairytale,’ Caruthers replied with a mock look of disdain upon his bloated face.

‘What do you mean, your childhood? Like most men, you haven’t left your childhood, or so my wife tells me with great relish!’ another quip from the cigar-smoking man as a peel of laughter rang out through the room along with the chimes of the grandfather clock as it struck nine o’clock Greenwich Mean Time. Two men on the far side of the drawing room put down their copies of The Times newspaper to peer studiously over their reading spectacles to see what all the amusement was about. One man even tutted and muttered under his breath, ‘Since Queen Victoria passed on, the whole place has gone to the dogs, gone to the dogs I tell you!’

‘Back in a time long since passed when I imagined I had all the time in the world, a young man with the world at his feet, I thought I could walk on both water and illuminated air as if I was Harry Houdini the Master Magician. However, time has a way of taking the invincibility of youth away from us and soon time is no longer on our side. Mr Albert Einstein said once upon a time—’

‘Here we go, if I start snoring don’t wake me up I beg of you, not until this quantum fairytale reaches the end of the story,’ the cigar-smoking man yawned theatrically as he stretched his arms above his head.

‘Let the man tell his story, otherwise the alternative is being bored to death; that, and being a physicist. I do love a good quantum fairytale!’ muttered Battersby, scolding his friend gently as he tried not to smile.

For a few seconds a faraway look entered the storyteller’s eyes, as if he was trying to remember how the story started. This was not a good sign as, like a joke, there was nothing worse than sitting through a tale and not finding how the story or joke ended.

‘See, unlike Theseus and his story of the Minotaur, you’ve made poor Digby lose his thread,’ a tall willowy gentleman with a hangdog expression upon his face sighed. In truth, to Digby, the man resembled a grandfather clock, and what’s more he was every bit as reliable as that old timepiece.

‘I apologize most profusely for my rudeness gentlemen it will not happen again for I hope soon to be in the land of nod with my dream date, Marie Curie,’ Caruthers laughed.

‘Marie Curie? No wonder you’re a scientist you could have chosen any number of starlets like Clara Bow, my dream date, or Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo or Scarlett Johansson. But no, Caruthers, you chose Marie Curie, no disrespect to the good woman long since passed,’ Battersby exclaimed indignantly.

‘Can’t help it, I’m in love with her beautiful mind,’ Caruthers replied as the old time song ‘You Must Be Out of your Brilliant Mind’ by the band Furniture appeared on the jukebox in Benjamin Digby’s head.

‘Not her brain, for I fear that is pickled and sits in a jar in the Museum of Mankind. This museum in its original form now only exists in the mind, or the British Museum if you want facts over fictions,’ the cigar-smoking man chortled, blowing a smoke ring into the air, which quickly disappeared into thin air, which enabled the man to jest, ‘I should be in the Magic Circle, not this circle of old duffers!’

‘If you’re not careful this lot of old duffers will duff you up, put you in a coffin and bury you alive in Highgate Cemetery; let’s see how your magic works then, Harry Houdini,’ Battersby snorted, putting his fists up as if he were a pugilist spoiling for a fight.

‘You wouldn’t hit a man when he was down: Marquess of Queensbury rules and all that jazz,’ the cigar-smoking man quipped as if he were the playwright and raconteur Oscar Wilde.

‘The old coot is only blowing smoke up your jacksy,’ Caruthers scoffed.

‘Don’t worry, he’s going to have a bell put in his coffin like the Victorians did, just in case he gets buried alive!’ Battersby quipped.

‘Lord Pembroke, a refill?’ enquired the butler of the Right Honourable member of the House of Lords, holding a decanter of whisky on an antique silver salver.

‘Have you lost your mind, man? If you need to ask me that, Tinker, after all this time, then you must be going as senile as most of the members of the club. Oh, and ice this time round, man, although I’m getting enough of the icy looks from my esteemed time-wasters to save me from being cryogenically frozen,’ the lord replied as the butler placed two ice cubes into the glass with a pair of tongs then slowly poured the drink in until it covered the ice cubes.

‘It’s hard to believe a couple of large ice cubes sank Royal Mail Steamer Titanic; damn shame, she was a fine vessel,’ the lord quipped as he held the glass up to the light as if he was imagining it was a crystal ball.

‘It’s a sovereign for cussing in the club as you well know, Lord Pembroke!’ Battersby laughed as he shook an invisible tin in the air.

‘I’m a pennyless pauper since shares in brown sugar from the Caribbean fell through the glass ceiling; pauper as in broke; it’s in the name: Pembroke!’ the cigar-smoking Lord said, determined to have the last quip before the story began in earnest.

‘I bet old Tinker has some stories to tell, both of his own and of the club members, but naturally being the club butler he’s sworn to secrecy,’ Caruthers added putting his finger up to his lips in a theatrical manner.

‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; I bet Tinker was all of these, am I right, Tinker?’ Lord Pembroke said in jest trying to get a rise out of the butler, who replied, ‘The Right Honourable Lord is always right,’

‘Right answer, Tinker, good man,’ the cigar-smoking man said, lording it over the butler and everybody else in the club.

‘As I was saying, what was I saying?’ Digby asked with a twinkle in his eye.

‘Okay, you’ve made your point Digby old man, do continue on with this tale of yours; we’ll all take an oath: no more interruptions on the pain of death, or something infinitely more painful for you gentlemen, which would be to pay tonight’s bar bill!’ the cigar-smoking man sniffed as he lit up another cigar with the one still in his hand. It seemed this man was a chain-smoker and cigars as fine as the ones he was smoking did not come cheap. Some members had nicknamed him Fidel after the famous cigar smoker Fidel Castro, although he was too old to start a revolution.

At this remark, most of the old gentlemen turned as white as a ghost; perhaps this was a meeting of the old London Ghost Club, which read the old members’ names out at each general meeting as if their spirits were still in the room attending the meeting. The only spirits in the Gentlemen’s Club were whisky, gin and vodka!

‘I will skip my childhood, happy as it was and full of adventure stories, I will also skip the happy times I spent at Oxford University. My secret story really begins at the time of my first proper job at the Crick Institute in London,’ Benjamin Digby said, trying to get the story in some sort of order as if he were the great storyteller Hans Christian Andersen. Benjamin Digby, Esq, like the great storyteller, wanted to hold his small audience spellbound and not send them all off to sleep. In truth he had waited all his life to tell this tale and it was a tale well worth telling if a little fantastical in nature; a lot fantastical in nature; one right up there with a story by the great storytellers Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. It was also a story with more twists and turns than Hampton Court maze.

As Digby told the story, in his mind’s eye he could see the giant celestial clock in the Clock Courtyard at Hampton Court, but in his mind’s eye the hands appeared to have stopped, frozen in time.

2

In which Benjamin Digby, Esq wastes some more precious time as the story finally gets up a head of steam.

Some said my work at the Crick Institute was a complete and utter waste of time. Actually, most people said my work at the institute was a waste of time, that work being the study of time. According to my esteemed colleagues, most of the time I spent studying the clock to see when it was time to clock off. My office space was in the basement, which should give you some idea of how much of a waste of time my work was deemed to be; there wasn’t even a clock down there so I had to use an hourglass to mark the passing of time. This rather blows the theory out of the water of my esteemed colleagues regarding the clock and the watching of it.

‘The whole ethos of the Crick Institute, the brainchild of Francis Crick, was for all scientists to work together sharing ideas for the common goal of furthering science. How far science could be furthered, well, that was an equation I would happily leave to Leonardo da Vinci, Pythagoras and Archimedes, even though in theory they were all as dead as the long-extinct dodo. Of course if time travel were possible, the dodo was alive and well as was the woolly mammoth, although this I did not think could be said of the dead parrot in the Monty Python sketch!

‘Now sharing ideas out as if they were candy was all fine and dandy but some scientists were not the sharing types and jealous of anybody getting their hands on their precious theories. Some may have said I was one of these secretive scientists, jealous of others’ work, but I wasn’t; I just didn’t want to be laughed out of London Town as my theories on time were what you might call out there; way out there. So far out there in fact they said I was living on another planet along with the Little Green Men and Spooky Mulder from the classic American sci-fi series The X-Files.’

By this time all the gentlemen in the circle of friends were listening so intently you could hear a pin drop, so much so, like the H.G. Wells story The Invisible Man, the storyteller had imagined they had all disappeared. That was the theory; the truth (which was always out there if you weren’t a conspiracy freak that is) was, they had probably all disappeared to the bar!

‘Nice space, I love what you’ve done with the old place, Wigsby, a young man dressed in a sharp suit, which looked as if it was made of tinfoil, said disparagingly in a nasal tone. In truth his voice made me think he was doing a bad impression of Stephen Hawking or the Daleks; perhaps he was one of John Joseph Merlin’s automatons turned rogue. Oh, just for the record, John Joseph Merlin was the eighteenth-century clock and automaton maker.

‘Right away I knew this man Milton Mildew was going to be my nemesis, my Voldemort, my Darth Vadar, a Machiavellian figure right up there with Niccolò Machiavelli himself. If I had a light saber or a magic wand to hand I would have cut him down to size with a witty Oscar Wilde-like reply, the pen being mightier than the sword. However, I’m afraid those witty replies only ever came later, much later, when it was too late to deliver them. If I’d had a computer I’d have delivered them a few minutes later by e-mail with a string of exclamation marks behind them as long as the string theory. Mildew, you’re a wet weekend, a drip, a blot on the face of humanity, a waste of space so get out of my space!!!!!!!!!! Every time he came down to my office I felt like I was one of Kraftwerk’s dummies who once upon a time fronted the German electronica band (still did in my time frame or 2O61 as dummies like the one in the film The Time Machine aged at a very slow rate).

‘But perhaps being a dummy in his eyes wasn’t such a bad thing; after all, then he wouldn’t see me as a threat and would stop toying with me and move on, hopefully to the salt mines in Russia, or better still Triton, Neptune’s icy moon, the coldest moon in the solar system: useless fact number one!

‘Yes, it is a nice space, like the one on the European Space Station; oh, and the name’s Digby not Wigsby by the way,’ I grinned like the Cheshire Cat or the village idiot, depending on your eyesight. I looked at the walls of my space covered with posters of science fiction movies like wallpaper from the dystopian Metropolis to The Time Machine, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The Time Tunnel. In 2O17 an old poster from the film Metropolis was sold at auction for 850,000 dollars: useless fact number two; two facts for the price of three!

‘I also had a plethora of globe atlases, some big, some small (one I was sure once belonged to Sir Isaac Newton) and hourglasses lined up in size as if I owned a hand-turned 24-hour hourglass clock. I would have liked to have owned Leonardo da Vinci’s Infinity Clock but nobody had ever built one even though Da Vinci had sketched the plans for such a clock.

‘I even had a brass telescope upon a wooden tripod, although the only stars I could see with it were the glow-in-the-dark stars I had stuck on the ceiling to brighten up the old place. However I could imagine that once upon a time the perspicullium belonged to the stargazer Galileo Galilei. When I looked through the brass telescope I imagine Galileo himself was looking through it and this transported me back in time, or at least in my own mind it did. Useless fact number three: perspicullium was an old name for a telescope that Galileo Galilei had coined many, many moons ago; how many moons? Well, you do the maths. Or if your maths is not that hot you could invent a time machine and get Pythagoras to do the maths for you.

‘From the first minute we met, I could see there would be friction between me and Mildew, science friction, light sabers at dawn, or we would cross swords literally, like the Musketeers. Mildew had the cold look of an assassin with his black onyx-like eyes, eyes that felt as if they were looking right through me like The Man with X-Ray Eyes, the old science-fiction B-movie. I could see he had no intention of being kind, seeing me as a third-rate scientist at best and worst like Doc the mad scientist out of the movie Back to the Future. I was the rat in the lab experiment, the monkey in the cage, to be poked and prodded and made fun of for his pleasure any time he felt like it, as if he were Dr Frankenstein back from the dead. I considered he may already be dead such was his pale appearance, which either made him a member of the Walking Dead Club or the Vampire Club!

‘I suppose you’re down here amongst the dead men for a reason, Blueberry; could it be you’re a time-waster, a mad scientist, another ghost hunter, or a believer that little green men really do live on mars? laughed Mr Know-it-all coldly thinking he’d got the better of me for the umpteenth time. Oh, by the way Mr Know-it-all, aka Milton Mildew, was the nickname I had given him along with Machiavelli or Mach for short. Mach was also an abbreviation for machine and one science fiction writers loved to use, or so my steam-powered search engine told me. There was also a track on Gary Numan’s classic electronica album Replicas entitled The Machman.

‘I preferred Kraftwerk, the band of German automatons, or so they would have liked us to believe. Kraftwerk were the soundscape I worked to, their hypnotic electro beats helped me think, as ‘Equinox’ by Jean-Michel Jarre helped me to relax, turn off my mind and let a stream of ideas appear as if by magic. It was just a matter of time before we would be streaming ideas from our AI friends electric and one small step from that was uploading our own minds to the AI’s body which would be made in our image, in other words replicas of us, so we would never die.

‘This stream of big ideas I would mind map