Minky Robinson: Not Forgotten

By Angela Moyle

Minky Robinson does not realise she is playing with fire. Aside from that one time, the time travelling chair has always been really good to her. It’s taken her to interesting places to meet remarkable people, then it has always brought her safely home again.

When the chair takes her to the middle of Germany during World War II, and one of the ugliest times for humanity, Minky will endure hardships greater than she knew possible and will struggle to see the good in her situation. Taken captive and placed in a concentration camp with violent guards, a severe lack of food and no idea how to get back to her chair... or her time!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angela Moyle
• Release date: Oct 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463221839

Angela Moyle

Angela very much enjoys writing for children young and old. She has published three children's picture books, a five-book series for older readers and two Choose Your Own Way eBooks.She lives in Canberra Australia.

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Minky Robinson:

Not Forgotten

by

Angela Moyle

Copyright 2020 Angela Moyle

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 9780463221839 - eBook

eBook distributed by Smashwords

Table of Contents

Other works by Angela Moyle

Minky Robinson: Not Forgotten

Acknowledgments

About the author

Other works by Angela Moyle

Capital Adventure children’s picture book series

Phoebe Digs Politics

Clyde’s Prickly Ride

Hope’s Dawn Service

Minky Robinson young adult series

Minky Robinson: Chair Traveller

Minky Robinson: Secrets Unlocked

Minky Robinson: No Love Lost

Minky Robinson: Not Forgotten

Kat… this one is for you. x

One

Have you ever thought about your blessings, how good your life is and how lucky you are? It's something that has been on my mind a lot recently.

For the first sixteen years of my life I can say it wasn’t something I thought that much about, but recently a few things have fallen into perspective and I don't want to take anything for granted anymore.

I struggled for years about silly, trivial things... things like my name for example - Minky Robinson. To say I hated my name was an extreme understatement. It took me some incredible experiences to realise my name wasn't so bad, and in fact, is something that makes me special and unique.

Three years ago, my parents and little brother moved overseas for work. I put on a stink about moving and thankfully my mum and dad let me stay in Australia and move in with my mum's parents - Leanne and Robert Taylor who I usually call Nan and Pop.

One of the cool things about Nan and Pop is, they own an antique shop, and the even cooler thing is they live in the apartment above the antique shop.

When I talk about incredible experiences, I'm talking mind-blowing stuff. You see, early into my move to Sydney, I found a chair in my grandparents’ antique shop that had unexplainable but seemingly magical powers. The chair allows the user to travel to different times and different places.

So far, I'd been as far back as the start of the 20th century where I'd met and even possibly influenced my poetry heroine, then to 1920 to meet the best cricket player in history. It felt a bit like I'd been working through the decades... 1930s, 40s, 50s and 90s. Late last year I even did a redo of an unforgettable night which I like to call the night of the supermoon - because whenever I think about it, that incredibly huge moon is right there in the background of my memories. I'd started the night with a boyfriend, but finished it with a brand new, and might I say, much better model.

My chair travels haven’t always gone well. There have definitely been low points, but the high points well and truly outweighed the lows. Sometimes it felt like using the chair to time travel was addictive for me. The more I did it, the more I wanted, or indeed, had to do it.

I should stay focused here and tell you how the chair came into my life. My great-grandmother Miranda had been backpacking around the world in the mid 1980s (which apparently wasn’t the usual type of activity back then for a 61-year-old woman, but she has always been progressive).

On New Year’s Eve 1986, Miranda was staying at the Hotel Dupont in Puerto Rico when a horrendous fire broke out. She had tried desperately to get out of a fire exit, however for some reason the doors were locked and she couldn't escape. She was looking down the barrel of certain death when she pretty much tripped over the chair while stumbling through the smoke filled building.

Miranda knew all about the chair you see, she'd been in contact with it many times through her 61 years up to that point. The first instance was when I visited her in 1938 and she was only 13-year-old. This was only my second time working out how to use the chair to travel. We spent the day together and it was on that day, we became best friends for life. By complete accident, it was also the day I dropped a necklace my mum had given me and fortunately I went back to 2014 without it.

It was fortunate because Miranda wore that necklace almost every day of her life since then, and thankfully she was wearing the necklace the day of the fire. She was then able to use the chair and the necklace to escape the fiery building in 1986 to the safety of the Antique shop in 2014 where my mum was presenting me with the exact same necklace that had helped Miranda escape a fiery death.

Poor Miranda. It was the first time she'd ever travelled by the chair. She'd come from chaos and drama of a burning building, to the safety of a place she knew all too well, but of course she didn't initially know 'when' she'd arrived. What I'd since learnt is she had seen my mum and I, but had slipped out of the shop to work out 'when' she was and that is when she quite literally ran into my Pop's best childhood friend Colin Murphy.

When Col saw Miranda, he had looked like he'd seen a ghost. After all, he’d known Miranda most of his life and he knew (as much as any of us) that Miranda had been dead for 28 years. Miranda herself wasn't in the best shape mentally or physically after her close call with death, so they'd gone back to Col's place where she'd told him everything.

‘Everything’ is a lot of things. I mean, Col and Pop wouldn't even be friends now if I hadn't introduced them to each other at the age of eight - yes, on one of my several trips to 1956!

It would have taken him a bit of time to get his head around the major bombshell Miranda dropped, but for a dude in his mid 60s, Col was actually pretty cool about everything. In fact, if I remember correctly, Col had been there when I’d first laid eyes on the chair and he had actually encouraged me to find it.

The game changer for them came last year, on the night of the supermoon. For most of the year, Pop and Col had not been talking to each other which had been pretty bad for all of us. It all stemmed from the fact Pop accused Col (the eternal bachelor) of having a girlfriend who he was keeping from Pop.

On the supermoon night, Col had suffered a heart attack and we thought we were going to lose him. The heart attack had scared Pop and Col back into talking to each other and putting aside their silly squabble. But then, I guess because of his scare, it all came out that Col did have a girlfriend and I was stunned to find out his girlfriend was Miranda – Pop’s ‘assumed dead’ mum! Miranda's identity wasn't outted straight away. Everyone wanted Col to recover quickly, so they told him to get better and bring this new girlfriend he'd been keeping a secret along to Christmas lunch.

Let me just go back a bit here. I knew Col and Miranda had been getting close, I mean they'd been not only sharing a roof for two and a half years, but they'd also kept a pretty incredible chair travelling, death defying secret. The thought of Miranda and Col having a romantic relationship though, was hard for me to get my head around and kind of grossed me out.

What I didn't realise, and what Miranda had helped me understand, was that even though both she and I had been there the day Col and Pop had met, and she and Col had known each other for many, many years… Col and Miranda really hadn’t had much to do with each other over that time, until their 2014 encounter.

She noted that until Col came into Robert's life, Robert rarely left the house. Col was Robert's ticket to freedom and independence and meeting Col had been a major turning point for him.

They never went to the same schools, so Miranda never saw Col at school events. Then Miranda was widowed soon after the boys met, so while it was great Robert had a friend to get out of the house and play with, Miranda was busy being a single mum with an antique shop business to look after.

When Pop grew up, he met my nan and they decided to get married. Miranda transitioned Pop into the family business. She let Nan and Pop move into the shophouse to start their family and she moved to a flat in the city, just opposite the Queen Victoria Building. It gave Miranda some freedom from the shop, and showed Pop she trusted him with her business.

My mum Jennifer and my aunt Cassandra, mum's little sister, had been lucky enough to have spent their first few years of life with their grandmother Miranda working a few days a week in the shop, while they'd lived upstairs in the shophouse. That is, until Miranda finally decided Pop had things under control with the business and she was free to roam the world and have adventures.

Because every special family occasion and at least one night a month since I had arrived had so heavily involved Col, it was easy for me to assume it had always been that way. I'd only recently learned that Col hadn't started sharing those kinds of times with the family until his parent's had passed away - that was around the time my mum and aunty were moving out of home and going off to uni, so it was a mutually needed friendship.

Pop and Col used to go and watch football and cricket games together. Then they started meeting at the club to watch games as it was slightly more comfortable, and eventually it evolved into spending time at Pop's place to watch games. My nan loves nothing more than cooking for people who enjoy eating her food so she enjoyed knowing Col was getting looked after. This is the long evolution of how he started to become part of the Taylor house furniture and why I shouldn’t be creeped out that they had found love together.

Two

Christmas this year - with the big Miranda re-veal - was interesting to say the least. Not only were my mum, dad and six-year-old brother Zac back in the country visiting from Dubai, my Aunt Cassandra was there with her new boyfriend Tom. There was also Nan and Pop, me, Col, all four of Col's younger sisters with their husbands, and of course Col's mystery lady Miranda.

With 18 of us in total, it was decided the best place to have Christmas lunch would be at the RSL Club. It’s not that Nan wasn’t able to cater for that many, it was more that as a group of such a size, we wouldn't fit anywhere else in a sit-down scenario. It turned out to be a bonus no one would have to cook or do the washing up.

Everyone had gathered and there was a real excitement about not only seeing Col back on his feet and recovered after his heart scare, but seeing him with a lovely lady friend at a family event for the first time ever. When he walked in with Miranda, well, to say people were in shock was an understatement.

Before Christmas lunch, Miranda, Col and I had met and decided on a story she would tell everyone. We all agreed that the chair, and any talk of time travel, had to stay well and truly out of the story – any talk about the chairs magical powers was something that should not be broadly discussed.

Miranda hadn’t spent much time in Puerto Rico before the fire, but she did remember a convent she had visited the day before the big Dupont Hotel fire occurred, so she thought it would be quite feasible that if she'd somehow lost her memory during the fire, she could have been there at the convent in Puerto Rico all these lost years.

After the unexpected reunion, everyone finally calmed down enough to listen to Miranda's ‘tall tale’ about how she had bumped her head, suffered amnesia and been kindly taken in by the sweet nuns at the San Tanco convent. She lived at the convent for almost three decades, helping the community and fundraising for the nuns.

That was until quite recently when she'd received another knock on the head which had quite miraculously reversed the amnesia.

She had been out buying supplies with her best nun friend Sister Jacqueline, when