Chloe’s Extraordinary Telescope

By Claire Rosemary Jane

Chloe Blackthorne is an only child of parents who are rather older than many parents and who are quite strict. One day, she sneaks into the loft which her parents have forbidden her from entering, and discovers a strange telescope hidden away! Chloe quickly discovers that it has extraordinary powers to both see into the future and into the past, becoming her favourite possession as she explores time. One day while using the telescope in her garden, a happy-go-lucky boy named Jack sees her using it and asks to have a look through the telescope himself. Much to her amazement, she discovers that Jack can see exactly the same through it as she does! So begins a series of adventures which get steadily scarier as the two of them look further and further into the future. What exciting and terrifying adventures await Chloe and Jack with their extraordinary magical telescope?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398476875

Claire Rosemary Jane

Claire Rosemary Jane grew up in Malvern in Worcestershire and is the eldest of six children. Her father was one of the Bawdsey Manor radar pioneers. Claire has always liked reading but her peak childhood reading was between the ages of 9 and 12. At school, her favourite subject was geography, although she also liked both writing and music. Claire went on to qualify as a Chartered Surveyor. She has travelled widely to many parts of the world and as a result has progressively become more and more interested (and concerned) in what humans are doing to harm the planet.

Book preview

About the Author

Claire Rosemary Jane grew up in Malvern in Worcestershire and is the eldest of six children. Her father was one of the Bawdsey Manor radar pioneers. Claire has always liked reading but her peak childhood reading was between the ages of 9 and 12. At school, her favourite subject was geography, although she also liked both writing and music. Claire went on to qualify as a Chartered Surveyor. She has travelled widely to many parts of the world and as a result has progressively become more and more interested (and concerned) in what humans are doing to harm the planet.

Dedication

For my lifelong friend Jane, because a visit to her in the city in which she now lives inspired the idea of and location for Chloe’s Extraordinary Telescope.

Copyright Information ©

Claire Rosemary Jane 2023

The right of Claire Rosemary Jane to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, 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.

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

ISBN 9781398476851 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398476868 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781398476875 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgements

A thank you to all the children, and a few adults as well, who, having heard parts of the story read to them, begged me to hurry up and get it published.

Chapter 1

The Loft

Chloe was bored. It had rained all morning, and she hadn’t even been able to go out into the garden. She lay on her bed on her tummy, idly swinging her legs in the air, and wondered what to do. She didn’t really feel much like doing anything.

Down in the kitchen, her mum was busy baking cakes. Sometimes, Chloe would help her, but not today.

Chloe wandered out onto the landing. For some reason, her dad had left the loft ladder down.

Now, Chloe was not allowed to go into the loft and normally the loft ladder was put up out of the way.

Like many people’s lofts, Chloe’s parents’ loft was full of all sorts of things, put up there in case they might be useful one day. Her dad had been in a hurry this morning but had rushed up into the loft before going to work, to look out the box with the Christmas decorations in it, for Chloe and her mum to start putting up when her mum had finished the baking.

Before she knew it, Chloe was tiptoeing as quietly as possible up the rungs of the ladder, to see if she could find anything of interest to relieve her boredom. She stuck her head into the loft but it was very dark and she could see very little. She tiptoed back down the ladder to go to fetch her pocket torch.

Back at the top of the ladder once more, she shone her torch around the darkness of the loft. Little pools of light appeared wherever she shone the torch. The loft was very dusty and there were lots of cobwebs, which kept getting caught in Chloe’s clothes and hair. Only parts of the loft had any flooring, in other parts all that could be seen were the timber slats that supported the plaster that formed the ceiling of the room below.

Chloe stepped gingerly into the loft, being careful not to make any more noise than she could help and making sure to only tread on the strong wooden ceiling joists, or on the few floorboards that were there. She was amazed at the things that had somehow found their way into the loft. Her old cot was up here, and some broken chairs, lying all higgledy-piggledy across the joists. There were boxes and boxes. Chloe peered into one or two but they were all empty. One had been the box in which the toaster had come, another, the box for the only radio in the house, and yet another had been the one from the china dinner set, which still contained all the packings. Chloe wondered why they were there, not realising that they were being kept in case the family should ever move house.

The next things to look at were the suitcases. They too were mostly empty, although one did contain a stack of uninteresting looking papers.

It was whilst she was peering into and behind a big tea chest that Chloe spotted the telescope. Chloe’s eyes lit up. At last, something that looked vaguely interesting.

The telescope was big and heavy, and very dusty and it was as much as Chloe could do to get it back down the loft ladder, without either dropping it or making so much noise like banging it against the ladder that her mum might well hear it and come to see what Chloe was up to.

Chloe went back into her bedroom with the telescope and quietly closed the door. Luckily, she caught sight of her face in the mirror, for it was covered in dust and there were cobwebs caught up in her hair and on her clothes.

Chloe was slim, of average height for her age, and had lovely brown eyes.

I’d better wash my face, brush myself down, and brush my hair first, thought Chloe, Otherwise Mum will be asking me what I’ve been up to.

She pushed the telescope out of sight under her bed. It took Chloe several minutes of careful brushing to get all of the cobwebs from off her clothes and out of her long dark hair. Having done this, she once more tied her hair back in a ponytail to keep it out of the way, and then washed her face.

I wonder what I can use to clean up the telescope? She thought. She found some tissues, retrieved the telescope from under her bed and wiped the worst of the dust off the telescope. She carefully wrapped the tissues in a clean one before putting them in her waste bin and hoped that her mum wouldn’t notice that most of the tissues were by now very black indeed.

What can I use to clean the rest of the dirt off? thought Chloe. She looked at her face flannel.

Here goes nothing, she muttered and running the hot tap in the basin in her bedroom, she started to gently wash the remaining dirt off the telescope and with lots of swishes in the water in the basin, managed to keep the flannel fairly clean.

When she had finished cleaning the telescope to her own satisfaction, Chloe gave the two lenses, one at either end of the telescope, a final clean then polished them with her handkerchief until the lenses sparkled and her handkerchief looked really grubby.

Tiptoeing out to the bathroom, Chloe put both the flannel and the handkerchief into the laundry basket and hoped that her mum wouldn’t notice how dirty they both now were. Getting out a clean face flannel to use in place of the dirty one, Chloe was finally now ready to try out the telescope.

Chapter 2

A Curious Discovery

Just finding somewhere to perch the telescope was a problem. Chloe had to get a pile of small books and put them onto the windowsill to lift the telescope high enough to see through the glass of the window instead of looking at the window frame.

Chloe then got a chair to sit on and carefully balanced one end of the telescope on the books, whilst holding the other end with both hands. In this way, she could move the telescope up and down and from side to side and so look at different things through the window.

Chloe peered through the telescope. She had already discovered whilst cleaning up the telescope that it had a ridged ring, which would turn. Now Chloe knew very little about telescopes but this would normally be used to change the focus of the telescope to make things sharper and clearer, according to whether they were near or far away.

Putting her right eye to the telescope, Chloe pointed the telescope at the church down the road. Through the telescope, the church looked much nearer, which is, of course, what a telescope is supposed to do.

Chloe studied the church carefully. It had big stained-glass windows, a high pointed roof over most of it, and a short stubby tower at one end, which had a spire on top of it.

It was then that Chloe saw, around the edge of the telescope, a series of numbers and a neat little triangular arrow pointing at 0.

The numbers were 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 2000, 3000, and 4000.

Chloe turned the ring of the telescope carefully until the triangular arrow pointed at 10 and looked at the church again. She couldn’t believe her eyes with what she saw. The church was still there, but it no longer had a spire.

Oh, my! thought Chloe, I must be dreaming.

She stopped looking through the telescope for a minute and looked around her bedroom. Everything was exactly as she had expected. She pinched herself.

Perhaps I was imagining it, she thought.

Now, Chloe was well known by the few people who knew her for living a lot of her life in a world of make-believe. Almost anything that she looked at could be made to look like something else. And she had a most vivid imagination, which never seemed to switch off.

I must have been imagining it, Chloe thought.

She looked again at the church. There it was, through her bedroom window, the spire was definitely still there. She looked again through the telescope, expecting to see the spire this time. But there was no spire visible.

Wow, thought Chloe, I do believe that this must be a magic telescope.

She reached again for the ribbed ring. With trembling fingers, she looked again at the church. There it was as it had been before. She turned the ribbed ring slowly and carefully until the triangular arrow pointed at 20 and as she turned the ring; she watched in amazement as the short stubby tower slowly disappeared and the windows changed from stained glass to clear glass.

And this time, high above the windows was a big plastic hoarding, lit with fluorescent lights that said: Pine furniture store.

Chloe was a bit frightened now. What would happen if she turned the telescope ring around to 30, and then to 40 and on up? She put the telescope down on the floor, pushed it under the bed out of sight and went and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. And as she lay and thought, lots of questions started to enter her mind. What were the numbers? Were they distance or could it possibly be that they weren’t a scale of distance at all, but one of years? And if she were to turn the telescope on, what would she see? And would she want to see it?

She lay here for what had seemed like just a few minutes and drifted off into a reverie of her own once more.