There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [77]
of the sticker Anna stuck on its cover. The word HISTORY is in her pocket. That is quite cool! For example there is when Queen Boudicca burned London to the ground which was to do with a tribe called the Iceni tribe and the uprising they were part of. If you were being witty with words that is what you could call what Brooke just did right now when she ran up the slope: up-rising. To be more literal she did it a moment ago and it took under a minute yip yip! Brooke Bayoude Fastest Runner In World Coming In Well Below 60 Second Mark. You can leave the word the out of Fastest Runner In World and in other places because it is a headline kind of thing and people will understand that the word the is there even if it isn’t actually there. It means the word the is implied. But it would obviously have been a lot faster than 54 seconds if she hadn’t had to dodge a lot of people. A lot of people have decided to visit the Observatory today due to it being the Easter holidays. The Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic Clock is a slave clock. A slave clock is a clock driven by a master clock, whose mechanism is elsewhere from the slave clock. The Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic Clock also has 23 hours marked on it instead of just the normal 12, like it is a double-length clock plus an 0 at the top where 12 midnight and noon would be, to make 24. It means that sometimes it is actually nothing o’clock. Nothing o’clock! What time is it? It’s a quarter past nothing. It’s half past nothing. Doctor, Doctor, I think I’m a clock. Well, don’t go getting all wound up about it. Joke from the days before watch batteries and digital. Brooke’s own watch is new. It is a Me To You watch. The picture on it is of a bear holding out a flower so that every time you look at the time it is as if the bear would like to give you the flower. It was from her mother and father on her birthday and it came with an actual bear that has been made to look like it is old though it isn’t, it is new with a pretend patch sewn into its face with big stitches. This is because old-looking things are more lovable. The bear is called Tatty Teddy. 54 seconds is Brooke’s first up-slope score (according to the watch) since she became ten. She has been ten for one day. She became it on Sunday 11 April. Ten on eleven April twenty ten. It will be particularly good next year because she will be 11 on 11.4.2011! Last year at school Brooke told Wendy Slater that there is a whole other range of numbers other than the usual ones that come after twenty-nine, that go twenty ten, twenty eleven, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. Wendy Slater believed her and altered her homework accordingly is what the letter home said about it THINK YOU’RE SO CLEVER Brooke’s class has had Mr. Warburton as its teacher now for two years. There is no doubting Brooke’s intelligence. Her verbal dexterity is notable and she is wonderfully imaginative and of course we do not have a problem with that or either of these things. But sometimes her infectious imagination can be vertiginous for her peers THINK YOU’RE THE CLEVEREST vertiginous: makes you feel dizzy.
But the fact is, Greenwich, right now, with all the buildings down there that people come here specially to look at, and the towers that are from now, and the old buildings that are historical, was once, way back in time, quite bustling and so on exactly like it is bustling today. But then out of nowhere and in a way no one could have predicted it all just stopped being bustling, not just when Queen Boudicca set fire to London and burned it down, but also when the Roman Empire began to not be an empire. Then, for some reason that is historical, London stopped being a port that was important—ha! the important port stopped being important. Greenwich was very important back then, historians know now, because it had a temple and a shrine and so on.
The fact is, they found a coin and an artefact, or artefacts.
The fact is. The arte-fact is. Brooke bends down to do up her lace. The arty-fact is, there was a picture of a man’s head on the coin, and it was one of the things they found