The garden is populated by beings dashing to and fro, glimpsed through the kitchen blinds. Animal or human? Friend of foe? There is thick fur across their backs and peaked caps upon their heads. They are busy with something of deep consequence, perhaps something to do with survival – food storage, reproduction, fleeing a pursuer? Once in a while they let out a singular, loud cry. The littlest (if there is only one) shrieks at a decibel beyond the hearing of a human, which makes me think that they are not human. I think there are three of them but they move with such speed and in a seemingly random configuration that I could be wrong. Perhaps there are six, eight, ten. Now they are dragging soft furnishings into the little wooden house half-way down the garden. Goodness me, where did they get those pillows?
I hope they are not giant rats. The council have stopped taking the green waste away and we are all instructed to put our uncooked kitchen waste in the garden compost but whenever we have done that in the past the rats come. I was just saying to Joel the other day that I hope the rats haven’t returned. Perhaps they are cats, hungry cats, cats on speed. Big cats? Leopards? No, I mustn’t wish for too big a prey animal. Small prey animals may be useful in a pandemic, large ones would be bothersome. They might eat children who are not in school. Wait! Our children! Where are our children?!
It turns out they are not rats, or leopards. They are orphaned children hiding in a barn during The Great Plague in 1665. Phew. Nothing to worry about there, except, of course, where my lovely children are. I open the kitchen door and ask the orphans but they do not seem to hear me. Perhaps I cannot time travel. I exist only within the next half hour, which is about how often I load or unload the dishwasher, the task to which I now return. The hairy orphan beings are knocking on the glass door. One of them is pointing at a stick and miming a word overly dramatically so I cannot make it out. The other two flank her like body guards –
Me: Hello, Cedar.
Cedar: Fire!
Me: Where?
Cedar: We want one.
Me: Somewhere in particular?
Cedar: We need to eat and we are rather tired of the raw potatoes and raw eggs our dying mother has given to us. We need to cook something on a fire. Can we?
Me: I point at the oven.
Cedar: I do not know what that is. I live in 1665. In fact I cannot really see you or this house. And I may be carrying the plague. But I just need to quickly ask if I can light a fire in the garden and then I need to very quickly get back to 1665. Please hurry.
Me: Oh. Okay.
Cedar: Can you pass me my fire lighter kit? It is in the utility room.
Me: How do you know where the utility room is? How do you know what a utility room is? I think every room in 1665 was a utility room.
Cedar: Shhhhh. Just get it.
Me: You collect the wood, I will lie down on my pillow-less sofa for ten minutes, and then I’ll come and help.
2020 ghost or not, I cannot allow the shawls and sheepskins to be worn while lighting and tending a fire, so I tempt the orphans back from 1665 by the suggestion of apple crumble made on the fire. I throw in a pandemic just so they feel a little at home. But they won’t believe me because right now, in the delicious wood smoke, under the trees, at the turn of April, it just doesn’t feel like anything is wrong.
Later I look up ‘The Great Plague’ on Wikipedia. The poor orphans I met today were survivors from the last widespread outbreak of the bubonic plague that lasted 400 years. That’s years. And with two zeros. Not months with no zeros.
Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down!
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