I am very excited to be posting an extract from this book today, This Ruined Place by Michael Lawrence.
The Blurb
Evy Miller thinks a summer with her grandparents in sleepy Dorset will be painfully dull. Her suspicions are confirmed when Juby, a wild-haired, lanky old man, strolls through her grandparents' doorway. At first, she thinks he’s nothing more than an odd duck who charms her grandmother and annoys her grandfather. The last thing she expects is to become his companion on visits to the small village of Rouklye, whose entire population was evicted during WWII. She has no idea that the reason for Juby’s visits will become a defining moment in her life and change her understanding of history and her own family forever.
The Extract
In this extract, Midge, is visiting the ruins of Rouklye with her grandparent’s friend, Juby, for the first time.
Following Juby into the building he’d said was once the village school, she stood in a narrow vestibule with coat pegs on either side. Each peg had a small card by it with the name of a pupil who’d once attended the school. Her eye was caught by one of the names: Violent Croke. She gaped – Violent Croke?! – but closer inspection revealed that there was no ‘n’.
She read the rest of the names without adding letters: Dorothy Ferris, Walter Richards, Kathleen Richards, Henry Braine, Vera Bellman, Tommy Ochart, Elizabeth Fannon, John Miller, Lizzie Naylor, Fred Day, a number of others. Above the pegs on one wall hung a framed photograph, cracked and brown with age, showing the children, aged from about four to fourteen, to whom the pegs belonged during their years in attendance at the school. A youngish schoolmistress, unsmiling, stood to one side of them, hands folded in front of her. Midge counted twenty-two pegs and twenty-two names, but thirty-one children in the picture, which suggested that there were either more pegs originally or that eight of the kids in the photo did without or doubled up. In the middle of the front row young Billy Brooker, who looked as if he’d been told to sit up straight and didn’t want to, held a small writing slate on which the teacher had chalked ‘Rouklye School 1912’. A typed note beside the photo stated that this same Billy Brooker was later drowned, aged fifteen, in a boating accident in Crowbarrow Bay.
The school itself was a single, heavily-beamed, chapel-like room. A pair of oil lamps dangled on long chains from the whitewashed ceiling. There was a brick fireplace with an old wood stove, and a series of linked desks with fixed benches. Samples of the work of former pupils were laid out on the desks, under glass like museum exhibits.
‘Any of this yours?’ Midge asked Juby, who was looking at other things in another parts of the room.
‘Long before my day,’ he said. ‘Didn’t go to school here anyway.’
A large blackboard stood on an easel to one side of the fireplace. The board’s main headings were painted on. The rest, changed daily this month if no other, were neatly hand-written in chalk.
Welcome to Rouklye School
15th August
Weather Outlook
Sunny, hot, cooling sea breeze
Max 29c
Juby stepped up onto a slightly-raised platform at the far end of the room, squeezed himself onto the bench fixed to one side of a large desk that stood there, and stuck his chin on a fist to gaze out of the broad end window. He’s an odd one, Midge thought. The way he looks, speaks, behaves. Even his name was odd. ‘Juby Bench’ was certainly on a par with ‘Violet Croke’ without the ‘n’.
A small giggle behind her. She turned to see who’d come in. No one had. For the second time in less than twenty minutes her spine tingled, but when she saw a young family passing beyond the window she decided that one of the children must have briefly looked in.
To pass the time until Juby deigned to head on out, she strolled along the desks examining the work under glass. There were crayon and pencil drawings, childish poems about nature, weather, home life. There were also sums, spelling tests, things about religion, and ‘lines’. The work didn’t seem all that old-fashioned, and she found it hard to imagine that the kids who’d produced it would be very old now – those who were still about at all. Most would be long dead, like Billy Brooker. It wasn’t so easy to be amused by their school work, or their names, when you remembered that.
Nearing the fireplace, she extended her fingers to the unlit fire, imagining the warmth of a good blaze on a freezing winter’s day, then moved along to the piano, an old upright. Tempted to sit down and plink-plank-plunk a bit, a glance at Juby, preoccupied by the window, dissuaded her. Instead, she went to a display case that offered a selection of hand-written entries from the school register, which seemed to have doubled as a diary.
July 13th, 1911 Not so good an attendance this week. Children are kept away while mothers carry food to the hayfield.
May 24th, 1912 Ernest Mawer has been away all week with a swollen face. Irene Day has been away since Wednesday owing to sickness.
Aug. 2nd, 1912 Irene Day leaves today being 14 years of age next week. I am rather sorry to lose my older children.
Oct. 26th, 1913 Attendance again lowered by the absence of Tommy Ochart who has not been to school since the holiday owing to having no boots.
‘Show you my house if you like.’
She glanced toward the platform at the end of the room. Juby’s hulking silhouette at the desk.
‘Your houssss...?’
The word skidded to a halt. There were two silhouettes at the desk, the second sitting across from Juby: a boy, thin and rangy, no less wild-haired than the man. She tried to speak, but her tongue refused to let go of the roof of her mouth.
Book Details
ISBN: 979 8987977439
Publisher: 8n Publishing
Formats: e-book and paperback
No. of Pages: 246 (paperback)
Purchase Links
About the Author
MICHAEL LAWRENCE has written and published a great many books, but he's done a few other too. For instance, after leaving art school he began training as a graphic designer in a London studio before morphing into a photographer. As a photographer he took pictures for advertising agencies, publishers and newspapers, of pop stars and politicians, of fashion models and underwear, and many other kinds of people and things besides. He also worked in a travelling circus for a little while, and has been an antiques dealer, co-owned two art galleries, and made hundreds of paintings, drawings and experimental digital images. One of his private joys is recording songs (many of which he's written) under the alias Aldous U.
As a writer he's won the odd award, had books translated into twenty or so languages (one of which - 'Young Dracula' - was the inspiration for five BBC-TV series), has shuffled onto stages at literary festivals, and been interviewed on TV and radio. 'There's more,' he says, 'but I don't want to bore you. There's a lot of me in the Rainey novels, but I'm not saying which bits.'
(media courtesy of Rachel's Random Resources)
(all opinions are my own)
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