The Unlikely Time Traveller Read Free Page A

even have legs. And they wouldn’t eat real food, just pills.
    I kept quiet. I thought about the letter me and Agnes had written for our time capsule, saying how we liked climbing trees. Maybe there wouldn’t be any trees in the future. Then what would people climb? Would they even understand what we meant?
    Next thing Robbie chipped in. “We’ll have machines for everything so nobody will have to work. We’ll lie about all day, not get out of bed even.”
    I could hear stifled laughter behind me that turned into coughing. I felt sorry for Robbie, even though it was a typical lazy-sounding thing for him to say.
    “Well, I think,” Carly said, “we’ll have pandas for pets, but we won’t have honey because all the bees will die. You know there’s already lots less than there were.” She sniffed and sounded like she was going to burst into tears.
    “If there are no bees,” Mrs Flynn told us, “there won’t be many new flowers either, or fruit, or veg.”
    “Actually, I think there will be lots of bees.” That was Agnes. Definitely one of the most positive people in the class. “And I think everybody will get a patch of ground to grow food in, and they will bring back spinning wheels so children don’t have to work in terrible conditions in factories in India making our clothes.” She was on a roll, but you could tell by people’s expressions they thought she was bonkers. “We’ll make our own clothes in the future.”
    That was too much for Max. He laughed out loud.I couldn’t picture Max with a spinning wheel. Actually, I couldn’t picture myself with one either. To be totally honest I couldn’t even picture a spinning wheel. All I could picture was the wheels of my bike spinning, and I doubt that’s what Agnes had in mind. But Mrs Flynn was more impressed with her thinking. “Yes, laugh now Max. But Agnes may be right. Who makes our clothes now? Let’s do a little experiment, shall we? I’d like you all to find the label on your school jumper, or sweatshirt, or jacket, and read what it says. Let’s find out where our clothes come from.”
    So we all got busy, twisting round and peering at the tiny writing on the labels. “Does anybody have a label that says Made in Scotland by any remote chance?” the teacher asked.
    Nobody had.
    “Or Made in England? ”
    No.
    China, India, Turkey. That’s where all our clothes were from. Countries, Mrs Flynn informed us, where people worked for low wages, often in factories that were badly built and they had no holidays or time off when they weren’t well. Then she said it takes lots of energy to transport our shirts and trousers and coats and socks halfway across the world. Not to mention our furniture and toys and all the other stuff we buy. “So Agnes might well be right. It might not be possible to buy cheap things from overseas in the future like we do now.” Then Mrs Flynn sighed. “But the truth is, we don’t know. It’s like Robert Burns says in the poem – we can’t see the future, we can only guess.”
    She didn’t add the fear.
    But now she had got us thinking about it I realised I did fear the future – a bit.
    If I had known what Robbie was planning I would have feared it a whole lot more.

4
    After school me and Agnes were first to arrive at the den. Robbie had gone home for a snack, and Will, who’s our other gang member and best pal, had football training.
    Mrs Flynn had got to us with her mouse poem. I couldn’t stop thinking about the world a hundred years in the future. Neither could Agnes. We didn’t bother playing cards right away, or going outside for a run around. We just sat there in the den, guessing at what the future might be like. The truth is I had no idea, even though I had done a spot of time travelling and had met people from two hundred years back, and one hundred years back. In lots of ways people from the past were just like me. They laughed and cried, wanted fun and adventures. It was the world around them