Children's Author
Helen Laycock
My children used to have a playhouse in the garden which I could see from the kitchen sink as I was washing up. In the early mornings, the windows of it would steam up and it put an idea into my head... What if, every night, someone was sleeping there, and we never knew?
Here's a trailer for you to enjoy...
An extract from when Mitch leaves the orphanage
Meanwhile, Mitch was trekking through the thick, dark woods, trying to remember in which direction he had seen the camp from the tree top. He was very cold. The evening was damp and his shoes were worn and uncomfortable. In the pitch black he was finding it very difficult to see. Thick branches above his head almost cut out what little moonlight there was.
Then he heard it. Just a slight noise. A snap of a twig and a rustle of leaves.
A huge weight dropped on to his back and he fell to the forest floor. The smell of damp leaves was in his nostrils and he felt a smear of cold mud upon his face. There was someone sitting on his back, holding him down.
‘Friend or foe?’ It was a boy’s voice. Mitch’s spirits lifted. Someone from the camp!
‘Friend!’ said Mitch, attempting to roll over so that he could meet this new acquaintance, but he was held fast. ‘Why are you pinning me down? Let me up so that I can at least shake hands and introduce myself.’
The strange boy was quiet.
Suddenly, from all around him, Mitch heard more rustling and menacing whispers.
‘Hey! What’s going on? Will someone please tell me?’
Mitch was beginning to feel scared. What was going on? He had come to join the camp. He was a friend, one of the boys from the orphanage. Why were they treating him like this? What had he done wrong?
Silence.
Mitch, still flat on the ground, became aware of a pair of large feet standing astride just in front of his face. As his head was being held down, he was unable to look up beyond the ankles of the stranger. In the darkness, he could just make out that the shoes were torn and ragged. Dirty toes were peeping through with long, claw-like toenails. He could see no trouser legs, no socks, just thick, muddy ankles, camouflaged in the dark.
‘Release him.’ This voice was deeper, commanding.
Slowly, Mitch got up on to all fours and pushed himself up to a standing position. The boy in front of him towered over him and was standing with his hands on his hips. All around him were other boys, all dark-faced, so that Mitch could only see silhouettes. He was unable to recognise anyone.
‘Name?’ ordered the deep voice.
Mitch held out his hand as a token of friendship, but it was not taken.
‘Mitch,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘And you are?’
‘Your leader, Montgomery.’
Mitch was suddenly struck by the thought of his old bed, where Johnson was now sound asleep. This was not how he imagined his welcome to be. All those late-night stories in the dormitory had created in his mind a quite different scene from that with which he was now met.
At that moment, Montgomery issued a command which was responded to immediately. The boys closed in around Mitch, hoisted him up and carried him flat on his back above their heads through the dark woods, chanting,
‘Initiate, initiate,
Emaciate, emaciate,
Rubricate, rubricate,
Eradicate, eradicate.’
Mitch was bemused. This didn’t match the stories that were told at Miss Scattypants’. They must have been rumours. All the boys that Mitch talked to had thought that life in the forest was a life of camaraderie and adventure. It wasn’t meant to be like this. This was scary. And those words. What did they mean? The boys were repeating them over and over again. This time in a whisper.
‘Initiate, initiate,
Emaciate, emaciate,
Rubricate, rubricate,
Eradicate, eradicate.’
He tried to pick them out. Well, Miss Scattypants had read lots of stories to the boys, so Mitch was able to pick out most of the words.
‘Initiate’. That must be something to do with an initiation ceremony when a new member joins some sort of group or club, he thought as he was carried along through the trees. It’s usually some sort of unpleasant ordeal, where the new person has to perform a task to prove their worth.
‘Emaciate’? Don’t you say someone is ‘emaciated’ when they are starving? It’s when their bones show through their skin. I don’t like the sound of that.
‘Rubricate’? Rubricate? Never heard of it. I’ll just have to wait and see. And what is that last word? Er-ad-i-cate. ERADICATE! That means to get rid of something! What on earth am I going to do?
The next thing that Mitch knew, he was being pushed into some sort of cage which was hanging from a tree. It was made from twigs tightly entwined and was only big enough for Mitch to crouch. With that, he was left swinging in the dark, silent night, alone and afraid. As the boys retreated, Mitch heard their voices fading into the distance.
‘Emaciate, emaciate, emaciate...’
‘So, this is it,’ he thought, ‘the first stage of the initiation. They are going to starve me.’
'Here is a children’s story to match anything by Roald Dahl or P. L. Travers for invention, excitement, and amazing characters.'
A rich girl, an orphan and a sinister plot at Lottery Lodge.
'Martha and Mitch is a story told gently, beautifully with great wit and a spirit of fun.'
This is a book full of inventions...
Many of Martha’s toys were most unusual. In fact, they were mostly unique, being original prototypes of those her father intended to manufacture.
All Mugsworthy toys were created by the funny little inventor, Willoughby Withers.
A quick note about Withers…
Withers was a tiny man with big blue eyes, a little white hair above his ears and a perfectly white coat. He always kept an emergency pencil behind his ear, and in his top pocket were a small notebook (worth millions in the wrong hands) and a packet of extra strong mints.
Nobody knew the exact age of Withers, but it was said that he was well over a hundred years old. He was a man of very few words, but was an absolute genius in the toy world. Mr Mugsworthy-Millions had built for him, within the walls of one of the factories—nobody knew which—a secret room where he ate, slept and invented.
Without Withers, Mugsworthy would have had a very different story to tell.
In many respects, Martha Mugsworthy-Millions was a fortunate little girl. In others, she was not. She lived at Lottery Lodge, with her father and step-mother.
Martha has never had a friend. Other children have never been to Lottery Lodge.
Imagine her shock when she comes across Mitch sheltering in her gingerbread cottage garden playhouse...
As she pushed her head around the door, Martha let out the biggest scream of her life. There was a scrawny, dirty, red, ragged individual asleep on the jelly sofa. Her scream woke him with a start. He didn’t scream back. He just opened his eyes and looked at her, sadly, Martha thought.
She ran over to him and knelt beside him.
‘You gave me a shock. I’m sorry for reacting like that.’ It was a boy, a real boy. ‘There have never been any children in the grounds of Lottery Lodge before. But, you’re hurt. Let me help you. I’ll get you some water.’ Martha hurried to the kitchen and returned with a large glass of water and a stripy straw. She held it to the boy’s mouth and he drank gratefully.
‘Are you hungry? Wait.’ Martha ran back to the kitchen to get some biscuits and broke them into small pieces. The boy was so weak that he could barely lift them to his lips. After a few mouthfuls, he began to speak.
‘Thank you... You’ve got to get help. Tell the others not to go.’
‘I don’t understand,’ replied Martha. ‘Help for whom?’
‘The boys. Tell them not to go to the woods.’
Mitch closed his eyes again and Martha ran to the bedroom upstairs to get him a blanket. She covered him and watched him as he slept. What on earth was going on? Something exciting was about to happen. She just knew it.
Isn't it strange how one child can be so lucky, when not a stone's throw away another child's life has taken quite the opposite direction? Indeed, not one child, but many unfortunate children lived on the other side of the thick wood that encircled Lottery Lodge.