Two Weeks with the Queen Read online

  Morris Gleitzman grew up in England and came to Australia when he was sixteen. He was a frozen chicken thawer, sugar mill rolling stock unhooker, fashion industry trainee, student, department store Santa, TV producer, newspaper columnist and freelance screenwriter. Then in 1985 he wrote a novel for young people. Now he’s one of Australia’s favourite children’s authors.

  Other books by Morris Gleitzman

  The Other Facts of Life

  Second Childhood

  Misery Guts

  Worry Warts

  Puppy Fat

  Blabber Mouth

  Sticky Beak

  Gift of the Gab

  Belly Flop

  Water Wings

  Wicked! (with Paul Jennings)

  Deadly! (with Paul Jennings)

  Bumface

  Adults Only

  Teacher’s Pet

  Toad Rage

  Toad Heaven

  Toad Away

  Toad Surprise

  Boy Overboard

  Girl Underground

  Worm Story

  Aristotle’s Nostril

  Doubting Thomas

  Give Peas a Chance

  Grace

  Once

  Then

  Now

  Contents

  Cover

  About Morris Gleitzman

  Also by Morris Gleitzman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  This book was written with the assistance of a Writer’s Grant from the Australia Council.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  First published in Great Britain 1989 by Blackie and Son Limited

  First Piper edition published in Australia 1990 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  First Pan edition published 1996 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  Second Pan edition published in 2001 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  This Pan edition published in 2010 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Piper edition reprinted 1990, 1991 (twice), 1992 (twice), 1993 (three times), 1994 (twice), 1995, 1996

  Pan edition reprinted 1996, 1998 (twice), 1999, 2000, 2001 (three times), 2002 (twice), 2003 (twice), 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 (twice), 2008, 2009

  Copyright © Gleitzman McCaul Pty Ltd 1989

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Gleitzman, Morris, 1953–

  Two Weeks with the Queen.

  ISBN 978 0 330 4 26220

  1. Title.

  A823.3

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2010 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Two Weeks with the Queen

  Morris Gleitzman

  Adobe eReader format: 978-1-74262-000-8

  EPUB format: 978-1-74262-001-5

  Online format: 978-1-74262-003-9

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  Introduction

  This book was almost about fruit-bats.

  In 1988 I lived next to a large suburban bush gully which was home to many of Sydney’s flying-foxes. I quickly discovered they were the most interesting neighbours I’d ever had.

  Each evening at dusk the sky darkened dramatically as thousands of them, little furry bodies suspended from huge leathery wings, swooped off to claim their share of Australia’s export fruit industry.

  I had an idea for a story about a girl who discovers the bats are under threat. It seemed a good choice for a young author who’d read all the writing manuals and was struggling to obey the rule that said write about what you know. The problem being that outside of his backyard he didn’t know much.

  The notion of a feisty young character defending her furry leathery friends from disapproving adults and their even more disapproving dogs, all in familiar surroundings, appealed to me a lot. It was an idea I was happy to spend a few months exploring in a book. Or so I thought.

  I spent several weeks planning the story. With each draft of the plan, the characters and their predicaments revealed themselves a little more. Soon I’d be ready to start writing chapters. As a veteran of two previous books, I knew that’s how it worked. Step by step, month by month, the story slowly unfurling.

  And I felt good about this story. Fairly good. Most of the time. Until finally one afternoon I couldn’t squash a nagging feeling. Was this the story I really wanted to write? Yes, I told the feeling, now go away and let me write it or I’ll report you to the Australian Society of Authors.

  But the feeling stayed. And an hour later something happened that had never happened to me before. Another story, a totally different one, complete and fully-formed, landed in my imagination like the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I gazed at it, awestruck, for about three seconds. Then I started scribbling notes. By the end of the afternoon I had an outline. The next day I started writing chapter one and, a month later, I was finished. That first draft, with a few gracious editorial interventions, is what you’re holding now.

  Boy, was I excited. Talk about a brilliant career development. Forget step by painstaking step. Forget slowly unfurling. From now on I could write a book a month. I was 36 years old. I calculated the thousands of books that lay ahead of me. (Maths was never my best subject.)

  Alas, and probably thank goodness, it was not to be. As time passed and my next story revealed itself with the speed of a geological era, I came to realise that probably I wasn’t ever going to write a book in a month again.

  So why did I get this once-in-a-lifetime book? During the twenty years since Two Weeks with the Queen was published, I’ve often been asked where the story came from. While words like genius and unique talent sometimes try to escape my lips, the truth is I don’t know.
It’s not autobiographical. Neither of my own younger siblings was ever diagnosed with a terminal childhood illness. Consequently I’ve never crossed the globe and tried to break into Buckingham Palace to borrow the Queen’s family doctor.

  Stories are rarely what they seem to be at first glance. A long time ago somebody invented metaphors, and our stories have been extra interesting ever since. Over the years I’ve had some inklings about Two Weeks with the Queen, some fleeting notions about its meaning for me. I was struck at one point by Colin’s dilemma. He has the obligatory problem that every main character must have for a story to exist, and he also has a second problem, and the nature of his dilemma is that he can only solve one. Whichever one he solves, the solving of it will guarantee he can’t solve the other. I certainly know what that feels like.

  But beyond that I haven’t probed and analysed Two Weeks with the Queen. I’ve been busy writing other books. And discovering that readers, teachers and librarians are much better at deciphering metaphors than I am.

  One thing I’m sure of is that Colin, Luke and Alistair’s story was growing inside me for a long time, without me knowing, and suddenly it needed to come out and no fruit-bats were going to stop it. I’m very grateful they didn’t. As well as putting me on the map as an author, Two Weeks with the Queen taught me a crucial lesson. Much as we authors might think we’re special because we can make up stories, there’s a mystery at the heart of what we do. Sometimes ideas take wing, and fill our imagination with their glorious swooping flight, and we don’t know why.

  So if we’re sensible, and fair, we share the credit with that mystery. Fortunately, though, mysteries don’t have legal rights, so we don’t have to share the royalties.

  A story by an unknown author needs help to find readers, and it needs luck. Two Weeks with the Queen had a lot of both, thanks to a series of benefactors.

  In the early 1980s I wrote scripts for a producer in ABC-TV’s education department, Sandra Levy. When Dr Patricia Edgar started the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, she asked Sandra to help produce a series of telemovies for young people. Sandra commissioned me to write one. While my original screenplay, The Other Facts of Life, was being filmed, McPhee Gribble offered to publish the story as a novel.

  I loved rewriting my screenplay as a book, but I didn’t see how books could provide the income I needed to support a young family. So I went back to screenwriting.

  In 1987 at a conference in the US, I met British TV producer Anne Wood (the future creator of Teletubbies). She noticed my copy of The Other Facts of Life, asked to read it, and passed it on to Philippa Milnes-Smith, an editor at Blackie publishers in London.

  Months later, out of the blue, a letter arrived from Philippa offering me a contract to write a children’s novel for Blackie. The advance was tiny, as befitted an author who’d never written a novel from scratch. But I didn’t care. Suddenly I knew. That evening, while the sky filled with soaring neighbours, I confessed to my partner Christine that I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing books. She kindly agreed not to leave me.

  A year later Blackie published Two Weeks with the Queen in the UK. But I lived in Australia and I needed an Australian publisher. My agent, Tony Williams, was friends with James Fraser, publishing director at Pan Macmillan. James read the book, and despite the difficulties in 1990 of putting out a story for young people in which a child is dying of cancer and an adult is dying of HIV-Aids, he and his team published it, and let people know about it, and persuaded them to read it.

  Twenty years later Two Weeks with the Queen has been published in a dozen or more countries, adapted brilliantly for the stage by Mary Morris and Wayne Harrison with productions in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, Japan and the National Theatre in London, championed as a possible movie for fifteen years by the irreplaceable Verity Lambert, and even turned into a stage musical in Minneapolis.

  Help and luck indeed. Thank you, dear benefactors. Thank you, unforgettable neighbours. Thank you, precious mystery. And thank you to everybody who has ever opened Two Weeks with the Queen and taken Colin, Luke and Alistair into their hearts.

  Morris Gleitzman

  For Christine

  Chapter One

  The Queen looked out across the Mudfords’ living room and wished everyone a happy Christmas.

  Colin scowled.

  Easy for you, he thought. Bet you got what you wanted. Bet if you wanted a microscope you got a microscope. Bet your tree was covered with microscopes. Bet nobody gave you daggy school shoes for Christmas.

  Colin looked away from the Queen’s flickering face on the TV screen and down at the shiny black shoes peeping up at him from their box on the threadbare carpet.

  Yuk.

  The Queen obviously couldn’t see them because she continued her Christmas Message without once chucking up.

  ‘. . . ridding our world of suffering and pain is not an easy goal,’ she was saying, ‘but we will achieve that goal if it is our sincere wish.’

  Colin’s sincere wish was that the shoes would burst into flames and explode into pieces. But they didn’t, even though they were being shot at by a low-flying MiG fighter plane.

  Colin stared out the window at the dusty paddocks. The shimmering glare was painful to look at, but not as painful as the sight of Luke playing happily with his model plane. Why should that little whinger get exactly what he wanted, right down to the colour of the pilot’s helmet and the number of napalm canisters under the wings?

  It wasn’t fair.

  ‘ . . . fair share of the world’s resources for all her people,’ the Queen was saying.

  Colin looked at his parents. He hoped the Queen was making them feel guilty.

  It didn’t look as though she was. People who are riddled with guilt don’t usually cuddle up on the settee and fan each other with bits tom off a beer carton.

  Colin stared at them for a while but that didn’t plunge them into guilt either, so he went back to watching the Queen.

  He wondered what it would be like to be that important. So important that it didn’t even matter if you spoke like a total prawn, millions of people all over the world would sit down on Christmas afternoon and say shhhh and listen to you.

  In his head, Colin started composing a letter. ‘Dear Your Majesty The Queen, I would be very grateful if you could send some tips on how to grab people’s attention and make them listen to you, understand what you want for Christmas etc. Even though I’m twelve I might as well be a lump of wood for all the attention I get around this place. Also some tips on how to stop younger brothers getting everything. I understand that chopping their heads off has been used a bit in your family. This is frowned on in Australia so something legal please . . .’

  Several loud explosions echoed around the shoe box as Luke roared in for another attack on the aircraft carrier HMS Yukky School Shoes.

  ‘Luke,’ said Mum, ‘we’re trying to listen to the Queen.’

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ said Luke.

  Serves you right, thought Colin, for having three lots of ice-cream with your Chrissie pud.

  ‘Serves you right,’ said Mum, ‘for having four lots of ice-cream with your Chrissie pud.’

  Four? Colin couldn’t believe his ears. When he was eight he’d only been allowed two. Young kids today didn’t know how well off they were.

  ‘I feel sick,’ said Luke.

  ‘Try keeping the racket down a bit,’ said Dad, ‘and you’ll feel better.’

  ‘Probably a strain of heat-resistant bacteria in the Chrissie pud,’ said Colin. ‘Pity we haven’t got a microscope in the family, I could have run some tests and spotted it.’

  Colin saw Mum and Dad swap a little glance that he wasn’t meant to see.

  They knew. They actually knew what he was busting for and they’d still given him shoes. Boy, wait till he had time to write that anonymous letter to the child welfare department.

  Luke came over and held out the MiG in a skinny hand.
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br />   ‘Wanna go?’

  Colin shook his head. That’s all he needed, charity from an eight year old.

  Luke’s pale brow furrowed for a second, then he was away, inflicting serious artillery damage to an already battered cane chair.

  A gust of scorching wind swept in from the Western Plains and made the plastic branches of the Christmas tree flap wildly. Something in the kitchen started to bang.

  ‘Col, shut that screen door, old mate,’ said Dad.

  Colin dragged himself to his feet.

  ‘Luke’d get their quicker,’ he muttered, ‘he’s got turbo thrusters and I’ve only got lace-ups.’

  But Mum and Dad’s eyes were already glued back on the TV screen.

  ‘. . . in these difficult times,’ the Queen was saying, ‘we have to work and struggle for privilege and good fortune.’

  ‘Bull,’ said Colin loudly as he slouched out to the kitchen, ‘some people are born with it.’

  Mum and Dad stared at the Queen.

  Colin stared at Luke.

  As Colin wedged a chicken bone under the screen door to stop it flapping open again, he heard the music playing at the end of the Queen’s Christmas Message. Then he heard footsteps behind him. He straightened up. It was Mum and Dad.

  Mum gave a little cough to clear her throat.

  ‘Love,’ she said, ‘about the microscope . . .’

  ‘Next time, eh?’ said Dad.

  They looked at Colin.

  Colin looked at them.

  He could hear Luke in the lounge, shooting enemy planes out of the sky with a faint roar.

  ‘We just couldn’t stretch to one this time,’ said Mum, ‘not with you needing a new pair of good shoes and all. But don’t forget, it’s your birthday in less than five months.’

  And it’s Luke’s birthday in less than two months, thought Colin bitterly. Wonder what he’ll get? A working model of the Garden Island Naval Depot with matching aircraft carriers? A trip round the world? A car?

  ‘They’re pretty snazzy shoes,’ Dad was saying. ‘Bloke could end up Prime Minister in shoes like those.’

  ‘I’ve got shoes.’ Colin pointed down to his brown elastic-sided boots. OK, they were a bit scuffed from when he’d borrowed Doug Beale’s trail-bike and the brakes had failed and he’d had to use his feet to stop, but they’d rub up with a bit of spit and chicken fat.