Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children

  Dedication

  FOR CAMERON AND MIA

  CONN IGGULDEN

  FOR MAXWELL AND DARCY

  LIZZY DUNCAN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Map

  Book One

  How to Blow Up Tollins

  Chapter One

  The Year 1922, During the Reign of King George V

  Chapter Two

  Serious and Determined Men with Beards

  Chapter Three

  The Vital Importance of Salami

  Chapter Four

  Talking to Beards

  Book Two

  Sparkler and the Purple Death

  Chapter One

  How Amputation Can Be a Blessing

  Chapter Two

  The High Tollin Makes Things Quite Clear

  Chapter Three

  No Hope and Nothing to Read, Either

  Chapter Four

  The Last Place They Would Ever Think to Search

  Chapter Five

  Tea and Execution

  Book Three

  Windbags and Dark Tollins

  Chapter One

  Pure Research and the Problem with Pumps

  Chapter Two

  Why Roast Beetle Is Always the Right Choice

  Chapter Three

  High Hopes

  Chapter Four

  High Tea

  Chapter Five

  Low Plots and Hot Water

  Author’s Note

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  A BUMBLE BEE

  ROMAN

  GRUNION'S DAD

  WING

  SPARKER

  BERYL

  GRUNION

  A FAIRY

  THE HIGH TOLLIN (ALBERT)

  WANGLE

  BRIAR

  Map

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE YEAR 1922, DURING THE REIGN OF KING GEORGE V

  OLLINS ARE NOT FAIRIES. Though they both have wings, fairies are delicate creatures and much smaller. When he was young, Sparkler accidentally broke one and had to shove it behind a bush before its friends noticed.

  In addition, fairies cannot sing B-sharp. They can manage a very nice B-flat, in quite a sweet voice, but B-sharp comes out like a frog being run over by a bicycle. Tollins regard fairies as fluttery show-offs and occasionally use them to wipe out the insides of cups. Tollins are also a lot less fragile than fairies.

  In fact, the word “fragile” can’t really be used about them at all. They are about as fragile as a housebrick.

  Before that summer when the world changed, Sparkler had looked forward to a full life containing nothing more dangerous than wrestling angry bees off flowers, or occasionally dancing with other Tollins at the full moon. He loved to dance, even when he trod on the toes of the others, or tripped over a fairy ring. Fairies never tripped, or fell over, so when they tried to take part, Tollins always began a singing competition instead. In the key of B. If the fairies stamped their little feet and rose to the challenge, they sounded like silver bells being dunked in soup before they gave up. Tollins enjoyed that.

  When Sparkler was born, his parents enjoyed a simple life of fluttering around at the bottom of people’s gardens. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to them was being chased by two little girls, until they were fortunately distracted by a pony. Adults were no danger. They just couldn’t see Tollins, even if they were really close.

  At first, the Tollins had thought nothing of the serious men with large beards and even larger boots who suddenly seemed to be everywhere, measuring things with bits of string and nodding to each other. Yet in just a short time, they had transformed the little village of Chorleywood. First they had run rails for clanking trains, then they built their fireworks factory. It had very thick walls and an extremely thin roof, just in case.

  The Tollins hadn’t minded the fireworks being tested. Some nights, Sparkler had gathered with his parents and grandparents to watch the serious, bearded men light them, one after the other. None of the fireworks went whee or had colors back then.* They just went bang and made the men jump and clap their hands together, almost like the children they had once been.

  The “Great Fireworks Discovery” had been an accident, really. One of the youngest Tollins had crept too close to fireworks on the bench of the factory. While no one was around, the little one climbed into the tube of something called a Roman Candle. Just as he was tasting a pinch of the black powder inside, it all went dark and he was trapped.

  The other Tollins searched for him, of course, but there was no sign. That night, the first fireworks were the usual sort, jumping and spluttering, but then the Roman Candle was lit, and the world changed forever.

  Sparkler had been there, sitting on a wall with his family. He still remembered the way the Roman Candle leapt into the air, trailing a shower of blue sparks before exploding with a bang that knocked one of the men down. The man’s beard was on fire when he stood up, but that didn’t stop him cheering as he patted the flames out.

  In the silence, in the night air, the Tollins heard the voice of the little one they had lost.

  “Heeeeelp!” he yelled. The older Tollins looked at each other and their wings vibrated so fast you could hardly see them. They leapt up into the darkness and one of them caught the little Tollin as he fell.

  He was bruised but alive, though his wings were in tatters. Those would grow back in time, but he also seemed to have gone deaf and couldn’t understand the questions they were all asking.

  “What?” he kept saying. “I was in the firework! No, in it! Didn’t you see? What?”

  Deep under Chorleywood station, the High Tollin had called a council of elders together to discuss the problem. While his parents spoke at the meeting, Sparkler had tended to the burned one who kept shouting “What?” The little one’s name had been Cherry, but he insisted they call him Roman after that.

  Tollins had come into contact with humans before. They were too curious for their own good and humans always seemed to be doing something interesting. Small Tillets were still told the tale of the Tollin who wrestled an apple off a tree and dropped it on the head of a young man sleeping below. The young man’s name was Isaac Newton and, as a result, he discovered gravity.

  As a young Tillet, Sparkler had even spent time at a school, when he overslept in a satchel. He still cherished the memories of the little book he had brought home, full of big letters and pictures of apples and bees. The bees smiled from the page, which was surprising. In Sparkler’s experience, bees had no sense of humor.

  Just taking that book had been an enormous risk. After all, the first Tollin law was that no one spoke to humans. It always led to trouble, or sometimes gravity. It was better for Tollins if humans didn’t know they existed. After all, Tollins weren’t fast, or even particularly nimble. Over the years, they had been caught by propellers, run over by lawn mowers and one had become tangled in a kite string until he bit through it. They might not have been fast, but they were tough. One of them had even been swallowed by a cat and she survived too, but the less said about that the better.

  In the end, the High Tollin decided no lasting harm had been done. He couldn’t have known then that the men with beards were more excited about the new kind of fireworks than they were about big ships, good boots and proper penknives put together. Seeing young Roman whoosh above their heads had been the most interesting moment of their lives and they would not rest until they had managed to do i
t again. If the Tollins had known then about Catherine wheels, perhaps they might have flown to a different part of the country, joining the Dark Tollins of Dorset, or the Mountain Tollins of Wales. They could even have stowed away on a ferry to another country, where Tollins spoke in a strange accent and wore berets. If they had, it would have saved them from headaches, exhaustion, fallen arches and worst of all, slavery.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SERIOUS AND DETERMINED MEN WITH BEARDS

  T TOOK ALMOST TWO YEARS for the bearded men to discover the secret of good fireworks. The Tollins sometimes watched through the windows of the factory as the men rolled the tubes and tried to recreate the magic moment when young Roman had almost blown himself to pieces.

  Sparkler had snorted with laughter as the men tried adding pieces of their beards, scraps of their jackets and even tiny snips from their boots, though that batch of fireworks just smelled awful. If he had thought about it, he might have realized that no matter how many times the fireworks men failed, they just shrugged their shoulders and tried again. You only have to wrestle a bee off a flower once or twice before he goes away, but the bearded men were serious and determined.

  The events of that summer started with two boys from a local house. They had spotted Sparkler’s parents sunbathing on a daffodil and instead of standing in amazement as children usually do, or even running back to the house for a shoebox and butterfly net, they yelled and whistled and raised such a commotion that Sparkler’s father fell into a rosebush.

  The boys’ parents didn’t believe the story at first, but their father had worked in the fireworks factory for a long time. He scratched his beard and tapped his boots on the ground, looking very thoughtful. He looked at the garden and he looked at the fireworks factory which was just next door. He considered lighting his pipe, which he couldn’t do in the factory in case he blew the roof off.

  “Well, I’ve tried everything else,” he said to himself. After all, something had made that Roman Candle better than all the others. Some special ingredient had made it soar upwards, like the dreams of bearded men.

  He knew his two sons weren’t handsome or clever. They were in fact the sort of boys who collect beetles and try to race them for money, but they didn’t tell lies, or at least, not very often. The bearded man didn’t think they would make up something as strange as a little winged creature sleeping on a daffodil, or even one who fell in a rosebush and used very bad language indeed.

  It wasn’t long before the bearded man was creeping about at the bottom of his garden, armed with a net. That didn’t work of course. He couldn’t see them and the Tollins just flitted about without a care in the world. Some of the young Tillets were trying to make fairy-powered roller skates, but the fairies kept getting squashed. Later, when Sparkler looked back on those innocent days, with the little piles of flat fairies, it made him sad. It had been a happy time.

  It was a simple blue glass filter that made the difference. The Tollins kept away from the two boys, but they didn’t try to hide from an adult—they had never needed to.

  They saw that the bearded man had made himself a pair of glasses and they saw the way he kept changing the lenses and peering into the bushes, but they fluttered on, drinking nectar and laughing at the way Sparkler’s dad couldn’t sit down. The first they knew of the blue glass filter was when three of them were scooped up in a jam jar and the lid was screwed down. They were trapped! The bearded man shouted in excitement and even considered a little dance of his own, before he remembered his wife was watching from the house.

  That night, the Tollins gathered along the walls of the testing yard and watched three green rockets whoosh up to the stars before exploding with a noise that sounded a bit like thunder, but a lot more like the end of the world. Their friends had fluttered down with burnt wings, shouting “What?” just as poor Roman had done.

  The next morning, the Tollins were woken by dozens of bearded men shouting and stamping around. All of them worked for the factory and all carried jam jars and wore glasses with blue lenses. As the sun rose, Tollins were snatched off petals, flowers and flowerpots. They’d be quietly snoring and suddenly, whoosh, they were in a net, and, pop, they were in a jam jar. The fairies didn’t seem to mind the sudden loss of their companions. The blue filters didn’t reveal fairies at all. Some of them sang a farewell song that they called “Good-bye to the summer (with burping frogs) in B-sharp.”

  The bearded men lined up the jam jars on the workbenches of the factory and the poor Tollins looked mournfully at each other. They all knew what was going to happen. They eyed the rows of cardboard tubes uneasily, but there was nothing they could do. One by one, they were plucked out by huge fingers and stuffed into fireworks.

  Some of them went legs first. The unluckiest ones went head first.

  Sparkler was one of the unlucky ones. He found himself upside down in something called a “Moon Rocket.” For a while, he comforted himself with the thought that Roman had survived the experience. Surely, he too would live through the explosion to come.

  One of the men tapped Sparkler’s tube and the shivering Tollin heard the words, even through the layers of cardboard.

  “That’s enough for the demonstration,” said the man. The voice was very low and deep, so it seemed to go on for a long time. To humans, Tollin voices sounded a little bit like the whine of a fly. They tried to swat them when they crept up to an ear. Sparkler concentrated as the voice boomed somewhere close. He could not hear if the owner had a beard, but he imagined one anyway.

  “After this,” he heard, “we’ll be the most famous fireworks factory in England!”

  His companion had a slightly less bearded voice. “How are we going to get enough of them though? They’ll run out eventually.”

  “We’ll comb the south of England for them, now we have the blue glasses,” his cheerful friend replied. “We’ve found forty in just a few gardens. If we get the job for Buckingham Palace, we’ll have buyers lining up the street. We’ll make our fortune!”

  Sparkler seethed in his tube. The bearded men didn’t realize Tollins could survive being used in fireworks! They honestly thought they were going to blow them up! He was horrified and then, after a bit of thought, he was horrified again. It wouldn’t be long before the bearded men found out that Tollins could be used over and over and over again.

  The future looked dark, though to be fair, almost everything looks dark when you are wedged upside down in a cardboard tube.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF SALAMI

  PARKLER SURVIVED HIS FIRST TRIP in a Moon Rocket. He had quite a lot of time to think about his situation before his tube was lit. Stunned and deafened, he fell for a long time before landing on the roof of Buckingham Palace in London. The bearded men had impressed the king with their new fireworks and Sparkler had been launched as a result. Three more Tollins landed among the pipes and tiles of the roof and rested there with Sparkler. It took almost two months for their wings to grow back.

  By the time they were ready to fly home to Chorleywood, Sparkler had formed one important question that needed an answer. It didn’t worry the men in the factory. They were happy enough gathering up Tollins from miles around and if they even noticed some of the them were the same, it didn’t seem to trouble them. For Sparkler, though, it was important. Why were Tollin fireworks better than the normal kind?

  It was while trudging through Somerset on his way home for the third time that he noticed something different about himself.

  Tollins have dust on them. It wouldn’t be right to call it fairy dust, as fairies don’t actually have any. It’s Tollin dust. Tollins don’t think about it much, any more than you think about your eyebrows, or a moth thinks about moth dust, though that exists as well. For Tollins, it’s a light powder on their wings and skin that drifts behind them as they fly. Sparkler was the first to notice that all the dust had gone after every trip in a rocket. Somehow, the bright colors and explosion used it up. It came back,
thank goodness, just as their wings grew back, but Sparkler thought it had to be important. He was almost cheerful as he walked through the Somerset village of Taunton in the moonlight.

  When he reached Chorleywood at last, he gathered some of the other Tollins at an old oak tree on Chorleywood Common. In the tunnels under the train station, he knew the High Tollin would again be in deep discussion with his council, so deep it would be difficult to wake them for dinner. Sparkler knew they’d never listen to him, so he gathered the ones he knew and trusted. Some had been taken for the latest batch of fireworks. His friend Grunion was still in a tube and his parents were somewhere over Margate, if Sparkler had read the factory supply lists correctly. That little book with its pictures of apples and bees had come in handy there. So had the children’s dictionary he had borrowed the previous year. It made his brain fizz to look through the pages, like a…well, like a firecracker, with ears.

  When the Tollins were all settled, Sparkler took a deep breath.

  “It’s the dust,” he told them, making himself comfortable on a fairy cushion. It squeaked a bit, but he ignored it. “Whatever it is, it burns off when they light the tubes. That’s what makes the colors and that’s why Tollin fireworks are so good.”

  The other Tollins shuffled and stared at each other, then back at him. They were a bedraggled bunch compared to the happy Tollins he had known before the factory came. In the end, it fell to an old Tollin named Briar to speak for all of them. Briar had refused to call himself by one of the new names. His first experience of the factory had been on a Catherine wheel and “Catherine” didn’t suit him, not even a little bit. Spinning round at high speed had not been enjoyable at all. In fact, he hadn’t walked in a straight line since that day.