Ellie Irving was born in Bristol, but raised in a hamlet on the outskirts of Southend-on-Sea by a family of avid readers. So avid, in fact, her mum enrolled her in the local library before she’d even been born, which was awkward for all concerned. Ellie’s passion for writing stories flourished aged seven, when her parents bought her a Petite Super International typewriter for Christmas, and there was no stopping her.
After studying for a Broadcasting degree at the University of Leeds, Ellie realized there were too few home makeover shows in the world, and worked on a number of DIY and Garden programmes for UK Style. She then returned to studying and completed an MA in Screenwriting in 2008.
She lives in London.
For The Record
Billie Templar’s War
The Mute Button
Fleeced
RHCP DIGITAL
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First published 2017
Text copyright © Ellie Irving, 2017
Cover illustration by Matt Jones
The moral right of the author has been asserted
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-448-17198-9
All correspondence to:
RHCP Digital
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL
For Mum
Because Barbara tries very hard
I WANTED TO start this book with a quote. Mr Keegan, who’s my headteacher and takes us for history on Friday afternoons, says our essays should start with a quote that sets up what it’s going to be about.
I wanted to write about brilliant female scientists, and you know what? There aren’t any. Not brilliant female scientists; there are plenty of those – not that anyone ever knows any. Except Marie Curie, maybe. I’ve read all about her. There aren’t any quotes about brilliant female scientists, I mean.
Cos this story’s totally about them. You’re going to love it.
So instead, I’m going to use:
If you give up, it means you never really wanted it in the first place.
Said by my Granny Joss. My dad’s mum.
Cos this story’s all about her too. My granny’s a brilliant female scientist, you see, except I didn’t know anything about it, at first. And this story’s all about our determination to succeed, even when it seemed like the whole world was against us. And this story’s about me. Je m’appelle Matilda Moore. J’ai douze ans. That’s French. You’re going to need that later. I am twelve and I am from Arnos Yarm, which is a boring old village in Canterbury, and I am an inventor. Nice to meet you.
Welcome to the tale of my outrageous, electrifying, marvellicifous (I made up that word – I told you I’m an inventor) couple of days with my Granny Joss.
For, within one thirty-one-hour period, we had:
It’s exhausting just reading about it, isn’t it? You’d better hang onto your hats, all of you who are wearing one. And if you’re not wearing one, hold onto your hair. And if you’re bald, not a problem, grab a tea towel.
We’d better start at the beginning.
YOU’RE MEANT TO describe yourself in books, so here goes:
I’m short for my age. I have light brown shoulder-length hair that I never brush because I have more important things on my mind like, ‘What shall I create today?’ to be worrying about how I look. I always wear blue dungarees because they have the most pockets, and I have a pencil tucked behind my ear, a tape measure somewhere about my person and a sketchbook in my rucksack. I AM READY TO INVENT AT ALL TIMES!
I look like I’d fall over and snap in a heavy wind. I look like I should be painting my nails or watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians like most of my classmates. But I like surprising people. I like the look on their faces when I tell them I’m an inventor. As if girls shouldn’t do that.
A famous guy called Thomas Edison once said, To invent, you need a good imagination, and a pile of junk. He was the chap who invented the light bulb, so he was a bright spark. (That had better not be a pity laugh, you guys.)
I have both – a good imagination and tons of stuff. Admittedly, not all of it mine. My parents are forever saying things like, ‘Matilda, HOW MANY TIMES have I told you NOT to dismantle the bookcase to use for your woodwork?’ And, ‘WHO has taken my brand-new pair of shoelaces? They were right here!’ while looking directly at me.
My idols in life are:
There are loads more – I’m going to create a whole list of them at the end of the book, you lucky things.
I’ve wanted to be an inventor for as long as I can remember. Aged four, I decided to modify the toaster to make a better play-space for my hamster. All I’ll say about it is that we weren’t allowed another toaster in the house after that. Or a hamster.
So far, in my twelve years on this earth, I have invented:
My Grandad Wilf was my mentor. Once a week, my parents and I would visit him and Granny Joss for Sunday lunch. I knew that Granny Joss had been a scientist herself, years and years ago, but she didn’t talk about it at all and I wasn’t allowed to ask her about it. Dad said she’d left the profession ‘under a cloud’, which I didn’t really understand and think has something to do with rain. Grandad Wilf was a vet before he retired, but he was an inventor in his spare time, so he and I would leave my parents and Granny Joss drinking boring cups of tea and disappear into his workshop at the bottom of the garden and invent like mad. It was my very best favourite hour of the week.
The reason I love inventing so much? Because anything is possible! You start with a blank page and no clue what you’re going to sketch. And then an idea whizz-pops into your mind and you think, ‘Ooh, what if I could invent a way to scoop toast out of the toaster without totally burning my fingers?’ and you outline a diagram and then you work out how to build it and you cut metal or sand wood and build, build, build, and then you have the finished product that you have totally made from your imagination!
Grandad Wilf also taught me the saying, Necessity is the mother of invention. It means that most inventions are created to fix a problem. Like Emily Cummins, helping people with their fridge situation.
Which brings us to my greatest invention yet: The Handy-Handy-Hand.
Grandad Wilf’s hands didn’t work as well as they used to. His fingers were gnarled and he found it difficult to hold his tools. ‘Arthritis,’ Granny Joss said. I knew how much this got him down, and so, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it’s my great pleasure to introduce you to The Handy-Handy-Hand!
A wooden glove, with interchangeable metal fingers that would do the work Grandad Wilf’s hands couldn’t! Need to shave? No problem! Swap the ‘fork’ finger for the ‘razor blade’, press a button on the palm, and away you go. Can’t peel an orange for a delicious and nutritious snack? Chill out! Swap the ‘scraping earwax’ finger for a ‘mini penknife’ and peel that pith away!
I built it all by myself. Grandad Wilf loved it, and he helped me get a UK patent for it too, which means that we filed my invention with the government and if anyone tries to copy it and claim The Handy-Handy-Hand was their idea, I can say: Well, you can jog on!
Grandad Wilf died a few months after that, and it was like the world was suddenly greyer. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with an idea (‘What if you could invent a machine that automatically opens a brand-new loo roll, so that you don’t keep shredding the paper when you try to open it?’) and I’d think, ‘Oh, just wait until Grandad Wilf hears this one!’ and it would hit me three seconds later that he was gone and I couldn’t tell him anything.
Granny Joss gave me everything from Grandad’s workshop, because not only was I the rightful heir to his tools, but she was packing up to move into a care home down the road. She didn’t want to live in a house all alone and one that held so many memories of her life with Grandad.
My parents and I continued to visit Granny Joss, but it wasn’t the same. Grandad Wilf wasn’t there. The workshop wasn’t there. There was no one for me to talk to about inventions. Dad’s an accountant. The only thing he’s ever invented is a way of typing ‘EGGSHELL’ on his calculator. (Press 77345993 and hold it upside down. See? Riveting.) Mum’s an office manager. She spends her days ordering stationery and filing expenses. Not much fun there, either. Granny Joss used to do sciencey things with space and the planets, but like I said, that was a no-go zone.
Instead, these weekly visits to the care home would consist of helping Granny Joss complete a jigsaw puzzle and listening to classical music.
Life without Grandad Wilf and his enthusiasm for inventions was very much duller.
Then one day, not long ago, my school announced they’d be holding a science competition, with a Grand Prize for the best invention or scientific display. There was a poster put up on the noticeboard and everything:
Think you’re the next Albert Einstein? Got an invention or a science trick that’s better than sliced bread? Want to win a GRAND PRIZE? Arnos Yarm Comprehensive’s Science Competition is the chance to show the world (well, Arnos Yarm) what you’re made of!
Ask your form teacher for details.
Well, I would! I would ask my form teacher for details! Because I knew exactly what invention I was going to enter. And sorry, any of you suckers hoping for the Grand Prize, cos it was mine!
At least it was until Thomas Thomas came along.
WITH ABSOLUTELY NO consideration of how it would affect his chances in life, Mr and Mrs Thomas had decided to call their son, their only child, Thomas. Thomas Thomas. As if there wasn’t anything else in the whole world they could have called him instead. Names that would have been better for Thomas Thomas than Thomas Thomas:
I hope, dear reader, that after mocking the name, none of you reading this is called Thomas Thomas. If you are, I’m sorry.
I’m sorry that your name is Thomas Thomas.
As well as having a silly name, Thomas Thomas sat next to me in science and always had to copy my answers, which was just plain old cheating. He was not the sort of boy who should win the Grand Prize at the science competition.
The competition took place on a Friday afternoon in December. Every single pupil was packed into the hall, like it was Morning Assembly, because it meant time off lessons. I spied four other pupils in the crowd with their scientific displays tucked under their arm, just like me with The Handy-Handy-Hand. I had half a mind to tell them not to bother wasting their time, but everyone was always banging on about ‘Team Spirit’ at this school, so I figured I’d better not.
At two o’clock, Mr Keegan stepped on stage. ‘Welcome, one and all,’ he boomed, ‘to Arnos Yarm’s inaugural Science Competition. Would all those taking part come up here with your efforts, please.’
In my head, I practised my winner’s speech. I would dedicate the award to Grandad Wilf, of course. But would it be too much to thank Leonardo da Vinci too? Or Tim Berners-Lee?
One by one, Mr Keegan called the contestants to the front of the stage to show off what they’d brought. A scruffy-looking boy named Josh went first. He held a glass of water in one hand and an egg in the other. ‘See this glass?’ he said, lifting it up for the crowd to see. ‘See this egg?’ But his hand must have been sweaty, because the egg fell right out of it, and landed with a SPLAT! on Mr Keegan’s brown shoes.
Our headteacher shook his leg furiously. Speckles of raw egg were flung out over the crowd. ‘I guess that’s a forfeit then,’ Mr Keegan huffed and moved to the next contestant.
‘Wait!’ Josh cried. ‘My trick!’
Mr Keegan glared at him. His shoes were ruined. ‘If you’re attempting to show that an egg can float in a glass of water if you’ve added salt to it, then I’m afraid,’ he sighed, ‘the trick is useless without the egg. You’ve simply got a glass of water.’
I smiled to myself. This was going to be a piece of cake.
Next up was Thomas Thomas. He picked up a huge bottle of Coke from the floor beside him. He fumbled in his pocket for his wallet and held that up to the crowd. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘Behold the scientific trick of ero – erodnee – eros …’ He looked about him, confused.
‘Eroding,’ I whispered. I’d seen this science trick on the internet.
‘Eroding money!’ Thomas Thomas eventually declared.
With that, he unscrewed the lid of the Coke bottle and guzzled the whole lot. HE GUZZLED IT! The whole lot! He poured it down his gullet like nobody’s business! Two whole litres’ worth!
And then, understandably, he gave an almighty BELCH – a loud BEEEUUURRRGGHHH! blasting from his belly. Thomas Thomas, looking ever so pleased with himself, as well as ever so sick, opened his wallet and took a five-pound note from it, which he stuffed inside the now-empty Coke bottle. ‘Alacazam!’ he cried.
Nobody said anything. The crowd looked to one another, not sure what they’d just witnessed.
‘If you’re trying to do what I think you’re trying to do,’ I said, actually starting to feel sorry for the moron, ‘you’re meant to drop a penny into a bottle of Coke. The phosphoric acid in the drink reacts with the copper of the coin and dissolves it. That’s eroding money. And it’s not magic, it’s science.’
Thomas Thomas looked from me to the five-pound note in the empty bottle. ‘Same thing,’ he shrugged. I mean, honestly!
Then, after a Year 8 girl had used a hairdryer to blow some ping-pong balls into the air, and a girl in Year 10 had produced a papier-mâché volcano, complete with exploding lava bubbling over the top, which wasn’t half bad, it was finally my turn. Time to give everyone something to get excited about.
True enough, the audience clapped in appreciation as I put the glove on Mr Keegan’s left hand and showed off all the different functions it could be used for. There were audible gasps of delight and amazement! I imagined this is how it felt when John Logie Baird first gave the world television. It was so obvious who the winner would be.
After we had all presented our efforts, three men walked on stage. They all looked like each other – tweed jacket, big round belly and just a few strands of hair combed over their shiny bald heads. ‘Let’s hear it for our local councillors,’ Mr Keegan said, gesturing to the men. ‘Mr Varney, Mr Dorfman and Mr Yonker.’
Everyone clapped politely. ‘I’m delighted to be here today,’ Mr Yonker said, taking charge, ‘and to present the Grand Prize of one thousand pounds!’
I let out a gasp of amazement. One thousand pounds? I ran through all the things I could buy with that:
A Black & Decker drill.
A workbench.
A new tool box.
‘One thousand pounds,’ Mr Yonker repeated, before adding, extraceedingly quietly, ‘of Varney Yonker Dorfman Quality Dog Food Vouchers.’
‘What?’ I said, just catching the end of his sentence. ‘Dog food vouchers?’
‘The winner,’ Mr Yonker ploughed on, ignoring me, ‘of Arnos Yarm Comprehensive’s Grand Science Prize is …’
I held my breath and crossed my fingers. I don’t know why I was so nervous. This was mine!
‘Thomas Thomas!’ Mr Yonker cried.
‘WHAT?’ I yelled. That couldn’t be right!
‘Thomas Thomas?’ I repeated. ‘THOMAS THOMAS? A boy so stupid he drank his experiment away?’
‘Now, now,’ Mr Keegan said, trying to hustle me off the stage. Thomas Thomas stepped forward to shake hands with the three councillors and smiled for the school photographer, his stupid grin plastered over his stupid face.
This was outrageous. ‘What about The Handy-Handy-Hand?’ I cried. ‘That’s better than all of them!’
Mr Yonker stopped smiling for photos and peered down on me. ‘We’ve made our decision,’ he stated.
‘But The Handy-Handy-Hand’s the best!’ I yelled. ‘It’s got a UK patent and everything!’
Mr Varney sighed. ‘We’ve awarded the prize to someone who clearly didn’t cheat,’ he declared. ‘Thomas Thomas may not have got the experiment right, but at least he did it all by himself.’
‘I didn’t cheat—’ I protested, but I was shoved out of the way by the other contestants rushing to look at Thomas Thomas’s dog food vouchers. ‘I made it for my grandad,’ I said.
‘You’re just a little girl,’ Mr Dorfman scoffed. ‘I highly doubt you did. The invention required welding and soldering and—’
‘And drilling and cutting metal,’ I butted in. ‘I did all of that in my grandad’s workshop! By myself!’
But Mr Dorfman, Mr Varney and Mr Yonker didn’t care. They clearly thought I was lying. Everyone did. Nobody thought I was capable of inventing and building The Handy-Handy-Hand just because I was a girl.
And it was this, the sheer injustice of it all – the fact that someone far less deserving should win the Grand Prize – that kicked everything off.
And it’s where this story really, totally, I’ve-said-it-before-and-I’ll-say-it-again-hold-onto-your-hats-people-this-is-the-real-deal really takes off. Ready?
‘IT’S NOT FAIR!’ is a cry heard in homes all over the world. Normally, mums and dads roll their eyes and say annoying grown-up things, like, ‘Life’s not fair. Get used to it!’ But this time, it really wasn’t fair!
Why should Thomas Thomas, a boy so stupid he was named twice, by a mum and dad so stupid they couldn’t think of ANY OTHER NAME to call him, win? My invention was the best!
All right, I wasn’t particularly fussed about the vouchers – we didn’t have a dog, after all. But it was the glory! It was the fact that I should have been crowned the winner!
As I trudged off stage, The Handy-Handy-Hand tucked under my arm, I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my blazer. I didn’t want anyone knowing how upset I was.
The home-time bell couldn’t come quickly enough. All I wanted was to crawl into bed and hide under the duvet for the entire weekend, but I had to sit through a boring lesson on ‘The Path of the River Thames’ first. And when I eventually traipsed through the school gates at 3.30 p.m. I spotted my parents parked up in the car outside, the last of the day’s sun glinting off the car’s freshly-buffed roof. My dad was extraceedingly car-proud. He washed and waxed the car to within an inch of its shiny-black life twice a week. He would spray Febreze and hoover inside after every single journey. He wore white leather driving gloves so he wouldn’t leave smears on the steering wheel. He even called the car ‘Her Majesty’ in private, without realizing Mum and I knew about the nickname.
Dad grinned at me and held up a plate of cakes triple-wrapped for safety in clingfilm. Crumbs inside the car were a definite no-no. ‘Something for your granny,’ he explained. ‘We’ve got to pop to the home to sign some forms and it was two-for-one on lemon drizzle at Sainsbury’s. It’s not a Saturday Big Shop Treat, I know, but I thought we’d live a little. Fancy a slice?’
Granny Joss’s care home was located in a quiet, leafy street three roads from my school and seven streets from my house. Arnos Yarm wasn’t very big, to be honest.
When we got there, the TV in the lounge was blaring out a news item about a British professor who was to be awarded a grand prize in two days’ time for something or other. Every resident but Granny Joss was gathered round the TV. She sat on her own in an armchair at the back of the room, looking thoroughly miserable. I didn’t blame her for not joining in. I’d had enough of grand prizes myself.
‘Oh, marvellous,’ Dad said sarcastically, plonking the plate of cakes down on the coffee table. ‘Two moody Moores. That’s all we need.’
I frowned. I’d told my parents what had happened at the science competition as we’d driven to the home, but they didn’t seem to be taking it very seriously.
‘Why?’ Granny Joss asked. She patted my knee softly. ‘What’s up with you, dearie?’
Granny Joss had lived in Canterbury for the last thirty years, but she’d been born and raised in Scotland and even now, at the age of eighty, still had the traces of a Scottish accent. She was a typical, average granny. She was tall and thin and had a shock of frizzy white hair. She liked jigsaw puzzles and tea and classical music. She wore hiking boots, as if she was ready to dash for the hills at a moment’s notice, which was ridiculous seeing as she’d never left Arnos Yarm in all the time I’d been alive.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I mumbled. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my mobile. It wasn’t a fancy one – there weren’t any games or apps on it – but I wanted to avoid her stare.
‘Matilda’s a little disappointed,’ Dad whispered to Granny Joss.
‘Oh?’ she replied, her voice full of concern.
Nobody said anything for a moment. The sound from the TV filled the silence. It was still banging on about that professor and his award.
‘Another boy won the science prize at school,’ Mum piped up eventually.
I knew Mum was merely explaining to Granny what had happened, but there was more to my disappointment than that! ‘Yeah, and he shouldn’t have done,’ I yelled hotly.
Granny Joss’s eyebrows shot up. Some of the other residents turned to stare at me in shock.
‘Forget it,’ I muttered. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ I looked down at the ground. ‘Grandad would have.’
Grandad Wilf had been the only one in my family who truly understood why I loved inventing. He’d been so creative and full of ideas, like me. My parents were extraceedingly sensible people who never did anything out of the ordinary. Dad, being an accountant, often wore a suit, even at weekends. He had his hair trimmed neatly once a month at the same barber. His ties were always grey – never anything so fancy as salmon pink or dusty yellow. Mum was the same. She wore long skirts and cardigans and practical shoes and liked programmes about needlework. My parents encouraged my enthusiasm for science and engineering and they applauded my passion, but I think they thought I was a bit nuts, thinking up all sorts of weird and wacky things to invent.
My chest tightened, thinking about Grandad Wilf. He would have understood everything. He would have jumped up on stage and shouted, ‘GIVE MY GRANDDAUGHTER THE PRIZE SHE DESERVES, YONKER!’
Dad and Granny Joss shared a look. Mum munched on her cake. Moments ticked by. I could feel Granny Joss’s eyes searching my face, debating what to do.
All of a sudden, she jumped to her feet – rather impressively for an eighty-year-old. ‘Come with me,’ she said, holding out her hand.
‘I haven’t done anything!’ I protested.
‘You’re not in trouble. I want to show you something.’ She heaved me to my feet and led me from the common room, through the hall and up the stairs.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked. I’d never been upstairs before. We always stayed in the lounge when we visited. I took in the faded swirling carpet of the hall, the framed pictures of birds in the stairwell.
Granny Joss walked to the bay window at the end of the second-floor landing. There was a flowery armchair positioned in front of it, with a brass telescope next to that. Granny Joss put her eye to the telescope and fiddled around with a couple of knobs. ‘Almost there,’ she said. ‘Just a few more degrees to the left …’ She sighed. ‘Marjory’s been playing around with this again. This is mine – a rather special telescope – I did have it all set up.’
‘To what?’ I asked. I hovered directly behind Granny Joss, trying to see what she could.
‘There!’ Granny Joss exclaimed, after a moment. ‘Look.’
She moved aside and I bent down and stared through the eyepiece. The night had drawn in and millions of stars dotted the sky, all twinkling back at me, like a carpet of black with grains of sugar scattered over it. ‘What am I looking for?’ I asked.
‘The known universe is made up of ten billion galaxies,’ Granny Joss said. I couldn’t help but note the excitement creeping into her voice. She’d never sounded like this before. ‘Assuming there is an average of one hundred billion stars per galaxy – it varies, you see – that means there are approximately one billion trillion stars in the observable universe.’
‘Riiiight,’ I said, continuing to peer through the telescope. ‘So …?’
‘Can you see one star shining brighter than all the others?’ Granny Joss asked. She hopped from one foot to the other behind me.
I squinted my eyes and wiggled the telescope around until, eventually, one star shone out above all else. ‘I see it!’ I cried. ‘Right there. Why’s it so bright?’
‘Because it’s a planet, not a star,’ Granny Joss replied. ‘It’s millions and millions of light years away. It’s bright because it’s bigger than even all the stars in its cluster.’
‘Is it Neptune or something?’ I asked.
Granny Joss shook her head. ‘You’re not even looking at our solar system. This is a planet further out in the Milky Way.’
As much as this was taking my mind from what had happened at school earlier, I couldn’t work out what she was getting at. ‘And?’ I said.
‘It’s called Planet Smocks,’ Granny Joss said, more quietly this time. She let out a long sigh. ‘Named after the man on the news this evening. The one being awarded the prize for discovering it.’
‘And …?’ I repeated. I was starting to get tired now. It had been a long day. A long, disappointing day.
‘And,’ Granny Joss said, in a smaller voice than ever, ‘it shouldn’t have been named after Professor Smocks, because Professor Smocks did not discover it.’
I frowned. ‘But if he didn’t discover the planet, who did? Who should it be named after?’
Granny Joss sighed once more. ‘Me,’ she said. ‘It was me.’
I STARED AT Granny Joss. I wasn’t entirely convinced I’d heard her correctly. ‘Sorry, what?’
Granny Joss slumped into the armchair. ‘I’m an astrophysicist,’ she declared, as if that explained everything. ‘At least I was, once. Not long after I married your grandad – crikey, this is going back a good fifty years – we moved to London so I could research radio waves emitting from stars. Professor Smocks was my boss at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.’
‘Sorry, what?’ I repeated. I knew Granny Joss had worked in science, but I’d always imagined she’d collected up the test tubes in the lab or something. ‘You discovered that planet?’
‘I did,’ Granny Joss nodded. ‘Except I didn’t know what it was at the time.’ She cleared her throat and gazed out of the window, casting her mind back. ‘I’d been examining the radio waves from a particular cluster of stars in another solar system and, late one night, I discovered XT28E. It was a star that didn’t behave like all the other stars around it. I showed it to Professor Smocks the next morning, but he didn’t think there was anything to it. I thought there might be, that perhaps it was more than a star, but this was the 1960s – the technology to travel that far into space to investigate hadn’t been invented yet. I believed that one day it would be possible for a space probe to go the distance, so I did the maths and charted the probe’s course and I came up with the equation that would make it achievable. I showed all my work to Smocks, who seemed more interested this time and said he would double-check everything, and then the next thing I knew, it was all over the news that he had discovered the star.’
‘That’s not fair!’ I cried.
Granny Joss shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not. Professor Smocks stole my work, but he was more senior than me and people respected him. There weren’t many female scientists around back then, hardly any. No one had any reason to think that Professor Smocks hadn’t made the discovery.’ I detected a tear well up in her eyes, but she quickly coughed to cover it up.
‘What about the planet part?’ I asked. ‘How come it’s now Planet Smocks?’
‘Because only in the last decade has the technology capable of travelling to the star been invented,’ Granny Joss explained. ‘NASA launched a probe seven years ago, using my equation, and when it finally got near XT28E last year, they discovered it was indeed not a star in a binary system as they had thought, but an actual planet. Smocks has spent the last fifty years telling the world it was his work, hence why NASA named the planet after him.’
I couldn’t believe it. How had I never known this about Granny Joss? ‘Dad always says,’ I hesitated, not quite sure how to put it, ‘that you left the science profession under a cloud. Was it because of this?’
Granny Joss looked downcast. Her piercing blue eyes weren’t as twinkly as they’d been a moment ago. ‘That’s right,’ she replied. ‘I protested to the Observatory, but they just thought I was jealous of Smocks. I realized I couldn’t stay there any longer.’
daredareand