MIDDLE-GRADE TIME SLIP ADVENTURES WRITTEN IN LITERARY PROSE FOR THE ADULT READER – an adapted genre from author V Knox

If time stands still anywhere, it’s at Bede. If ghosts haunt anywhere it’s in Bede Hall

Bede Hall hovers in and out of this world, visiting its past and future which means that even in the blistering heat of August it could snow at any time. It was old. The word ageless barely covered it, and the word timeless was an outright lie. Older than time was closest to the truth. But even then, strictly speaking, the Hall was older than history.

Long ago, Vikings had pillaged from the eastern shore and Scots had raided from the north, yet a serene pocket of calm flourished, protected by energies older than the pyramids.

Faint traces of prehistoric circles, lines, and squares lay etched into the fields. Phantoms of early Bronze Age ditches encircle mounds and barrows that shimmer to life after the rains, and the hillocks of Iron Age settlements play hide-and-seek in the long nettles. Saxon gold shuffles deep under the earth with Neolithic flint arrowheads, dagger blades made of iron, and mosaic tesserae from Roman villas. And all the while, the tips of abandoned cairns poke their noses from mossy hillocks into the sunlight.

Left to themselves, the old nature gods silently returned to Bede from the netherworld. The face of the Green Man, overseer of the growing seasons, lord of the harvest festivals and woodland creatures, began appearing again in the barks of trees. Lady Flora, the Green Woman, consort to Jack-of-the-Green, gathered the scattered fairies into colonies and fanned the waning magic into sacred fire.

Twins Christopher (Kit) and Bathsheba (Bash) Stratford-Smyth who live in a suburb of greater London, 300 miles to the south, are twelve when their Egyptologist father goes missing from his dig in Egypt.

Meanwhile, Bede Hall, their grandmother, Lady Nan’s stately home in Northumbria, is in danger and not a little angry. It feels cruelly abandoned at its hour of need, put up for sale while its matriarch, oblivious of her old home in danger of being sold to shady developers, has intentionally distanced herself from responsibilities by retreating into a fog of distracting memories.

While the Hall faces being turned it into a commercial venture, or demolition, Lady Nan dreams on about a previous life she remembers in ancient Egypt.

The Bede Trilogy: ‘TWINTER’, ‘TIME FALLS LIKE SNOW’, and book three (available in November 2020) ‘TOMORROW AGAIN’ – https://www.amazon.com/V-Knox/e/B0094K0Q7Y