What happens next?

Chapters 4 and 5 are now online, thanks to Gormley and Ofili classes at Millennium School. If you live or work in East Greenwich or the Greenwich Peninsula you can take part in Lucy's project by writing a chapter or even just suggesting how the story should progress.

To find out more, email rohini@streamarts.org.uk

The Peninsula Papers: CHAPTER 5 by Ofili Class, Millennium School

As the caretaker walked towards us, I saw that he had a scar running across his cheek. He was wearing a silver uniform, with holes in his hat and a name badge saying ‘Dave’ on his chest.

“What do you think?” I whispered to Mr Smith. I already felt the situation was out of control and was unsure whether to let another person join us.

“I don’t trust him,” he replied. “leave it up to me!”

Before I knew what was happening, he had tripped Dave up and to my surprise produced a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and put them onto Dave’s wrists. Why on earth did he have them with him? I was becoming more and more worried about whether I should really have trusted this man.

He snatched the tape away from his grasp, took a set of keys from the caretaker’s pocket and held one up to me. “This says its for the Paper Cupboard, I saw that door inside the school!” By this time Dave was shouting at us, but we managed to get him inside and into the cupboard without too much trouble. A pang of guilt made me leave the keys in the lock on the outside though, so hopefully he wouldn’t be in there for too long.

“I’m not leaving it here now,” said Mr Smith, and swiftly opened the hiding place to get the diamond back again. By this time my head was spinning at the constantly changing decisions, but I let him take the diamond once again and put it into his back pack.

Outside the school, the road was quiet and dusty with the sounds of the traffic in the background. Just then a black cab came past, and not only that but the light was on. I hailed it and we got in. The taxi driver turned round. “Where to?”

“The river?” said Mr Smith

“And step on it!” I told him.

The cab was spotlessly clean and unusually shiny inside, with gold leather seats and television screens in front of us. I noticed that the film Goldeneye was playing.

“You must have some money to do the cab up like this,” I remarked.

“Oh yeah, it comes from all the diamond smuggling,” he laughed, without noticing how much we both jumped. “Only joking! Seriously though, I don’t need the money but I just like driving people round.”

We went back past the yellow and red buildings, past Sainsbury’s and the Odeon, until he pulled up by the river, where I had passed earlier that day.

I searched in my pocket for some change. “This one’s on me,” said the driver, and we got out of the cab. “Just do me a favour some other time.”

“Thanks for the ride!” I called after him as he drove away.

We were standing by the Yacht Club, the bright sails clinking in the wind, which seemed to be getting stronger. My rash companion had already jumped into one of them which was just at the edge of the water. I tried to tell him that I hadn’t ever sailed a boat before, but he took no notice. The water was so rough that the boat was being pushed around and I could see that it was going to be impossible to sail it on the river.

“If you’re not coming with me, I’ll have to go on my own!” he said, the wind gusting around him. I was becoming increasingly concerned for his sanity, and once again wondered whether Mr Smith was really his name, or just a cover he had used at the Pilot Inn.

I had no time to react, because just then a particularly large gust of wind blew him off his feet and he landed on the floor of the boat. The diamond, which had been clutched in his hand, flew into the air, the light gleaming and reflecting from its surfaces as it went.

SPLOSH! The diamond cut through the surface of the water as fast as a bullet.

We looked at each other for a split second before Mr Smith dived over the side of the boat to try and rescue his prize, but the diamond was falling too fast through the murky waters. I could just see him at the bottom of the river, his hands grappling through the mud and grime. After nearly a minute of frantic searching, he came back up to the surface, but the water was by now even rougher, and he was being carried away by the current.

The Peninsula Papers: CHAPTER 4 by Gormley Class, Millennium School

As the door creaked open, I peered through into the room which had red painted walls and was in a very messy state, as if someone had stayed there for some time. The man, who I assumed must be Mr Smith, was sitting on the wooden bed with the bear held in wrinkled hands.

As he stood up I saw that he was thin and much taller than me. Trying to keep calm, I asked if I could have the bear back but he replied loudly “It’s my bear and my reward.”

I tried to reason with him- after all, someone really wanted it back- but we both ended up raising our voices and shouting over each other. I made a grab for the bear but he kept a tight grip on it. As we both pulled it, the arm ripped, the stuffing flew out onto the floor and out rolled what looked like a large diamond.

Within an instant we both tried to get the stone, which had rolled a little way across the floor. But at that moment there was a loud knock on the door, which sent my heart into my throat. Quick as a flash Mr Smith bent down and picked it up, putting it deftly into his backpack. I opened the door to find an elderly couple, a woman wearing glasses and a man carrying a small bag. Something about them reminded me of my grandparents, I thought as I asked, “Hello, can I help you?”

“Is this 4A?” the man asked. “No!” answered Mr Smith aggressively. As the man turned to walk away he pulled a camera out of his bag and took a photograph, before briskly walking back down the stairs.

“That was odd,” I said to Mr Smith. As he looked at me I could tell how much the event had shaken him, and he seemed to calm down as we looked at each other.

“Look, maybe we can work together on this” he said. “Maybe we can split the diamond in half? Or at least, split the money we’d get when we sold it.”

I still felt somewhat guilty about the person in the newspaper who was looking for the bear, but the discovery of the diamond made me think that perhaps the story wasn’t as straightforward as I had thought at first. I began thinking about what I could buy with my half of the money. Perhaps a shop, selling sweets or cakes on Trafalgar Road.

We discussed the idea. What should we do next? It seemed as if people were already looking for us in the hotel. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who had followed him here. Mr Smith suggested that we needed to find an unlikely hiding place for the diamond so that we could come back and get it when things had died down a bit. I knew the area but not that well. I gazed out of the window and my eyes landed on a multi-coloured group of buildings with a smaller one in the middle. It had a large fence surrounding it. “What’s that?” I asked my new companion.

Mr Smith smiled. “That could be the perfect hiding place,” he said. “That is Millennium Primary School.”

***

As we walked along John Harrison Way, the sun lit up the golden buildings and the neat gardens of the Millennium Village. In the distance, we saw the modern building that was the school.

We sprinted up to the silver gates but found that we were confronted by an intercom system. I rang the buzzer and when the receptionist answered with a cautious “hello?” I replied with the first thing that came into my head. “I’m running a writing workshop.”

“Well come to the desk and sign in then” she said and the buzzer sounded to let us in.

We sighed with relief, but we still had to get past the receptionist, and ducked down to crawl on our hands and knees past her desk. Through the door and upstairs, and we came across a science lab, which I thought could be a good place to hide it; we could put it amongst the chemicals and crystals that I imagined would be there. The lab was multicoloured with shelves full of mysterious-looking liquids in large bottles.

However, we saw that there was a teacher in the corner, with frizzy grey hair, leaning over a bubbling saucepan, so we turned back and returned downstairs.

I looked down the corridor, which seemed immensely long. The colours were bright and there was a lot of light. In different circumstances it must have seemed a calming place.

We bumped into a small child of about five years old. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“We’re teachers. Get back to your classroom.” I said sternly, and opened the nearest door. We walked into a room full of toddlers, who I thought were being naughty, crying and running around.

“BE QUIET” Mr Smith shouted. “We’re the new teachers.” I was already wondering whether he should have said this so loudly, and then I realised that the real teacher was standing there, staring at us. “Who are you? Get out of this school!”

Not wanting to admit that we’d lied, I tried to think of an excuse. “Erm…. Erm.. I need a stapler” I said and ran back out of the room.

“In here!” said Mr Smith, opening a door marked ‘Headmaster’. There were big piles of paperwork and a computer. Could we hide it here, I wondered?

We heard the door begin to open and had to dive under the desk. We were sweating like mad! But luckily the head teacher went to make himself a cup of tea, and we jumped out of the window and headed to the playground.

We then saw what we thought was an excellent hiding place- a wooden decked platform which must have space underneath it. Mr Smith ripped a really strong branch from a tree, which took several minutes despite my trying to make him hurry up. He finally got it off and we used it as a crow bar to lift up the planks of wood, before slipping the diamond in.

“Right, let’s go” said Mr Smith, “we can come back tonight to get it back.”

We were just about to leave when a man came chasing after us. “I’m the caretaker,” he said, “and I’ve got a CCTV tape of everything you’ve done. I’ll give it to the police.. unless you let me join you!”

What happens next?

Chapters 2 and 3 are now online, thanks to Ann Webb and Arthur Hayles. If you live or work in East Greenwich or the Greenwich Peninsula you can take part in Lucy's project by writing a chapter or even just suggesting how the story should progress.

To find out more, email rohini@streamarts.org.uk

The Peninsula Papers: CHAPTER THREE by Arthur Hayles

“Lost – Reward Given for Recovery. On Thursday 21 October a light brown teddy bear, about 30 cm long, of great sentimental value was lost in the East Greenwich/Peninsula area. Reward to anyone returning it or for information leading to its recovery. Tel. 07------.” I was sure it was the teddy that I had passed lying on the cycle path near the Millennium School less than half an hour before.

The present poor state of my finances, coupled with my constant wish to do some good in the world, made me turn and head back as quickly as I could. But about a hundred metres from the crossing near the Millennium School I suddenly slowed down. For there in the distance I saw a tall man stoop to pick up the soft toy, shake it, and then put it into his shoulder bag.

I felt a surge of disappointment, frustration and puzzlement. What was I to do? Without any clear idea of what I would say when I accosted him, I quickened my steps again. However, I hadn’t reckoned on his extraordinary pace as he strode away from me along John Harrison Way, soon turning left into West Parkside. Fortunately, the wide, flat, unobstructed nature of the Peninsula landscape meant that I always had him in sight. Without actually running to catch him up, which I was rather reluctant (and by now too tired) to do, I could only, with effort, slightly reduce my distance from him until he turned sharp right into River Way towards the Pilot Inn and so disappeared from view. By the time I reached the Pilot Inn, he was nowhere to be seen.

I had never visited or stood before The Pilot Inn before, and it struck me as rather strange – a very old hostelry and a line of tiny cottages all by themselves in an empty space. The old hotel and cottages seemed marooned here, like some ancient ship run aground and beached forever. Those few, poor cottages wouldn’t have supported a large inn. I wondered what might have happened here in past centuries – smuggling? dealing in forbidden goods? press-ganging? Did pilots employed to guide ships safely along the winding reaches of the Thames really use to come to The Pilot Inn? The only inhabited buildings anywhere near now were the ultra-modern, multicoloured apartment blocks and houses of the Greenwich Millennium Village on one side and the ultra-modern office blocks, O2 and Underground Station on the other, and they were all some way away from the inn and cottages. However, behind tall black fencing, nearer tower blocks were now rising, threatening to overshadow and dominate these human scale buildings left over from the past. 

Rousing myself from my daydreaming, I entered the public house part of the hotel. Although thirsty, I was reluctant to spend some of my remaining few pounds on a drink - if I managed to get hold of the lost bear and could look forward to a reward, that might be a different matter. So I slowly explored each part of the pub, looking for the tall stranger who had taken my bear. I was surprised at how low down the garden was at the back of the building – quite a drop. But the man who had taken my bear was nowhere to be seen. I guessed that he might be a guest in the hotel and had gone up to his room.

I saw no alternative but to buy a drink after all, so that I could ask the barman whether the hotel had any guests at the moment, as I was anxious to meet a man who could be staying here. I said that I had been trying to find, and return to its owner, a toy of great sentimental value lost on the Peninsula, but had seen in the distance a tall man with dark hair, black parka and shoulder bag pick it up and come here. He replied that there were three guests at present, a couple, who had a child with them, and a single man. The barman added that my description could well relate to the single guest, and volunteered to ring his room and, if he were in, to let him know that I wanted to see him. The barman went away, coming back a minute or two later to say that Mr Smith would see me in his room upstairs. I was surprised, as I had expected that Mr Smith (if that was his real name) would come to the public bar, if prepared to see me at all. I finished the mineral water and, with some misgivings, slowly climbed the stairs to Room 4 and knocked gently on the panelled door.

The Peninsula Papers: CHAPTER TWO by Ann Webb

I hadn’t seen it at first. I had been looking at an advert for local history walks. “Interested in SE10? Join one of our walkabouts and find out what went on and when. Ring ----- to discuss our schedule and rates.”

This sounded interesting. I’d read a bit about this place’s ancient history and now I know a bit about what’s about to happen- with 2012 Olympic Equestrian events in the wonderful Greenwich Park and the fact that this will, at last, be designated a Royal Borough: after all the royals that have lived here, that accolade is well overdue!
But, I knew very little about the history of the peninsula part of the borough, which was almost anonymous until 2000 when the Dome opened and brought visitors from all over the world.

If I followed up the advertisement I might have the opportunity to hear colloquially from people who live here just what life used to be like and they’d tell me about places of interest to the locals that didn’t necessarily get publicised. Yes, I decided to ring the number and get booked up for a roam. I wondered if anyone else I knew might be interested? I must find my camera and get some good pics, rather than just relying on my mobile. If I get my act together I can do a story with pictures, that could be a good birthday present for someone older to remind them of their youth in south London.

But then I glanced just to the left of this advert and saw….

Forthcoming chapters

Chapter 2 is on its way....

Forthcoming chapters will be written by children at Halstow, Millennium and St Joseph's Schools. Also chapters are being written in collaboration with residents of Sam Manners Sheltered Housing Scheme, and other local people.

We still need more people to get in touch to contribute to the book. If you'd like to find out more, email rohini@streamarts.org.uk, or phone 020 8858 2825
Or you can TEXT your idea to 07964 878315