We are learning this version of Tom's Midnight Garden, can you practice with the actions and your story map at home?
Again it had been a boring day for Tom, spent waiting for the drizzle to stop at his Auntie Gwen’s where he’d spent the last six days while his Mum and Dad had some sort of 'Romantic break' in Rome. As he lay in his lumpy, uncomfortable bed he's gotten angry that he was stuck here in Bath, miles from his friends, in a flat with literally nothing to do. He was especially angry that he simply couldn’t get to sleep. He was quite certain that by now it was past midnight and, being a sensible eight year old, he knew for a fact he was going to be just as grumpy in the morning too. Aunt Gwen was definitely going to put that dreadful dishwasher on again as soon as she’d had her breakfast, he just knew it.
Staring at the thin, laced cobwebs that dangled from the corners of the room, all he could hear was the irritating grandfather clock ticking away in the cold, uninviting entrance of the building. Ding Dong! It’s deep, unmistakable sound echoed through the hall way. It had become such a familiar sound that now he barely even noticed it, even when it sang it’s sweet song at full volume on the strike of each and every hour. Thoughts from the day raced through Tom’s mind, whirling together all at once like alphabet soup. Tossing and turning wildly, this was the last thing Tom needed. Counting ten dongs, then eleven dongs, and at last, the twelfth dong, "Finally," Tom muttered, "I thought that was never, ever going to end."
Dong!
"Really?" he exclaimed, feeling increasingly exasperated. Tom had decided that keeping so quiet for the last four hours was now at an end, it was also time for this budding engineer to investigate why on earth a seemingly normal clock had just struck thirteen. He sat up in bed, carefully moving that evening’s reading that consisted of two Spiderman comics (read cover to cover, twice) a rather dull text book of his cousins on electric motors and his over due library book on Romans with a rather grand looking Roman Centurion on the cover, dressed in glinting gold amour.
He slid out of bed, slipped on his slippers and sneaked out his bedroom door and into the dark, musky scented corridor of his Aunts flat.
Old newspaper, sweet wrappers and cans littered the floor. The landing on which he found himself was very dim, making it tricky for Tom to avoid the towering mountains of rubbish left by Aunt Gwen’s messy neighbours. He pressed on with his job and eventually got down to the grandfather clock, its face was altered slightly and it’s Roman numerals had some how got wet and had begun to blur into one another looking almost like a strange painting.
"Hmm, I can’t fix that," Tom whispered, running his hands across the clock face. His mind drifted as he gazed at it. It reminded him of the golden evening sun that shone through his bedroom window at home. What was happening? He wondered to himself. At that moment, something caught Tom’s eye. "I’ve never seen that there before, I wonder where it goes" Tom whispered. Beside the tall grandfather clock now stood a door. A door unlike any other he’d seen before. Tom thought of the doors he’d read of in his book about Rome, made of the finest oak with gleaming brass rivets and hinges. Standing on his tiptoes, he could just about reach the handle. Tom turned it slowly and found himself somewhere altogether more interesting….
