'It's Titanic - aren't you curious? No one alive today has seen it like that.'
Emmie & Jack are on a school trip with a difference.
Visiting Belfast to see where Titanic was built, they step back to 1912 and discover the great ship itself.
All too soon, they find out that the way home is blocked, and Jack gets dragged off to work by one of the crew.
Who is the mysterious stranger lurking in the shadows, and can they solve his time riddle to escape from the doomed ship before it is too late...?
The Titanic Tunnel by Glen Blackwell was published on 5 May 2022 by Zoetrope Books. As part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you today.
Extract from The Titanic Tunnel by Glen Blackwell
The coach slowly moved forward, clanking over the ramp which led off the ferry and onto the worn concrete of the terminal. As the driver carefully negotiated the route to the exit, the noise level from the children on board increased with their excitement. It was late afternoon, and the school party were on the final leg of their journey from London. They were in their first year at high school and had come on a trip to Belfast to see where Titanic had been built, and to visit the museum dedicated to it.
‘Wow - look at that!’ Jack said, nudging Emmie. They were now driving through the city centre on the way to their hotel and were grateful that it was only a short ride from the port.
‘Cool!’ replied Emmie, looking up and noticing the large yellow shipyard cranes for the first time. ‘Are they the cranes which were used to build Titanic?’
‘No, I think they might be more modern than that,’ Jack answered, running a hand through his short orange hair. ‘Whenever I’ve seen pictures of Titanic being built, it was always covered in scaffolding.’
The pair sat back in their seats, heads turned to the side and eyes fixed on the developing views through the window. They had travelled by road to Liverpool, then taken a ferry across the Irish Sea to Belfast. The sea had been quite calm, but Emmie had still felt seasick on the short voyage. She hadn’t been on the open sea before, and the gut-wrenching sensation wasn’t something she was looking forward to repeating on their way home.
Jack idly traced out the shape of the big cranes on the window alongside him and then stared with interest as a large metal and glass structure came into view.
‘That’s the Titanic museum,’ explained Emmie, ‘look, there’s a huge metal sculpture of the name outside.’ They both stared in awe at the sharply angled building which, with its four-pointed corners, looked a bit like a star.
‘It’s been a fairly normal journey,’ joked Jack, ‘not the most adventurous bus trip we’ve ever had...’
The previous autumn, Jack and Emmie had been on
their usual bus journey home from school and had
somehow stumbled back in time to 1940. Experiencing
the London Blitz first-hand had given them a unique
insight into what life was like for people at the time,
but how it had happened, and why to them, was still a
mystery. They’d talked endlessly about it to each other
but couldn’t come up with any plausible reason.
Glen Blackwell lives in Suffolk, England.
He has a career in finance and The Titanic Tunnel is his third book.
Inspired by bedtime reading with his 3 daughters, Glen loves to bring stories to life for young readers.
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