The Secret Message by John Townsend Page A

alike. I don’t know why grown-ups go on and on about which relatives a new baby looks like most. When my little sister was born, Dad and I laughed every time someone said, ‘Oh, doesn’t she look just like Ems when she was a baby?’ Ems is my mum and she told me it was just the same when I was born – when old aunties kept saying, ‘Oh, doesn’t Samlook just like his great great grandad? He’s the spitting image – an exact double.’
    I’ve grown up knowing that long ago a man I never knew looked just like me. I’d seen some of the crumpled brown photos in a box in Dad’s desk, but I hadn’t seen the one of the boy in the field before. I have to agree that we do look so alike. I think it’s our eyes and the shape of our chin.
    My younger twin brothers, Ben and Tom, look nothing like me. They just look like each other! Twins, so they say, run in our family (Dad says noses do, too!) so I’ve always felt a bit left out by not being a twin myself. But I think it’s really cool to have a sort of twin from the past, even though he died long ago and we never met. He’s made me feel a bit special sometimes … but nothing like as extraordinary as when I saw that photo. It was the moment I knew I had to find out more about my twin from 100 years ago.
    My dad gave me a little frame to put the photo in. He said, ‘You can hang it on your bedroom wall with your drawings.’ So that’s what I did. I put it between my two favourite paintings. One is a flying skylark which I drew from a book and then added a tree and a field in the background. The other is a close-up of a poppy I picked from a ditch. I thought it looked so lonely with its bent stalk, so I put it in a jar and painted it in watercolours. Everyone said what a good job I’d done, so I’m really proud of those two pictures. But now I have a third to look at every night before I go to sleep. It’s my twin in a suit with a strange collar.
    I was drawing at the kitchen table when Dad came in with that case I’d found. He said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve had to mangle it up to get it open, but at least you can now look at what’s in it. Nothing much!’
    The case was lined with smooth red silk andthere were just two books inside. One was a small black Bible and the other had a burgundy leather cover.
    ‘It looks as if your great great grandad typed up his memoirs and stuck them on the pages in that book. I haven’t read them yet, so maybe you’d like to take first peep, Sam.’ Dad then put another battered little case on the table, which he unzipped to show an old portable typewriter inside. ‘I remember my grandad telling me this belonged to his father as well. It must have been used to type those pages.’
    I gently placed my fingers on the typewriter keys. It felt really weird to be touching something that my twin had once touched. It was also weird that four of the keys had blobs of hard wax stuck on them. ‘Why are those letters blotted out?’ I asked.
    Dad shook his head. ‘No idea. Maybe he didn’t like …’ he paused to work out which keys werecovered, ‘… 6, Y, H and N. Maybe hot wax spilled over the typewriter and set on those particular keys. Anyway – have a little read and let me know if you find anything interesting in that leather book. Don’t expect anything too exciting!’
    Little did my dad know what I was about to discover. When I went to bed that night, I opened the book and slowly began to read the first page. Like all the pages, it had a typed sheet of thin paper stuck on it. A few inside were upside down. I must have been the first person for ages to read these forgotten words that were older than my dad. Maybe no one alive knew what story they told.
    I so wanted to find out about the man who was my double – or maybe I’m his double. So I plumped up the pillows on my bed, pulled the duvet up to my chin and began reading the faint words in front of me …

O UR S TORY
    by Frederick Ovel
    There is more to Freddy Ovel than