Ye Olde Antique Shoppe

The Idea for Ye Olde Antique Shoppe

Some years ago, two sisters, living in Somerset, died and her executors discovered an apothecary shop, complete with cobwebs, which had been boarded up since the death of William White, their grandfather, in 1909.

The death of the last sister in 1987 was the first time the shop had seen the light of day since then and it was a fascinating sight. All those old remedies, blood tonic and the like, all still as they were then.

The shop was auctioned off and was bought by Flambards, a theme park in Helston, Cornwall. Flambards started off as a sort of museum with a Victorian village, a Blitz display which is very realistic with its sounds and smells, and a few other smaller exhibits. Then it acquired a small fairground and it bought, at auction, the time capsule apothecary shop. They moved it, complete with cobwebs, to Helston and it is there today, for visitors to view, although they cannot go inside.

It was this shop that gave me the idea for the series, Ye Olde Antique Shoppe.

Imagine you are a young woman, trying to build a career, and your aunt dies, leaving you her house in an expensive part of London. She also leaves you a shop in central London, a shop named Ye Olde Antique Shoppe, that you had no idea ever existed.

And this shop has been shut up for years, more than sixty years. But why? A valuable property like this, in the capital city? If her aunt did not want the shop, why not sell it, or lease it out?

Well, that was precisely the choice Rachel Parnell had to make in the first of our series, The Edward V coin.

Ye Olde Antique Shoppe
Book One - the Edward V Coin

Rachel Parnell is a struggling dress designer with ambitions of one day having her own design label. But for now she is pretty hard up, designing for other people, big companies who claim her designs as their own. And rent in London is not cheap.

She loves the house her aunt has left her, but it needs modernisation; now she would have the shop, she could sell it and have enough money to keep the house and with the rent money she would save, she could have all the work done.

If she could sell that shop, she would be rolling in it.

Rachel isn't comfortable with really old things. She likes looking at them but entering a place that had been boarded up for so long, and she had no idea why, is a bit daunting. So she asks her friend, Peter Attwood, to go with her. Peter is an archaeologist and they have been friends since university; he is fascinated by the idea of the Antique Shop and jumps at the chance to be the first to enter it for all those years.

Inside, they find a few antiques, mostly Victorian or Georgian, nothing special, but there is a mysterious back room. On the door to that room is a warning never to take anything from that room outside the shop.

Inside, there is a wealth of magnificent and priceless antiques and they find a coin from the short reign of King Edward V. He was one of the young princes confined in the Tower of London by their uncle, Richard of Gloucester, and who subsequently disappeared from there.

That coin would be worth a fortune and they decide to take it back to Rachel's flat and investigate on the internet. For some reason, their smartphones won't work inside the back room.

After locking the door, they turn to see the familiar buildings gone, the motor vehicles gone, the traffic lights, the buses, everything was replaced by a few horseback riders, some old horse drawn carriages and a field of grazing horses.

And a woman screamed and cried out 'harlot!'

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Ye Olde Antique Shoppe
Book Two - The Anne Boleyn Necklace

Rachel moved into the house, despite it being in a bit of a state, and she arranged a lease of the whole top floor for Peter. He wasn't getting on with his flatmates and he needed the privacy for his new book. He was publishing a journal written by young Edward V while he was confined in the Tower.

While Rachel was renovating the rest of the house, she discovered journals, written both by her Uncle Charlie who seemed to have done a lot of time travelling, and her Aunt Rosalie, who she hardly remembered.

It seemed Aunt Rosalie had married a man in the sixteenth century and had a child. She had brought the child back to her own time but when world war II broke out, she thought she would be safer with her father. But after the war, that father, a knight in the court of King Henry VIII, refused to allow Rosalie to take the child.

Rachel thought her cousin, Caroline, was stranded in the sixteenth century, so she and Peter looked in the Antique Shop for something that might take them back to the right era.

What they found was immediately recognisable; it was the necklace with the letter B hanging from a pearl chain, the necklace that Anne Boleyn wears in all her portraits.

But how did it get into the Antique Shop? There was only one way to find out.

They went to rescue Caroline, to bring her back to their own time if possible. She was born here, so it should be possible. But what Rachel found in Caroline was not what she expected. Something else she did not expect was to be presented with a six year old African slave boy, a gift from an admirer. Horrified, Rachel can only hope it will be possible to take him back with her, since it is not possible to bring inanimate objects through the time portal from the past.

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Ye Olde Antique Shoppe
Book Three - The Ripper Rings

Every time she went through the portal to the past, Rachel declared that she would never do it again. Yet there always seemed to be something that would change her mind.

What would you do, if you found in such a place the three rings taken from a victim of Jack the Ripper, and you found them inside the shop left you by your family?

Wouldn't you want to know how they got there? No one has ever discovered the real identity of Jack the Ripper, although there have been many candidates put forward.

Rachel will discover the truth, but she will never be able to tell anyone.

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Ye Olde Antique Shoppe
Book 4 - The Roman Bracelet

Rachel and Peter's efforts to keep the Antique Shop a secret didn't reckon with a very persistent estate agent, who wanted to sell the place for them.

He followed them in one day and would not take no for an answer, especially when he saw all the marvels in the back room.

He thought perhaps Rachel didn't know what she'd got, so when no one was looking, he slipped a Roman bracelet into his pocket and left the shop.

When he got outside and looked up, London had disappeared!

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Ye Olde Antique Shoppe
Book Five - The Confederate Cap

Peter had spent a lot of time in the Antique shop and he thought he was beginning to know it very well.

The knew things that often appeared intrigued him at first, until he realised they were put there by people in the past.

But one day he found something that made him realise he didn't know the Antique shop as well as he thought.

It was a cap of a Confederate soldier from the American civil war.

That made no sense at all. The shop was in England, in London, so how did a cap from the American civil war get here? He took it outside and found London as it was in his own time.

But then he found another door!

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Ye Olde Antique Shoppe
The Tarot Cards and The Rosary

After Peter's heartbreaking years spent in America after the civil war, he has stayed away from the place. That pleased Rachel and the shop scared the life out of her.

But there is a pull from the shop and eventually Rachel cannot ignore it. What she finds there are a pack of tarot cards and a note for Martha Parnell, the disreputable ancestor who trapped her and Peter in the London plague of 1665.

It seems the whole Parnell line is in danger if they don't go back to 1307 and stop an ancestor there from taking vows as a nun.

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After their last trip, when Rachel were forced to spend some weeks in the fourteenth century with Martha, she discovered more about her. It seemed she did have a soft side and on the spur of the moment, she invited Martha to return with her to the twenty-first century.

With Peter away in Egypt, on an archaeological dig, Rachel was glad to have Martha with her when they went back again to help who they thought was an ancestor. But he turned out to be part of the evil Nazi regime and the women found themselves in the middle of the London blitz.

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Ye Olde Antique Shoppe
The Egyptian Headdress

Rachel and Martha had a lucky escape in the blitz, but they managed to survive and get rid of an enemy at the same time.

But when Peter returns from his dig in Egypt, he has another worrying tale to tell. During his search for the tomb of Queen Cleopatra, his assistant, Mia, digs up something that should not be there.

The Antique Shop is up to something, and when he and his friends find an Egyptian headdress in the shop, they think they know what it is.

They are wrong.

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Ye Olde Antique Shoppe
Letter from the Tudor Court

Integrating Martha into the twenty-second century is both difficult and amusing. Her sixteenth century superstitions cause levity, while her conviction that the television is a window into other people's lives is shocking.

Despite all the changes and the gadgets that she considers to be magic, she is enjoying this century and knows she can start a new life and doesn't need to steal anymore.

Things are quiet. Rachel's designer label is doing well, Martha has done something really daring for her - she's had her hair cut!

They hope to leave the shop alone, but that pull begins again, together with something in the history books that wasn't there before.

A visit to the shop soon tells them why and a letter from the Tudor Court tells them more.

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BOOK TEN of Ye Olde Antique Shoppe is called Hitler's Notebook. When Rachel's hard up cousin comes looking for a hand out, he sees something that makes him curious about why his wealthy cousin has no interest in reporting a theft of a valuable antique to the police. Even more puzzling is when he persuades the jewellery shop opposite the Antique Shop to let him view their CCTV video. He cannot understand why he sees the thief go in but never come out. Rachel is forced to reveal the secret, but Daniel is not the most reliable relative she could have. He thinks it would be a great idea to do the world a favour and go back in time to kill Hitler before he ever came to power. The Antique Shop decides to help him.

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Ye Olde Antique Shoppe currently has ten books in the series, but more will be on their way. All are available in kindle, paperback and mostly audible as well as to read under the Kindle Unlimited subscription.

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