Companions of Us All -- Doctor Who backstories

Jo

Almost Christmas, 1959. Jo trudges home from school behind her older sister Belinda and younger brother Stephen.

Belinda Grant is the cleverest girl in Year 6. She's going to get a scholarship to the prestigious grammar school next year, everyone knows it. She walks with her head held high, book in hand, leading the way.

Stephen Grant is elegant and graceful, far cuter than most grubby seven-year-old boys. He can dance better than Jo or Belinda and he wants to be a gymnast when he grows up. He skips along the pavement merrily, crunching the frost underfoot. 

Josephine Grant is eight years old, clumsy, and still can't read.

"They're just wobbly squiggles!" she said on her first day of school when introduced to the alphabet. The teachers started to tell her to stop whining, stop being lazy, stop daydreaming.

Now she has to give her parents the results of her end of term test. They're going to be disappointed beyond words, again. Jo can always feel their disappointment radiating off them every time.

When the three siblings get home, they are greeted by their mum and dad and grandparents (who are visiting). There's a round of "how was your day at school?" which goes exactly as was expected, and then it's time to decorate the Christmas tree.

"What's wrong, duck?" Jo's grandfather asks in the lounge, noticing Jo isn't very enthusiastic about baubles and tinsel at the moment (Stephen's wrapping tinsel all around himself and giggling, Belinda's trying to untangle him).

Jo tells him. Grandfather Thompson Grant, an ex-spy in the British armed forces who has lived through two world wars, chuckles gently.

"So what if you can't read? Let me teach you morse code instead."

And that's what they do for the next hour. Grandfather Thompson picks up a little bell on a string from the box of decorations, and rings the dots and dashes that make up letters of the alphabet in morse code. Jo takes a bell and copies them, committing them to memory.

"But I don't understand. What's the point?" Jo asks.

"The point is," Grandfather Thompson says while lighting his pipe, "there's more than one way to go about things. Letters of the alphabet are not only written, you see. Now you and I can send each other 'notes' over the dinner table, and no one else will understand them, don't you think?"

Jo gets it. She sees Belinda writing in her maths puzzle book, Stephen pretending to be a ballerina.

"Like this," Jo says, and rings the bell in little dot and dash rings:

J-O-I-S-T-H-E-B-E-S-T

"That's my girl. You'll get the right school teacher, one day."

"Do you think I be a spy too? Like you?"

Grandfather Thompson takes a big puff on his pipe. At that moment, it's like Jo takes a snapshot with her mind: his velvet smoking jacket, his white hair, the way he looks slightly into the distance when he's about to tell a story of far off places and adventures.

**

Grandfather Thompson died of a heart attack when Jo was 17, studying for a singular science A level. She couldn't believe she had got so far in school to do an A level, but she wasn't sure she could pass it. Too much reading involved, too many accidentally spilled chemicals in her experiments.

Grandfather Thompson was on her mind when she started a job at UNIT, the closest thing to being a spy. She met a mysterious old man who never dressed like a doctor or a soldier, but like her old grandfather.