SOCKS will be the passport to an adventure of epic proportions during the mid-term school break.

Spare Parts Puppet Theatre and the WA Shipwreck Museum are joining forces to present Tom Vickers and the Extraordinary Adventure of his Missing Sock.

The interactive adventure— based on a WW I soldier who was a relative of Spare Parts’ Zoe Atkinson—is an action-packed romp through the nooks and crannies of the museum.

• Kids enjoy the interactive adventure. Image supplied

The soldier’s life becomes a “choose your own adventure” as kids explore story lines through mysterious objects, curated artifacts and installations connected to a 1914 battlefield on the Western Front.

To enter, players have to knit a row of a sock to get their passport.

“It’s like a quest,” says Spare Parts artistic director Philip Mitchell.

The humble sock was vital to the war effort, with cold wet feet causing trench foot, an excruciatingly painful condition that could lead to amputation.

Australian women knitted socks by the thousands to help out, and at the start of the war any colour and shape was allowed.

The army eventually decided that the socks had to be uniform grey and a specific pattern, but there were rogue knitters who flouted the rules.

“Some women knitted little messages into the socks,” Mitchell says.

“The show is a rich tapestry of personal stories about the interconnected lives of people over the last hundred years and is intended to reveal how small acts of kindness can change the world.”

Tom Vickers is at the Shipwreck Museum on Cliff Street, Fremantle, April 14–29.

by JENNY D’ANGER