by Joan Aiken
With frantic haste he spun the Bonny Mary about in the narrow creek, and headed full speed for open water.
“Och, my soul,” said Gran. “The Laird!”
It was a blue-and-silver wave the size of a mountain. It came marching along the coast like a Roman army, pushing its way over rocks, headlands, islands. It made a noise, a kind of droning hiss, as it approached. A wild, keening noise, like the banshee’s wail. It did not roll. It slid, as if some huge shoulder, submerged, was heaving the surface of the water along.
Geordie, experienced and canny, did not try to fight against the Laird, but angled his boat on a forty-five degree course to minimize the shock of the moment when the wave hit us.
All the sky vanished, there seemed to be nothing above but curving water.
Gran, who had been standing by the gunwale, was catapulted from the boat like a leaf in a gale. I saw her face of utter astonishment, mouth wide open, above me one moment; the next moment she was gone, flung, arms wide, into a wilderness of spray. It seemed that she welcomed the huge swell of sea, hugged it to her, as she had never hugged Lu-Lyn or me …
The Bonny Mary was full of water.
“Bale, boy, if ye wish to stay alive,” shouted Geordie, and threw me a round pan with a wooden handle.
I baled. Frantically I dipped, scooped and flung water. My efforts seemed puny to reduce what was in the boat, but I kept at it, one reason for my diligence being that I did not dare look about me. We were still climbing up this endless slope of sea. But what would happen when we reached the crest?
We never did reach it.
Due to Geordie’s expert handling, the Bonny Mary sidled her way southerly across the immense wave as it travelled on eastwards; and at last it left us behind in mid-channel. “And,” Geordie said grimly, “fifteen miles tae eastward of our proper course.”
“But, Geordie—what about Gran?”
He blew out his cheeks and spread out his hands. “Man, Davey, she’d not stand a chance! Nae more than a snowflake in Satan’s kitchen. Not with a hundred thousand tons of water atop of her. Dinna grieve for your Gran, lad. ’Twas no’ a bad way for her to go. A way she might even have chosen herself. To straighten out what had gone amiss.”
Working away at my baling I supposed he might be right. Gran must have been very glad that she had seen the island again. And that she had done what she intended with Lu-Lyn’s ashes.
(Where were they now? Carried to the world’s end on the Laird’s shoulder? Or down in those fossil forests, among the bones of dinosaurs?)
The sun suddenly rose, bright as a bonfire, on the eastern horizon. To our north, Muckle Burra was shrugging back into its blue retinue of mountainous islands. Some of them, in the sun’s rays, glittered white with snow.
Now I could see the Saddle, outlined against one of those white slopes. A good place for skateboards, Lu-Lyn had thought. How did she know that? She never had a skateboard.
If I ever went back to live on Muckle Burra I would turn it into a friendly, welcoming place, with a golf course for summer visitors and a skateboard park for their children. The long months of winter would give enough time for the island to retire into its old silence and solitude.
“Ye’ll be faring back to Muckle Burra, maybe?” inquired Geordie, catching my thought.
“If I can …”
Gran and Lu-Lyn, Mother and Dad were gone. All my family. I would have to learn to live with the aching emptiness of that. “As you have learned to live, Davey,” I remembered Gran saying.
I laid the empty baling pan aside.
“Ye did a grand job there,” said Geordie. He went on, “If ye went back, I ken half a dozen lads who’d not say no to the chance of setting up on their own. ’Twould be worth thinking about. Ye’d need to learn to handle a boat. ’Twould be worth thinking about,” he repeated.
I thought about it. The mainland came closer. The shabby grey buildings of Firthside stood out from their background. People were to be seen on the quay. Leap Year Day was just beginning.
I wondered if my wheelchair would still be in the shelter where Gran had left it.
When Geordie tied up against the inner pier the tide was still low. Fishing boats lay beached on their sides, scattered across the sandy harbor floor.
I looked up at the steep flight of granite steps that rose between our gunwale and the quay above. At high tide, when we went aboard, it had been possible to step straight across from the quayside into the boat.
“Ye’ll need help up the steps, likely?” suggested Geordie.
“No,” I said. “Thank you. I believe I can walk …”
A Biography of Joan Aiken
Joan Aiken had a very happy childhood, and her memories centered around her two much-loved homes: a haunted house in the historic town where she was born, and a tiny old cottage in a country village where she grew up. These magical places became the settings for many of her stories, as you will be able to easily imagine if you read on …
The house where Joan was born in 1924, nearly a hundred years ago, was in the small medieval town of Rye, in the county of Sussex, England—a place of cobbled streets and red-brick houses jostled tightly together on a high little hill rising out of the flat green plain of Romney Marsh. The English Channel was two miles away. Some of Rye’s castle walls and fortified gates still remained from when the village served as a stronghold against French invaders. Jeake’s House, where Joan was born, stood halfway up the steep, cobbled Mermaid Street. It was built in 1689 and was owned by several members of the Jeake family. One of them, Samuel Jeake, was an astrologer and mathematician; a huge leather-bound book written by him once belonged to the Aikens. Samuel Jeake had invented a flying machine, and, trying it out, he boldly leapt off the high wall of the town. Sadly, it did not work, and he crashed down into the tidal mud of the river Rother, which ran around Rye. Joan certainly included that in one of her stories!
There was a very ghostly feeling about Jeake’s House, which Joan described as follows: “[Its smell was] a delicious blend of aged black timbers, escaping gas, damp plaster, and mildew; I can remember the exact feel of the brass front-door knob turning gently in one’s hand, the shape of the square black banister post, and the look of the leaded windows with their small panes.”
Just as clearly, Joan remembered the stories she first heard at the house, which were read aloud by her mother and her older brother and sister, John and Jane: “First there was Peter Rabbit, and then The Just-So Stories, fairly milk-and-honey stuff; then Pinocchio, rustling with assassins, evil plots, death, moonlight, and irony; then Uncle Remus, told in a mysterious dialect, full of wild characters, with the wicked Br’er Fox.” No wonder this house haunted her memories!
When Joan was five, her father, the American poet Conrad Aiken, returned to the United States, and her mother, Jessie, married an English poet. Along with her mother and new stepfather, Joan went to live near the rolling green hills of Sussex Downs, five miles away from the closest town. John and Jane were sent away to boarding school, but for the next six years, until the age of twelve, Joan was homeschooled by her mother.
This new home was a different kind of paradise for Joan. Now she could roam the wild garden, climb trees, and explore the little village of Sutton, which had no “sidewalks”—as her Canadian mother called them—just one road with grass banks and little scuffed paths along the top where children had made tracks of their own. Sutton had one tiny store, which sold everything from bread to postage stamps. A four-minute walk from the shop was a forge, where the blacksmith, Mr. Budd, worked at his roaring bellows or clanged shoes onto the great, fringed feet of farm horses. In those days, a carter would go into the town once a week with his pony and trap and bring back goods for the village families. Joan’s household did not have a radio or a car—or even electricity! Water was pumped by hand from a well, and at night they lit oil lamps and candles. Much of th
eir food came from the garden’s vegetable patch and fruit bushes; milk and cream or meat came from farms nearby. Even the poorer families in the area had help in their houses, and a village girl called Lily came to Joan’s to scrub and wash dishes. When she had finished her work, she sometimes took Joan to climb the slopes of the Downs, half a mile away, or pick cowslips and kingcups in the marshy meadow behind Lily’s mother’s cottage. Sometimes, Joan and Lily would walk two miles in the summer heat to a shallow pond where they could bathe.
Jessie quickly taught Joan how to read, and gave her lessons in French, Latin, English, history, arithmetic, geography, and even Spanish and German. With no school friends to play with, books became Joan’s friends—she read everything in the house! First, she went through the novels from Jessie’s Canadian childhood: Little Women and the Katy series. Then, she read all of the fairy tales, The Jungle Book with its stories about Mowgli, and the books her older brother and sister left behind. When these ran out, she moved on to ghost stories or books about history, such as stories about the Three Musketeers and the Princes in the Tower. Joan’s mother would read longer works aloud before they had radio or television; this was their main entertainment. Every night at bedtime, or when the family went on picnics, or as they sat stringing beans for supper, Joan would be listening to stories, so it was not surprising that she soon started writing some of her own. She saved up her pocket money and bought herself a notebook at the village shop, then set to work writing exciting tales with titles like “The Haunted Cupboard” or “Her Husband Was a Demon.” She was so proud of them that she kept those pages for the rest of her life.
It wasn’t until several years later that Joan had the company of a baby brother, David, and as soon as he was old enough, it was Joan who took him exploring on the Downs, and told him stories to cheer him along as he began to tire on the way home. Some of these short tales were published in her very first book many years later, such as “The Parrot Pirate Princess,” which she gave to David as a birthday present. Joan used to say that it was only by racking her brain to answer her little brother’s constant question of “What happened next?” that she learned how to write the exciting fiction she is known for today.
I was lucky enough as Joan’s daughter to have many more of those stories told to me as she was writing them quite a number of years later. Then I was the one asking “And what happened next?” When the tales were finished, she would type them out and send them away to her publishers, and I would enjoy the excitement of seeing them come back as printed books with pictures, just as you are able to see these stories today on your own screens—wouldn’t it have amazed Joan to imagine that all those years ago?
—Lizza Aiken, 2015
Joan’s birthplace, the little town of Rye, England. This is a page from the picture timeline on the Joan Aiken website.
Joan, age two, with her mother, Jessie, in the garden of Joan’s birthplace, the Jeake’s House, in 1926.
Mermaid Street in Rye. They didn’t have many cars in those days!
Some of Joan’s first picture books.
Some of the stories were quite scary. Joan loved this one in which Pinocchio meets some robbers in the woods.
Joan’s mother, Jessie, married again and the family moves to a small village. This is another page from the Joan Aiken website.
The small cottage where Joan’s family lived. It was called Farrs.
Joan’s family could only reach the nearest town of Petworth by horse and cart.
Mr. Budd, the blacksmith, shoes carthorses in the village smithy.
May Day in the village was a grand day. The little girl (at left) in a long coat is Joan watching the May Queen’s procession go by.
Joan’s first notebook, where she wrote her stories. She kept it all her life!
One of Joan’s early poems and a drawing of her cat Teglees.
Joan (upper right), age ten, with her big brother and sister, John and Jane; her mother, Jessie; and her younger brother, David, who loved to listen to her stories.
Where Joan and David took walks, up on the Sussex Downs.
When she was older, Joan would go back to Rye to visit her father over the holidays, before she went away to school. Like Joan, he loved cats, and one year the family cat had kittens!
All images courtesy of the Joan Aiken Estate.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2002 by Elizabeth Delano Charlaff for the Joan Aiken Estate
Illustrations copyright © 2002 by Ian Andrew
Cover design by Jesse Hayes
978-1-5040-2097-8
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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