Bogwoppit

by Ursula Williams

  ‘I’m not disputing that!’ said Lady Clandorris. ‘Look here! Are you trying to start a conversation? If so, why? I don’t object to answering questions if they are not simply asked for the sake of asking, but I will not be drawn into a conversation. It is a perfect waste of time.’

  ‘Aunt Daisy,’ Samantha pursued after a moderate pause, ‘why don’t you have a television or a radio so you can hear what is going on in the world?’

  Lady Clandorris stared at her incredulously.

  ‘Going on in the world?’ she repeated. ‘Why should it make the slightest difference to me what is going on in the world?’

  ‘Well … I mean … anything could happen behind one’s back!’ said Samantha. ‘An assassination, or an abdication, or a whole country falling into the sea! Or a war, or a terrible disease, or people landing from Mars or something!’

  ‘There you are!’ said her aunt in triumph. ‘Why on earth should I want to know all about all those tiresome things? Much more comfortable not to know them! Nothing to worry about if you don’t know, is there? Why not leave them to it and have some peace and quiet while one can? Surely you agree with me?’

  ‘I’ll be late for school if I don’t go now!’ said Samantha, hastily rinsing her cup and plate under the tap. ‘I haven’t time to be drawn into a conversation!’ she threw back over her shoulder as she left the kitchen. Lady Clandorris’s cackle of laughter was terribly like that of a startled barnyard hen, she thought, racing down the drive towards the Prices’ home.

  Mr Price was just leaving the house. He said he was too busy to go up to the Park until Monday, and today was only Thursday.

  ‘Serve her right!’ said Samantha inwardly. Aloud, she said: ‘Very well. I will tell my aunt you will come on Monday. Things are very unpleasant up at the Park, with the drains,’ she added reproachfully.

  ‘Tell her to swill some disinfectant down ’em!’ Mr Price rejoined, getting into his van. ‘It does all the good in the world to drains. Try it.’

  The three Prices were very subdued and sorry about the loss of the bogwoppit, and Samantha was terribly upset. When they showed her the door that the bogwoppit had managed to open she just said they should have fastened it more securely. When they described its disappearance in the marsh pool Samantha was quite convinced that they must have drowned it. They hurried off to school not quite the best of friends.

  By missing her dinner Samantha was able to explore the pool for herself, but it gave no clue to the bogwoppit’s fate. The water lay brown, still and weed-ridden, with an iridescent scum on the surface, unpleasant to behold.

  Samantha trudged on up the Park to find herself some dinner, and ran into Lady Clandorris just leaving the house.

  ‘No plumber!’ she shouted, passing Samantha at a trot.

  ‘He can’t come till Monday! I knew he wouldn’t!’ Samantha shouted back. ‘He said you ought to put some disinfectant down the drains!’

  Samantha was in trouble for missing school dinner, and came into her classroom to find Miss Mellor enthusiastically holding forth about the bogwoppit study project she had evolved for the current term.

  ‘On the very first fine day we will go to the marsh pools and make observations,’ she was telling them. She won’t like the keeper or his dogs, thought Samantha. The Prices’ eyes were solemn with the same thought. Samantha said nothing. It will be a morning off school, she was thinking. Even if we don’t actually get there, or see anything if we do.

  ‘We aren’t allowed inside the Park!’ somebody pointed out. It wasn’t the Prices.

  Miss Mellor was a newcomer to Filley Green. ‘Of course we must ask permission first,’ she agreed. ‘Samantha, do you think you can arrange it with your aunt?’

  Samantha swelled with importance. She felt herself at the same time heiress to the Park and to every bogwoppit it contained. She had only to say the word and the keeper’s protests would mean nothing. The whole school would be able to flood into the forbidden acres and all because she was the niece of Lady Clandorris.

  ‘I am sure it will be perfectly all right! I will ask my Aunt Daisy!’ she said graciously, feeling not in the least sure, but hopeful.

  She went home without a word to the Prices, being overtaken on the drive by her aunt, the back of her car completely full of cans of disinfectant. She passed Samantha as if her niece had never existed. When Samantha arrived in the kitchen Lady Clandorris was filling bucket after bucket with a very strong-smelling disinfectant that she was preparing to swill down the drains from the entrance in the cellar.

  ‘You can bring the rest,’ she told Samantha, leading the way with a couple of buckets. ‘It’s the strongest I could get, and they told me it’s the best stuff you can use for drains.’

  Samantha looked apprehensively at the vast regiment of tins and buckets. There was not a sign of a bogwoppit in the cellar today, and she hoped they were not lurking in the drains.

  ‘Let’s put some clean water down first,’ she suggested. ‘Just to make sure it gets through.’

  ‘As you like. So long as you fetch it yourself,’ said her aunt. Samantha flung a couple of buckets of clean water down the drain. That would warn them, she thought, and they would go and wait in the marsh pools till the swilling of the disinfectant was over. Lady Clandorris followed it up with bucket after bucket of disinfectant till every tin had been emptied and the cellar almost shouted with cleanliness and slaughtered germs.

  ‘That’s that!’ said Lady Clandorris. ‘Perhaps we shan’t need the plumber after all.’

  Samantha played the pianola to an absent audience. The spaces behind the panelling, the kitchen, the stairs, were all as silent as the grave. She missed the scratching of restless feet and felt uneasy. But it was best that the bogwoppits should be contained down there in the marsh pools where they belonged.

  The house felt very quiet without them.

  Lady Clandorris was triumphant. She did not even trouble to close the cellar door at night. Neither did Samantha. She would not admit to herself that she hoped to find footprints in the kitchen in the morning. The bogwoppits were nice little creatures, but they were … well … they were bogwoppits! Better, no doubt, to study them as a project in their own surroundings. But playing the pianola was not the same without them.

  She went to bed early, and was almost asleep when she heard something snuffling, sobbing and shuffling up the stairs. The noise was so unexpected that she sat bolt upright in bed with cold shivers running down her spine, until she remembered where she had heard that noise before, and at almost the same moment her bedroom door was gently pushed and something shuffled, sobbed and snuffled towards her across the floor.

  It was a bogwoppit … or was it? The furry head was streaked with whitish disinfectant. The wings hung limp and dripping by its sides. Each footstep slapped a wet puddle on to the floor. The whole appearance of the little creature was so dejected, so sodden with misery that Samantha could hardly believe her eyes. Its tail was a mere rat-like streak, dragging on the ground behind it and leaving marks across the carpet. Yet in all its misery and desolation Samantha recognized her own personal and especial bogwoppit, somehow arrived to find her, after a day of disasters almost too harrowing to contemplate.

  She leapt out of bed and took the bogwoppit in her arms, gently rocking it to and fro against the front of her pyjamas. It smelled so strongly of disinfectant that it nearly stifled her to put her nose close to its drenched fur. It thrust its wet chin against her face, and she could feel it gasping and struggling for breath. The familiar, musty bogwoppit odour was completely submerged in strong disinfectant, the effect of which seemed to be rapidly killing it minute by minute.

  Samantha clutched it frantically, wondering if she ought to give it the kiss of life, but it seemed much more important to rid it of the powerful stench that was poisoning it. Running down to the next landing in her bare feet she locked herself and the bogwoppit into the bathroom, hoping that her Aunt Daisy would not choose just that very minute to
want to have a bath.

  The bogwoppit wailed and shrieked and shivered when Samantha put it into the washbasin. Then it escaped underneath the old-fashioned wash tub, protesting and biting when she tried to reach it. She had to run both taps hard to drown the noise it made. Finally she hooked it out with the lavatory brush and wrapped it in a bath towel in case it should scratch. Out of the towel she spilled it into the rusty water under the racing taps. The sides of the bath were too steep for it to get out.

  After its first angry yells the bogwoppit subsided, and allowed itself to be sponged and sluiced and even soaped. The smell of disinfectant receded as it became diluted in the water, and the bogwoppit seemed to realize this and be grateful. It stared up at Samantha with its large, round pleading eyes, and begged to be taken out of the water. The last of the disinfectant disappeared down the plug hole as she wrapped the bogwoppit again in the bath towel and dried it gently on her lap. When it was dry and clean-smelling it looked quite attractive. Holding it carefully in a bag made by joining the four corners of the towel together, Samantha tidied the bathroom as best she could with one hand, and returned to her bedroom.

  As she climbed the stairs she caught a glimpse of her aunt, Lady Clandorris, emerging from her bedroom in the corridor below, wearing a large and jazzy bathcap. She was carrying a towel and a jar of pink bath salts. Samantha hurried into her own bedroom and closed the door.

  ‘Nobody except a bogwoppit could possibly object to the smell of disinfectant!’ she told herself, her heart racing at the thought of the narrow escape she had had of being discovered with the bogwoppit in the bath.

  She was quite prepared for the creature to escape during the night, for Miss Mellor’s descriptions of bogwoppits being unable to move except in water seemed to have no bearing on the habits of this particular specimen, but to her surprise it crept underneath her eiderdown and slept close up against her all the night long.

  7. Mass Murder

  Next morning found the bogwoppit lively and playful, and very, very devoted to Samantha. Its fur was clean and beautiful, its feet and wings spruce and clean. It smelled lovely.

  It rubbed itself round her legs and then lay on its back, playfully kicking its legs in the air while she tickled its tummy. She did not know what to do with it.

  ‘If you come downstairs my Aunt Daisy will kill you,’ she explained to it gently. ‘And she may pour another bucket of disinfectant over you!’

  The bogwoppit closed its eyes and mewed plaintively, as if it were fully aware of such dismal consequences. It vanished underneath Samantha’s bed.

  ‘So you had better stay up here and keep quiet!’ she went on. ‘I’ll fetch you some food before I go to school, and you can just wait till I come back again. Unless of course you would rather I took you straight back to the marsh pool?’

  The bogwoppit emerged from underneath the bed, made a kind of nest of Samantha’s pyjamas, curled up on top of them and went to sleep. Samantha was able to fetch a handful of the leaves it liked from the herb garden, before her aunt came down to breakfast.

  They were eating silently, one on either side of the table, when they heard a rat-tat-tat on the front door.

  ‘Is it the postman?’ asked Samantha.

  Lady Clandorris shook her head.

  ‘He puts them in the box. And I never take them out!’ she said severely. ‘Don’t take any notice. They’ll soon go away!’

  But Samantha was much too inquisitive to ignore the knocking for long. She crossed the hall at a run, pulled back the bolts, and found Mr Price on the doorstep with his bag of tools.

  ‘It isn’t Monday!’ said Samantha in surprise.

  ‘I thought I’d fit it in before work!’ Mr Price said cheerfully. ‘Now then, where does her Ladyship keep her drains?’

  ‘We shan’t need you, plumber!’ said Lady Clandorris, emerging from the kitchen. ‘The drains were cleaned out yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Better have a look at ’em while I’m here!’ said Mr Price, his plumber’s instinct leading him through the kitchen and down the steps into the cellar. Lady Clandorris stood angrily on the top of the cellar steps looking down at him as Mr Price opened and shut manholes with a great deal of noise and clanging.

  ‘Beautiful drains you’ve got, Lady Clandorris!’ he called up. ‘Never seen such beauties! You could drive a coach and four down ’em!’

  For a moment Lady Clandorris seemed gratified, and then she said crossly: ‘Well if you have finished will you kindly come up and let me close the door?’

  ‘You put disinfectant down, I’m glad to say, like I told you,’ said the receding voice of Mr Price. ‘I’ll just have a look around while I’m here, and see what I can find, but it all looks quite shipshape to me.’

  Reluctantly, Samantha tore herself away to go to school. She remained on cool terms with the Prices, and Miss Mellor did not mention the Project. It rained, and was a very uneventful day.

  But when she returned to the Park for tea she found her aunt highly elated. Mr Price had penetrated the whole length of the passage he called the drain, though the true drain was under the manholes and ran along under the earth. He had said it was the best construction he had ever seen in his life. ‘Like a palace down there at the end!’ he had described it. And Lady Clandorris would have no more trouble with the rats, he had promised her, because the disinfectant had done the trick, just as he had told her it would. The vaults of the great drain were full of dead rats, dozens and dozens of them, all killed by disinfectant and lying there in rows. He was coming along to bury them after tea. In fact, as Samantha suspected, the disinfectant had done its job only too well, and there was not a live bogwoppit left in the place. Except of course, her own especial and preserved bogwoppit, tucked up safely in her bedroom. It was now the one and only bogwoppit in the world!

  She raced upstairs to find it sleeping peacefully, full of aruncus wopitus and not at all inclined to be roused from its dreams. Samantha’s heart sank as she pictured its distress at finding itself suddenly bereft of all its family and friends.

  She shut it in and wandered down to the marsh pools, where Mr Price was already digging a hole to bury the sack of dead bogwoppits he had fetched from the cellar, and at the same time arguing hotly with the keeper, whose dogs were looking very dejected, and straining at the leash to leave a spot they so openly distrusted.

  The keeper left, and the three Prices, who had been watching from the fence, came running across the field to join their father and Samantha. Mr Price dug on silently. Presently he shouted to Jeff to throw him the sack. When Jeff fetched it the children ventured to look inside it, and it was just as they had feared and expected. Dozens and dozens of dead bogwoppits lay piled on top of each other looking exactly like dead rats. ‘Ugh! They’re horrible!’ said Deborah with a shudder.

  ‘Nasty brutes, rats!’ said Mr Price, burying the sack and stamping the earth down on top of it. ‘Don’t want the dirty brutes in a lovely drain like that one!’

  When Mr Price had gone home Samantha and the Prices remained beside the bogwoppits’ grave. Their resentment for each other had died down. They were drawn together in their sorrow and distress. Deborah would have liked to hold a funeral service, or to erect a cross, but it did not seem a suitable testimonial for bogwoppits. They settled on a few flowers and a painted board, on which Timothy had written: ‘The last of the Bogwoppits. Rest in Peace.’

  ‘I don’t know what Miss Mellor will say!’ Deborah grieved. ‘She was so keen about that Project.’

  ‘They couldn’t have lived long, anyway,’ said Jeff. ‘There would have been nothing for them to live on. The disinfectant didn’t only kill them … it came up through the marsh pools and it has killed all their special leaves they like to eat, the aruncus wopitus ones. They would have starved to death.’

  It was perfectly true. The disinfectant had seeped through the ground and lay in streaks across the marsh pools. Round the pools the aruncus wopitus leaves drooped and wilted, their leave
s a pale and sickly green.

  ‘I think it is terrible!’ said Deborah. ‘To think that bogwoppits are nearly extinct and we might have had a Project and got on television, and now your aunt has killed everyone of them.’

  ‘Your father told her to!’ retorted Samantha.

  ‘But she did it!’ said the Prices.

  ‘I’ve still got one!’ said Samantha.

  ‘Got what?’ said the Prices, unbelieving.

  ‘A bogwoppit. In my bedroom!’ said Samantha. ‘And I simply can’t think where in the world would be the safest place to keep it.’

  The Prices, wide-eyed, made no offer. They had had their chance, and they had failed. There was a long and awkward silence, broken by Timothy.

  ‘Perhaps in the Pets’ Corner? At school?’ he ventured, but Samantha was scornful. ‘School is full of disinfectant!’ she said, adding crushingly: ‘Like your house!’

  ‘Will you let us see it?’ The bogwoppit had grown in importance and stature all of a sudden, and so had their respect for it.

  ‘It’s the only bogwoppit now in the whole world!’ said Jeff.

  ‘As far as we know,’ agreed Samantha. ‘But my Aunt Daisy won’t want it in her house. She won’t want you either!’ she added to the Prices. ‘She hates visitors, and she detests children more than anything else.’

  ‘Does she hate you?’ asked Deborah, not without a hint of malice.

  ‘I’m her niece!’ Samantha said loftily, suddenly remembering Lady Clandorris’s threat to turn her out by the weekend. Tomorrow was Saturday.

  ‘If I should ever have to change houses again,’ she said doubtfully, ‘do you think your mother would let me come and live with you?’

  ‘And the bogwoppit?’ exclaimed the Prices. ‘Oh yes!’

  But on Saturday morning Lady Clandorris did not mention turning Samantha out of the house. She went out quite early in her car, saying she would not be back until dark.

  Samantha immediately invited the Prices to come and spend the morning with her.