Bogwoppit

by Ursula Williams

  8. Samantha Gives a Party

  ‘Do you mean …’ the Prices asked incredulously, ‘that we can really come up to the Park?’

  ‘It is my home!’ said Samantha grandly, ‘and I am inviting you!’

  ‘Cor!’ said Jeff Price, ‘you bet we’ll come! But what about that mucky old keeper?’

  ‘I do believe,’ said Samantha, ‘that he doesn’t work on Saturdays. On my Aunt Daisy’s calendar it says on all the Saturdays: “Keeper’s Day Off”. And on Sundays too, after Church, “Unlikely”. Whatever that may mean!’

  ‘Wait until the rest of ’em hear we are going up to the Park!’ said Timothy. ‘Won’t they stare and wish it was them!’

  The Prices went back with Samantha, and easily persuaded her to take them on a tour of inspection round the house. They were too excited to be daunted by the general state of shabbiness and disrepair. To them, as to Samantha, the mere novelty of it all made the place seem grand and impressive. From tiptoeing across the hall they came to racing each other up and down the twin flights of stairs, and when they were reunited with the bogwoppit their satisfaction was complete. They could not get over its improved appearance, the shining of its fur, the cleanness of its paws, and the almost complete absence of the bog smell that used to make its company a little less than pleasant.

  But clean and shining as it might appear, this morning the bogwoppit was in a discontented mood. It showed no pleasure at all on meeting the Prices, which was rather natural, given the circumstances of their last meeting, but even in Samantha’s arms it cried and muttered, or shuffled moaning at her heels while she led the Prices on an exploration of the house, complaining bitterly when it got left behind.

  It did not cheer up until they reached an attic at the very top of the house, where it suddenly made a dash into the most cobwebby corner it could find, and did not reappear until its head, fur and feathers were covered in dust, bat droppings and spiders’ webs, a perfectly disgusting sight. But the expression on its face was beatific.

  ‘Look at that!’ exclaimed Samantha in disgust. ‘And it was so beautiful after its bath!’

  ‘It likes dirt!’ said Timothy with some sympathy.

  ‘It liked bathing too!’ said Samantha. ‘It loved it!’

  ‘Let’s bath it again!’ suggested Jeff.

  They raced the bogwoppit downstairs and bathed it.

  The bogwoppit sang and chattered with joy as they towelled it clean, and the cobwebs ran out with the bathwater in muddy streaks. Quite evidently it thought it was having the best of both worlds.

  ‘Keep an eye on it, or it will do it again!’ Deborah warned. They made a lead out of a piece of string so that the bogwoppit could not run away and dirty itself. It protested and pulled away from the leash, threatening to suffocate, so they picked it up and carried it in turns. By now it seemed to have forgiven the Prices.

  ‘What shall we do now?’ Jeff Price wanted to know as they descended the stairs into the hall. ‘Fancy us being here! I can’t believe it! What would the rest of ’em say? They’d never believe it either!’

  ‘I know!’ Samantha suddenly exclaimed, with her eyes shining. ‘We’ll have them all up here this afternoon! I’ll give a party!’

  ‘A party!’ they repeated, incredulous.

  ‘What about your Aunt Daisy?’ asked Deborah.

  ‘She won’t be here! And it is my home!’ said Samantha, adding defiantly, ‘I can ask who I like!’

  ‘What will we have to eat?’ asked the boys practically. After all the main feature of a party is the food.

  ‘There’s heaps of food in the cupboard!’ Samantha said grandly. ‘And while the twins go to invite all our friends Debby and I can make some buns.’

  The boys sped away on such a welcome errand, while Deborah and Samantha explored the resources of the kitchen cupboards and the larder. They found boxes and boxes of biscuits, also plenty of butter, sugar and flour.

  While they mixed and baked in the old-fashioned coke range that also heated the bathwater, Deborah asked again whether Lady Clandorris would mind all her groceries being used for a party for such a large number of people.

  Samantha had never waited to ask her Aunt Lily for anything she wished to take to do. Sometimes a shouting match ensued but usually Aunt Lily grumbled and took no particular notice. Samantha’s conscience told her it was wrong to treat her Aunt Daisy like this but now she had gone so far it was difficult to retract.

  ‘It is my home!’ she repeated stubbornly to quiet Deborah. ‘My aunt, Lady Clandorris, will be glad for me to have my friends to visit me while she is out.’ But she was not in the least convinced of what she was saying.

  There was an enormous table in one of the rooms, and here, when they had dusted it, they decided to have tea. Meanwhile the bogwoppit slid up and down the once polished surface, or spun like a top, humming and cackling. It kept it from getting under their feet, although the damp marks of its hot wet paws necessitated the table being dusted and polished all over again.

  The twins returned breathless from their errand. Everybody had accepted the invitation with joy, and meanwhile the Prices had to go home to dinner. Samantha and the bogwoppit were left to take the cakes out of the oven and to lay the table, which was only possible when the bogwoppit was tied by the leg to a chair in the kitchen.

  The third time it had bitten itself free Samantha threatened it with the cellar, that still reeked of disinfectant. To her surprise it lay down meekly, sobbing and whimpering, its large eyes pleading with her to spare its life.

  Samantha felt overwhelmed with guilt. She picked it a handful of aruncus wopitus leaves from the herb garden, and when it had eaten them, allowed it a twenty minute nap on her knees.

  The party had been arranged for three o’clock. At half-past two Samantha took the bogwoppit upstairs and brushed it with a clothes brush until its fur was soft and silky, its feathers gleamed.

  She looked critically at her own dresses, hanging rather sparsely inside the enormous wardrobe in her bedroom. She knew that her best dress was too short for her. She had been nagging at Aunt Lily to buy her a new one for months. It would do, of course, as it had before, but a school party, or the birthday parties of her friends, were a different matter to receiving guests as the niece (and surely the heiress) of Lady Clandorris of the Park. With the bogwoppit under her arm she went downstairs to inspect the contents of her Aunt Daisy’s wardrobe.

  Lady Clandorris’s dresses, like her hat, had once been grand, but were now old and rather tattered. They looked unworn, unloved, and uncared for, as if nobody had taken them out of the cupboard for years. Sequins hung in little loops from embroidered flowers. Hems trailed. Necklines sagged. Sleeves were split at the seams, and fastenings were missing. All the same, Samantha fell in love with a peacock blue, low-necked, crêpe tea gown, took it off the hanger, and added a boa in faded apricot feathers. It was hardly the kind of dress to wear with her school sandals, but these were fairly new, and the dress came well down to cover her insteps.

  Meanwhile the bogwoppit had jumped on to the bed, wrapped itself in Lady Clandorris’s bedjacket, and gone to sleep. Samantha only just remembered to collect it when she carried her treasures upstairs.

  As she picked up the warm and sleeping body, now kitten-soft, she remembered how she had always longed for a pet of her own, but Aunt Lily had never allowed it. Samantha had loved all the school pets, and had once tamed a robin in Aunt Lily’s garden, but it was quite different to having something dependent on you for everything, like the bogwoppit.

  ‘You are the One-and-Only-Bogwoppit-in-the-World!’ she murmured into its wispy ear. ‘And I shan’t let anybody send you away or hurt you!’

  The bogwoppit raised its head without opening its eyes, wiped its odd, rubbery little beak on Aunt Daisy’s aged bedjacket, from which it refused to be parted, and tucked its head into Samantha’s neck. She took it upstairs and put it carefully into her bed, Lady Clandorris’s bedjacket and all, while she changed into
the hostess tea gown.

  Then she closed the door firmly upon the sleeping bogwoppit and went downstairs to greet her guests.

  A large number of children were coming up the drive towards the house. They were hurrying, and looking a little anxious, led by the three Prices. When they saw Samantha standing on the steps of the house everyone relaxed a little and seemed relieved.

  Samantha stood aside to welcome them into the hall. Her entire class was there from the school, and the twins’ class as well. Every child was agog with something between anxiety and anticipation. When Samantha closed the door behind the last of them a sigh of relief went through their ranks. They were much more afraid of the keeper and his dogs than of any chance of meeting Lady Clandorris.

  ‘It’s all right! Everybody is out!’ Samantha reassured them. ‘And I am glad to have you all come to see me. Please make yourselves at home!’

  The visitors, like the Prices before them, wanted a fully conducted tour from top to bottom of the house. They were enormously impressed by the number of rooms, and by Lady Clandorris’s large bedroom, into which Samantha allowed them to poke their heads, one by one. She thought it best to leave the One-and-Only-Bogwoppit undisturbed in her bedroom, and warned the Prices not to mention it to their friends. When asked if her own bedroom was as grand as Lady Clandorris’s she was tempted to show it off, but prudence prevailed.

  ‘Well no,’ she said untruthfully. ‘It is just like any of the others.’

  Finally she took them down the cellar steps and unfastened the door of the long tunnel that led to the drains. It still smelled strongly of disinfectant. Everybody was sorry to hear that the bogwoppits had died, because now there would be no Project for Miss Mellor.

  Samantha succumbed to temptation and explained that one – just one – bogwoppit had escaped the massacre, and was now the One-and-Only-Bogwoppit-in-the-World. The children seemed very pleased about this, and said perhaps Miss Mellor would be able to do a Project after all.

  ‘My aunt, Lady Clandorris, has asked the plumber to build a grid halfway down the drain, between here and the marshes,’ Samantha said. ‘Then if ever they do come back they can’t get into the house.’

  ‘My dad is going to build it!’ Timothy Price added proudly.

  The Prices had heartily agreed to keep the bogwoppit’s presence a secret, in case it became over-excited with so many children at the party and escaped into the wild. No risks must be taken with the One-and-Only-Bogwoppit-in-the-World, and they enjoyed sharing a secret with Samantha.

  Samantha and Deborah’s buns disappeared very quickly; so did the rest of the food. It took a remarkable amount of cakes and biscuits to satisfy nearly sixty people. Samantha and Deborah made cups and cups of tea, using several tins of evaporated milk and a whole box of sugar. Even with mugs they could only muster ten drinking vessels, until Jeff discovered a whole china teaset of an elaborate and old-fashioned design in a cupboard, but even then they had to drink in turns and share teaspoons. Some of them waited quite a long time for a drink and grew thirsty, queuing up at the kitchen sink to drink at the tap of cold water. They made quite a flood round the sink between them, on the kitchen floor.

  ‘We should have left the twins’ class out of it!’ grumbled Samantha, overwhelmed by the hungry and thirsty numbers. ‘It’s them that made all the mess, and they’ve eaten twice as much as our class did.’

  ‘Well I don’t see why they should be left out!’ snapped Deborah in defence of her brothers, but just then somebody suggested playing hide-and-seek, and they began to pick up sides.

  Afterwards they all remembered it as the best game of hide-and-seek in the best house that any of them had ever played in. When the last prisoner had been dragged shrieking into the hall, Samantha sat down at the pianola in the far room and they danced, first in the hall and through the lower rooms, including the kitchen and the cellar, and then finally up and down the stairs.

  In the middle of it all Lady Clandorris suddenly came home, not early, but quite late, as she had promised in the morning. The party had simply gone on and on and on, and nobody had thought of looking at the time.

  Samantha became aware, all at once, of a complete stillness falling on the house. The long chain of dancers had left the room where she was pounding on the pianola, relieved at intervals by one of the Prices, and were wending their way through the rest of the house. She knew they would be back again, and went on pounding, listening to their shouts and yells and singing, and the stamping of their feet across the hall. Suddenly the stamping ceased, and the voices broke off into a silence so profound it was almost a noise in itself.

  Samantha took her feet off the pedals to listen. Nothing. Just nothing. She might as well have been alone in the house.

  Something had happened! Had they all danced out of the front door and disappeared into the Park? But only a few minutes ago someone had announced that outside it was pouring with rain, and sure enough great drops were dripping through a crack above the window. Had they all gone into the cellar to explore the drain? Or had they got tired of the party and just gone home?

  Samantha bounced off the pianola stool and went to look for them. And almost immediately she realized that nobody had disappeared or gone home, or gone anywhere at all, in fact. The hall was full of children. Every invited child was there, from the Prices to the youngest member of the twins’ class, but they were all standing as still as if some magician had turned them suddenly into stone, and they were all staring in one direction.

  At the bottom of the stairs facing them, wearing her pheasant feather hat and a large outdoor motoring coat, despite the time of year, stood Samantha’s Aunt Daisy, Lady Clandorris.

  Something rose and swelled inside Samantha’s breast. It was not exactly courage, because terror was lurking so closely behind it. But she felt strongly that she ought to take the blame and defend her friends, so she pushed herself forward between the paralysed ranks of children, standing squarely in front of them with her hands on the hips of Lady Clandorris’s peacock blue hostess tea gown. If it came to a showdown she had had plenty of practice with her Aunt Lily, and had often taken on Uncle Duggie in the same encounter.

  Aunt Lily, however, had never been slow to open her mouth and speak her mind. It was disconcerting to find that Aunt Daisy was in no hurry to speak at all, but stared at her with so icy and angry a stare that Samantha could find nothing in her repertoire to match up to it.

  After a very, very long silence Lady Clandorris suddenly said quite loudly:

  ‘Is your party finished yet?’

  ‘Yes …’ Samantha stammered, taken by surprise. ‘They were all just going home.’

  ‘Good!’ said Lady Clandorris, moving absolutely nothing except her lips. ‘Then when they have left the house will you please collect all your possessions together and come with me. I have found a person to take care of you and a house where you can board until your Aunt Lily comes back from America, or until I can get in touch with her and send you after her. Mrs Bassett will take you this evening. You had better hurry up as she is expecting you to supper.’

  In the stunned silence that followed this pronouncement Samantha savoured to the full the deepest humiliation of her life. In front of all her friends, all her invited guests, she was being turned out of the house she had boasted about and of which she had been so proud. It was far far worse than being suspended from school.

  Yet even as she stood out there in front of them all, scarlet in the face and bitterly defiant, two things happened at exactly the same moment.

  Every child in the hall suddenly looked in her direction, and moved a little closer to her as if to assure her of their sympathy and their support, while a murmur of indignation arose, so pronounced and so ominous that Lady Clandorris unconsciously stepped backwards on to the bottom stair of the right-hand flight raising herself just a little to gain an advantage over the protesting mass of children facing her. And while they continued to murmur and shuffle and voice their indignation
in an even tighter bunch around Samantha, a scraping, flopping, scratching noise came from the upper landing, as the bogwoppit, resentful of being shut up and neglected during the whole of Samantha’s party, came blundering down the stairs. It had gnawed a hole in the bottom of Samantha’s door, and was not prepared to be agreeable to anybody. It seemed particularly resentful at the sight of Lady Clandorris.

  Hearing the noise she turned and saw it descending, step by step, balancing itself upright by its ridiculous little wings, muttering and complaining, fixing her with its round eyes full of spite and indignation. It was covered with dust and fluff from under Samantha’s bed where it had curled itself up with the bedjacket.

  ‘Samantha!’ ordered Lady Clandorris, almost the first time she had used her name. ‘Go into the kitchen and fetch me a bucket of disinfectant!’ Samantha stood perfectly motionless.

  ‘Samantha! I said fetch a bucket of disinfectant from the kitchen!’ repeated her aunt, with the bogwoppit now not six steps above her and lowering its head as if to bite.

  ‘If I have to pack my clothes I shall not have time to fill any more buckets for you!’ declared Samantha.

  The children cheered.

  Lady Clandorris swept off the stairs with the bogwoppit three steps behind her and strode towards the kitchen.

  ‘Quickly!’ Samantha said, turning to her friends. ‘Go home … now! And take it with you!’ she urged the Prices. ‘Take care of it and DON’T LET IT OUT! – I’ll come and fetch it as soon as I can. Remember it’s the ONLY-BOGWOPPIT-IN-THE-WORLD! – And keep it away from your father’s disinfectant!’ she called after them as the three Prices fled out of the front door, clutching the protesting bogwoppit and followed by all their friends.

  9. Samantha Moves Again

  ‘Where is it?’ said Lady Clandorris coming back into the hall with an over-filled bucket of disinfectant slopping on to the stone flags. ‘And where have they all gone to?’

  She put the bucket heavily on to the floor.