by Nina Bawden
She cried and cried and Nick sat and watched. He didn’t know how to stop her and when she did stop by herself, when they got to the junction and had to change trains, he was afraid to say anything in case she started again, and so he said nothing. Neither then, nor later: Carrie never mentioned Druid’s Bottom after that day, not to him, nor to their mother, and because she had frightened him so badly, crying like that, neither did he.
Chapter Fifteen
Even thirty years later, when she was quite old enough to know it wasn’t her fault, that a house didn’t burn down because a girl threw a skull into a horse pond, she still cried in much the same way when she thought of it. Not in front of the children but later, when they had all gone to bed and to sleep. Only the oldest boy stayed awake and he heard her, crying softly in the next room. On and on, like a waterfall …
In the morning he told the others they were not to disturb her. She was tired, he said; they would go for a walk before breakfast and let her sleep as long as she needed.
He knew where he was going. He led them at a smart pace along the path where the railway had been and though they grumbled about the branches scratching their legs his sister and his brothers followed him. But when they came to the Grove, they stopped and hung back.
He said, ‘You don’t have to come. None of you.’
That made them want to, of course. And they were not really the sort of children who were easily frightened. Once they had set their feet on the path they tumbled down bold and bouncy as puppies.
Carrie’s daughter said, ‘What were they scared of, her and Uncle Nick? Just a few silly old trees!’
But when they got to the bottom of the Grove they were scared a little. The ruined house looked so dead in the sunlight with its blackened walls and boarded-up windows. There was the yard and the horse pond – and the dead house beyond them.
‘Come on,’ the oldest boy said. ‘We can’t just go back. Might as well have a proper look, while we’re here.’
But even he went forward slowly. The smallest one clung to him. ‘Were they really all burned up? To a cinder?’
‘She thought so.’
‘Why didn’t she ask someone?’
‘Scared to find out, I suppose.’
‘Scaredy-cat. She’s a scaredy-cat!’
‘You’d be too, I expect, if you’d done what she did,’ the oldest boy said. ‘Or thought you had. Let me see, the stables must be round at the side.’
They turned the corner of the house and saw what looked like an outbuilding, only rather a smart one, painted white and with a tub of nasturtiums outside the open front door. Carrie’s daughter wrinkled her nose. ‘Bacon cooking?’
‘Ssh …’ The oldest boy seized the younger two and dragged them back, out of sight. ‘If someone’s living there we’ve no business to go rootling round. Trespassing.’
‘I didn’t see any notice to stop us,’ Carrie’s daughter said. She peered round the corner of the house. Then flapped her hands behind her. ‘Hang on …’ They waited. When she turned round, her cheeks were fat as balloons, fit to burst. She blew out through her lips and pretended to fan herself. She said, ‘How old was Hepzibah?’
‘I don’t know. Mum didn’t say’
‘She didn’t say nothing about people’s ages.’
‘Didn’t she?’
‘Don’t know. Can’t remember.’
‘What are you whispering for?’ the oldest boy said. He looked himself and saw a tall old woman coming towards them. No, not towards them – she didn’t know they were there – towards a gate that led to a field tucked away under the mountain. A flash of white feathers in the field, and the old woman was carrying a bucket. Hepzibah! Hepzibah going to feed her chickens! Even if it isn’t, he thought, she can’t bite me!
He stepped out of cover and walked up to her. She had grey eyes and white hair. He said, speaking fast to get it over with, but politely, ‘Are you Miss Hepzibah Green? If you are, my mother remembers you.’
She stared at him. Stared and stared – and her grey eyes seemed to grow larger and brighter. At last she said, ‘Carrie? Carrie’s boy?’
He nodded, and her eyes shone brilliant as diamonds. Her face cracked in a thousand lines when she smiled. ‘And the others?’
‘Yes.’
‘Gracious Heavens!’
She looked at them all, one by one, then again at the oldest boy. ‘You look like your mother. They don’t, but you do.’
‘Green eyes,’ he said. ‘It’s having green eyes.’
‘Not only that.’ She looked at him, smiling, and he thought she was beautiful, even though she was old and had a stiff, curly whisker or two on her chin. The little ones would giggle at that if they noticed, and if they giggled she’d know what about, he was sure. She was sharp. He thought, I’d better warn them …
She said, ‘What am I thinking about? You’ll be wanting your breakfast and here I am, standing here as if eggs cooked themselves. White ones or brown ones? Or speckledy?’
‘Oh, we don’t want …’ he began, but she was leading the way; very tall, very thin, very old; skinny old legs stiff as stilts.
They went in through the white painted door, down a passage into a kitchen. It had been part of a barn perhaps, because there was a high ceiling and beams but it was cosy and bright, with a wood fire in the hearth and the sun streaming in.
Hepzibah said, ‘Look who’s here, Mister Johnny! Carrie’s children!’
He sat in a chair in the sun by the window; a tiny bald man, like an elderly goblin. He blinked at them sleepily.
‘Say hallo to Carrie’s children,’ Hepzibah said.
He smiled shyly, ducking his head. ‘Hayo, hayo. How you?’
‘He can speak!’ Carrie’s daughter said. ‘He can speak properly!’ Her face swelled with rage at the thought of the lies her mother had told.
‘Not when Carrie was here, he couldn’t,’ Hepzibah said. ‘After the war, when Albert was grown, he had a friend of his, a speech therapist, come down from London. Mister Johnny will never talk like the rest of us, but it’s more company for me, having him answer, and it’s better for him. He doesn’t feel so cut off. Your mother tell you about Albert?’
They nodded.
‘Albert Sandwich! What a name!’ Hepzibah stood with her eyes fixed on distance, remembering. ‘Oh, they were a pair, him and your mother! Talk of opposites! Mr Head and Miss Heart, I used to call them, and both of them stubborn as mules when their minds were fixed. She said she’d write first, he said, and nothing would budge him. Mr Cocksure, he seemed sometimes, but he was shy underneath. He thought she couldn’t be bothered, once she’d gone away’
‘She thought he was dead, that’s why she never wrote,’ the oldest boy said. ‘She thought you were all dead, in the fire.’ How absurd, he thought, did she really think that?
‘How did she know about the old fire?’
‘She saw it from the train.’
Hepzibah looked at him. Witch’s eyes, the oldest boy thought. But that was ridiculous! He said, ‘She threw the skull in the horse pond. She thought she’d started the fire, doing that. It sounds silly now.’
Hepzibah said, ‘Poor little Carrie!’ She looked at him. ‘She believed my old tales. You wouldn’t, would you?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ But her bright eyes seemed to be seeing more than eyes usually did, seeing straight into him, and it made him less certain. He said, ‘I don’t know.’
She said, ‘The insurance people said it was Mister Johnny, playing with matches. All I know is, it was him woke us up. Saved our lives, probably. Nothing else, though Albert got a few old books out of the library – burned his hands and his eyebrows off! He looked a real scarecrow!’
‘Was all the house burned?’
‘Gutted inside. The floors and the staircase. We moved into the barn – camped out, to begin with. Then the lawyers did up the outbuildings and said we could stay on as caretakers. Keep an eye on what was left of the place.’
/> ‘What happened to Mr Evans?’ Carrie’s daughter said. ‘It all belonged to him, didn’t it?’
‘He died, poor man. Not long after the fire. Heart, the doctors said, but it was more grief and loneliness. Missed his sister – she’d left him to marry an American soldier.’
‘Auntie Lou?’
‘That’s what Carrie and Nick used to call her. Mrs Cass Harper, that’s her name now. She went to live in North Carolina, after the war. We heard nothing from her for years till last summer, when her son came down to have a look at the place. Tall young man with a drawly voice – hard to make head or tail of what he said, really.’
‘Schewgullum,’ Mister Johnny said, looking excited.
‘That’s right. Brought Mister Johnny some chewing gum and he got it stuck to his dentures! Albert came to meet young Mr Harper and fixed up to buy the place. He says he wants to re-build and live here one day but I think he was thinking more of Mister Johnny and me. You’ll be safe now, he said when the papers were signed, no one can turn you out, ever! And we’re grateful, of course, though he won’t hear of gratitude! He says we’re all the family he’s got, since his own parents died when he was a little lad, and he’s got no one else, never married. Oh, he’s been like a son to us, Albert has! Comes down at least once a month. Due this weekend, as a matter of fact …’
All the time she was talking, she was setting the table with egg cups and mugs, and cutting bread and butter. Eggs were boiling on the stove; she lifted them out and said, ‘Come on now, you must be hungry.’
The eggs were beautiful; firm whites and dark, runny yolks. And the butter, thickly spread on crisp bread, was like no butter they had ever tasted: smooth, but leaving a grainy, salt tang behind on the tongue.
‘Was Albert an orphan then?’ Carrie’s daughter asked. ‘She didn’t say!’
‘Who’s she? The cat’s mother?’
‘No, mine,’ she said, grinning at Hepzibah.
‘Little Carrie,’ Hepzibah said in her soft, remembering voice, and this made the children laugh.
‘She’s ever so tall for a woman,’ the oldest boy said. ‘Our dad used to call her a bean pole.’
He felt Hepzibah’s eyes on him and buried his face in his mug. He had said used to! Would Hepzibah start poking and prying? Most people did and he hated it – hated having to explain that his father was dead. But Hepzibah wasn’t ‘most people’, he realized suddenly. She hadn’t once asked any of the ordinary questions. ‘Where is your mother?’ ‘What are you doing here, by yourselves?’ ‘Does she know where you are?’
Hepzibah said thoughtfully, ‘It’ll be good to see little Carrie. She may have grown taller, but she’s the sort doesn’t change other ways. Nor your Uncle Nick, neither. How is he, now?’
‘Fat,’ the little ones said and looked at each other and giggled.
‘Well, he always had an eye for his stomach. Mister Johnny, d’you remember Nick? How that boy used to eat!’
Mister Johnny looked blank.
‘It’s a long time for him to remember a name,’ Hepzibah said. ‘Though he’d know Nick at once if he saw him, he doesn’t forget those he loves. He’ll know Carrie when she comes. Does she still like her eggs boiled five minutes?’
The children sat quiet. Then the oldest boy said, ‘She won’t come, Hepzibah. I mean, she’ll come when we go back and fetch her, but she’s not coming now. She’s too – too afraid …’
Had always been afraid, he thought. More afraid than most mothers. Not stopping them doing things, she wasn’t silly like that, but you would look at her sometimes and see the fear, holding her still. Especially when they were happy. As if she were afraid of a happy time stopping.
He thought, perhaps because this happy time had come to an end all those years ago, and she blamed herself for it …
Hepzibah was smiling at him as if she knew what he was thinking: as if she understood everything. But she couldn’t understand – she was just a clever old woman who had persuaded Carrie to believe her old tales. Hepzibah had taken his mother in with her spooky nonsense, the oldest boy thought, and felt, all at once, rather indignant.
Hepzibah turned to the stove and put a brown egg in the simmering water. ‘That’ll be timed about right,’ she said. ‘You go and meet her. Tell her all’s well and her egg’s on the boil and Hepzibah’s waiting. Run along quickly, she’ll be half down the mountain by now!’
Her voice had a clear command in it and the children stood up and went meekly out of the kitchen, past the old, ruined house, past the horse pond …
As they crossed the yard the oldest boy stopped being indignant with Hepzibah and felt sorry instead because she was so foolishly sure and was going to be disappointed. She thought she knew their mother was coming, and she couldn’t possibly know! She wasn’t a witch; just an old woman who was quite good at guessing, but had guessed wrong, this time.
‘There’s no point in hanging about,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait a minute to please Hepzibah and then we’ll go back and finish our breakfast. I daresay one of us can eat an extra egg!’
But the others were younger than he was and so still believing, still trusting. They looked at him, then at each other, and laughed.
And ran ahead to meet their mother, coming through the Druid’s Grove.
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First published in the USA by J. B. Lippincott Company 1973
First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1973
Published in Puffin Books 1974
Published in Puffin Modern Classics 1993, 2005
Text copyright © Nina Bawden, 1973
Illustrations copyright © Faith Jaques, 1973
Introduction copyright © Julia Eccleshare, 2004
The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted
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ISBN: 978-0-141-90941-7
