The Diddakoi

by Rumer Godden

  ‘I think you will find they won’t touch you again,’ Miss Brooke said on Monday when she dropped Kizzy at school. ‘In fact I’m sure of it,’ and did not dream how right she was.

  Everyone looked at the mark on Kizzy’s forehead; the girls gave it surreptitious glances in the classroom; it was like a visible scolding, but no one spoke of it – and no one spoke to Kizzy, except Mrs Blount, and Mr Fraser in the playground at breaktime; he made a point of coming there and found Kizzy sitting by herself on the steps with a book. ‘All right again, Kizzy?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ but it was not all right; there seemed to be a magic circle drawn round Kizzy, invisible, and no girl crossed it; when she came out to go home, two boys, Stephen and Tommy, smaller than Clem, who did not come out until half past three, were waiting at the gate; Stephen walked one side of her, Tommy on the other.

  ‘You needn’t,’ said Kizzy.

  ‘Clem said we was to,’ and they plodded on. Next day it was Robert and George. The girls watched but none of them taunted or sang an insult out. ‘Mr Fraser must have ordered the boys to do that,’ they said among themselves; it made them feel more than ever under a cloud and they kept away from Kizzy as she kept away from them. At break and after-dinner-play, when the boys were in a separate playground, Kizzy sat on her step with the largest book she could find; she could almost read now – Miss Brooke helped her in the evenings – but everyone knew she certainly could not read the Encyclopaedia Britannica; she took a volume because they were the largest books in the classroom.

  Once Mary Jo, playing hop-scotch, called ‘Come and hop . . . Kizzy,’ but Elizabeth Oliver whispered, ‘Silly, she doesn’t know how to play.’ Kizzy put down her book, walked to the chalked-out space; she gave a withering look at Elizabeth, cast her pebble, hopped neatly and exactly from square to square, then ‘home’ without one fault; her legs were far stronger than theirs. Then she walked back to her place, sat down and buried herself in her book. Even at dinner there seemed to be a little iceberg of silence each side of her. It was not that she was ostracized now; it was simply uncomfortable to be near her. Somehow neither she, nor the other children could begin – except Clem. He often came at weekends to Amberhurst House – the Admiral liked him more and more – and sometimes in the week to tea at the cottage. ‘You ought to ask Kizzy back,’ said his mother.

  ‘She wouldn’t come.’

  ‘Surely . . .’, but, ‘No, thank you,’ said Kizzy steadily. Mrs Cuthbert too asked her to tea or to spend the day with Prue, but Kizzy went into such panic that Miss Brooke had to promise she need not go, ‘Not ever, promise. Promise,’ begged Kizzy. Yet she was feeling lonely. Funny; when she was in the orchard, solitary except for Gran, she had never felt alone; now, in the middle of girls and boys, she knew sharply what loneliness was. She walked to school by herself and soon by herself walked home – when Clem was sure she was safe from Prue’s gang, he had released the boys.

  It was not only school; in those warm summer days, May, June, July, Miss Brooke would find Kizzy standing at the open window, ‘gazing,’ she told the Admiral. Once she put her arm round Kizzy and said, ‘I wish I could help you, Kiz.’ Kizzy leant against her, rubbed her curls against Miss Brooke’s shoulder – ‘She would never have done that a few weeks ago,’ – ‘I wish I could help.’

  ‘You do,’ said Kizzy, but it was such a weary little voice that, ‘I knew I didn’t,’ Miss Brooke told the Admiral, and she said, ‘Something must be done to heal this.’

  ‘You wouldn’t consider,’ Miss Brooke asked Admiral Twiss, ‘letting Kizzy, one Saturday, ask the girls in her class to tea at the House?’

  ‘Those girls!’ the Admiral recoiled.

  ‘Those girls among them. I would willingly ask them to the cottage but it wouldn’t be the same as coming to the House to see your models and the horses – it would give Kizzy an importance.’

  ‘But ask girls, those girls, to Amberhurst.’ The Admiral was stunned.

  ‘It’s a wonderful idea,’ said Mr Fraser when he was consulted. ‘Nothing could help Kizzy more.’

  ‘If you really think so . . .’ Admiral Twiss could be talked round, but not the gnomes, Peters and Nat. Not Kizzy.

  ‘Put on a tea for those bullies. Not on your life,’ said Peters.

  ‘They’re only little girls,’ pleaded Miss Brooke.

  ‘Little girls. Little monsters. Fourteen against one.’

  ‘Let a pack of children near my youngsters. No, Admiral Sir,’ said Nat while Kizzy, when the idea was broached, said, ‘I might ask the boys.’

  ‘But it’s not the boys, it’s the girls who need . . .’ began Miss Brooke.

  ‘I should have to ask Prue . . .’ Kizzy breathed through her nostrils – like a little war horse or dragon, thought Miss Brooke. ‘If Sir Admiral lets those girls come to the House,’ said Kizzy, ‘I’ll never go there again.’

  ‘Kizzy, don’t you see, you have to make the first move because you were the one who was hurt?’

  ‘I’ll stay hurt,’ said Kizzy.

  Miss Brooke gave up the idea and the loneliness went on; it was like a hard shell round Kizzy that nobody could break.

  The summer holidays came and, with them, brilliant weather. ‘What are you and Kizzy going to do?’ Mrs Cuthbert asked Miss Brooke.

  ‘Oh, picnic and garden.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Where else?’

  ‘You should get away.’

  ‘I don’t think Kizzy is quite ready for that.’ Miss Brooke did not explain that she had spent so much money buying extra things for Kizzy she could not afford to go away.

  ‘Look,’ said Mrs Cuthbert. ‘You go, Olivia, and we’ll take Kizzy to the seaside with us.’

  ‘It’s very good of you, Edna . . .’

  ‘She can sleep with Prue . . .’

  Miss Brooke could almost hear Kizzy saying, ‘I’ll climb out of the window first.’

  ‘It’s good of you, Edna,’ Miss Brooke repeated, ‘but it might spoil your holiday. Besides, I don’t think Kizzy would go.’

  ‘Heavens, you don’t have to ask her.’

  ‘I think I do. People should always be asked before being disposed of.’

  ‘A child.’

  ‘Children are people, Edna,’ said Miss Brooke as she had said it to Mrs Blount.

  ‘Well, please yourself,’ said Mrs Cuthbert. ‘But I tell you, Olivia, that child’s too much on your mind.’

  ‘Isn’t that what she came for?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To be on my mind.’

  ‘Peters,’ said Admiral Twiss on a close hot morning in August. ‘I was thinking. It must be stifling in that little thatched cottage of Miss Brooke’s.’

  ‘It must, sir.’

  The spacious rooms of the House were cool; the lawns stretched invitingly to the park where the trees gave a deep shade. ‘I was thinking if I asked Kizzy – and Miss Brooke to stay,’ he said it with a rush – ‘until this hot spell was over, what would you say?’

  Peters said nothing but began to clear away.

  ‘Would you . . . object?’

  ‘It’s not for me to object, sir,’ said Peters, who had objected so often before.

  ‘She could have the blue room.’ The blue room had been the Admiral’s mother’s and Kezia, his grandmother’s.

  ‘So she could, sir.’

  ‘Tell Nat,’ said the Admiral and, putting on his panama, in his thin alpaca jacket and light trousers, he walked down the village to the cottage and, for the first time, saw Miss Brooke troubled.

  ‘It would be lovely,’ she had said when he asked her, ‘but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘True, it is very hot here,’ said Miss Brooke. ‘I should be grateful if you would have Kizzy She would love it but . . . I had better not.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Admiral slowly. ‘It’s Mrs Cuthbert.’

  ‘All the Mrs Cuthberts,’ said Miss Brooke.

  ‘Tittle-tattle,’ said Admira
l Twiss crossly.

  ‘You can’t blame them,’ said Miss Brooke.

  ‘Kizzy can’t come to tea with us,’ Mrs Cuthbert had said – and Mary Jo’s mother and Sally’s and Elizabeth’s. ‘But I notice she can always go to the House.’ ‘It’s the House, the House, the House,’ they said.

  Once Mrs Cuthbert had lost her temper. ‘Olivia, I never knew you were a snob. Yes, it makes my blood boil,’ said Mrs Cuthbert. ‘My Prudence not good enough for a gypsy brat.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Edna.’ Miss Brooke was still calm. You know it isn’t that and Kizzy’s not a brat. She’s shy of other children, that’s all, and think, Edna – she came to me from the House, where they were more than good to her. Naturally she loves them, especially Admiral Twiss.’

  ‘Which is why he comes to visit her so often – at your cottage.’

  ‘Gossiping about us, eh?’ asked the Admiral now.

  ‘Indeed yes.’ Miss Brooke raised her candid hazel eyes. ‘They think I’m in love with you – and you wouldn’t like to encourage that, would you?’ asked Miss Brooke.

  School began again in September and again, every day, Kizzy stayed in her circle or private shell and no one broke in. Then one afternoon she came back to find Miss Brooke sweeping up leaves, fallen twigs and garden rubbish into a bonfire and, ‘Couldn’t we have tea out here, Olivia?’ begged Kizzy.

  ‘You let her call you Olivia,’ Mrs Cuthbert had said.

  ‘What else is she to call me? “Miss Brooke” seems so stiff.’

  ‘Auntie Olivia.’

  ‘I am not her aunt.’

  ‘Couldn’t we, Olivia? Have tea here?’

  ‘In the vegetable patch?’

  ‘The vegetables don’t matter. It’s the fire.’

  The wind was chilly, the days were closing in and Miss Brooke hesitated. ‘I’ll show you how to keep warm.’ Kizzy was excited. She brought a piece of corrugated iron left over from the chicken house. ‘We’ll put it up here with some bricks to hold it.’ More bricks, with the ironing board across them, made a bench. ‘I used to have a box to sit on,’ said Kizzy. ‘If only we had Gran’s kittle iron.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You dig it into the ground to make it stand over the fire and hang the kettle on it. Prob’ly it’s still in the orchard. Tomorrow I’ll go and look.’ For the moment they used Miss Brooke’s picnic methylated stove for the kettle and fried bacon and sausages – rather burned bacon and sausages – over the fire in an old frying pan. Kizzy put apples on a stone and roasted them. ‘Tastes good out of doors,’ said Kizzy and Miss Brooke had to admit it. Chuff came out to bear them company and had his saucer of milk there. When it grew dark, Kizzy fetched two sacks, one for Miss Brooke, one for herself. ‘We put ’em over our shoulders,’ and they sat there in the garden, with the fire on their faces, the stars overhead.

  Kizzy sang for Miss Brooke in a low crooning voice, unexpectedly sweet. Miss Brooke had never heard her sing, nor did she know the songs.

  ‘Come along, my little gypsy girl,

  Come along with me, I pray.

  A-stealing horses we shall go

  Over the hill and far away.

  Before your mother and your aunt

  I’ll down upon my knee,

  And beg they’ll give me their little girl

  To be my Romady.’

  ‘Better you should a-tinkering go

  And I should fortunes tell.

  For then safe in our little tent

  Contented we might dwell.’

  ‘Well said, my little gypsy girl,

  I like well what you say.

  We’ll tinker and we’ll fortune tell

  Over the hills and far away.’

  ‘Who taught you that?’

  ‘My Gran,’ and Kizzy sang again.

  Oh! the eggs and bacon;

  And oh! the eggs and bacon;

  And the gentleman and lady

  A walking up the way!

  And if you will be my sweetheart,

  And if you will be my sweetheart,

  And if you will be my darling,

  I will be your own, today.

  Oh! I found a jolly hedgehog;

  Oh! I found a good fat hedgehog;

  Oh! I found a good big hedgehog,

  In the wood beyond the town:

  And there came the lord and lady,

  The handsome lord and lady,

  And underneath the branches

  I saw the two sit down.

  They didn’t know the Gypsy,

  They didn’t think the Gypsy,

  They didn’t hear the Gypsy

  Was looking – or could hide.

  If they knew I saw the kisses,

  The pretty little kisses,

  If they knew I heard the kisses,

  Oh, the lady would ha’ died! . . .

  ‘Can I have my tea here every day?’ asked Kizzy.

  ‘And she was happy,’ Miss Brooke told Admiral Twiss.

  ‘Ah!’ said the Admiral.

  ‘But you said . . .’ Kizzy stopped in the cottage doorway flushed with running and disappointment. ‘You said we should have tea by the bonfire,’ yet there was Miss Brooke with the tea table drawn up to the sitting-room fire.

  It was a month later. Through the end of September, and first weeks of October, they had had tea in the garden, ‘when it wasn’t absolutely deluging,’ said Miss Brooke. Kizzy had found the kittle iron, though it was heavy to lug from the orchard, and Miss Brooke set it up; the Does had taken the kettle but Miss Brooke found an old one. The sheltering sheet of iron had been made steady and a plank found for a bench instead of the ironing board; Miss Brooke had found a wooden box and it, too, had lettering on it: McGregor Dundee. Kizzy came home every day to see smoke going up, the kettle on the boil. ‘I think tea does taste better in the open air,’ said Miss Brooke.

  ‘Olivia,’ said Kizzy solemnly. ‘I think I love you.’

  Once Mrs Cuthbert almost caught them. They heard her knock, but Miss Brooke had locked the front door so that Mrs Cuthbert could not come in with her usual bounce; the only way into the garden was through the house or the garage – that was locked too – ‘and the hedges pen us in,’ Miss Brooke said. She went to open the door for Mrs Cuthbert. ‘Why Olivia, your hair’s all ends. You look thoroughly windblown. What have you been doing?’

  ‘Having tea in the garden.’

  ‘Tea in the garden! In this gale and cold!’

  ‘We were not cold.’

  ‘I do love you,’ Kizzy had said when Miss Brooke came back, but now . . . ‘You said I should have tea in the garden,’ she accused.

  ‘You are having tea in the garden.’

  ‘But you . . .’

  ‘You won’t need me,’ said Miss Brooke. ‘Go out and look.’

  Kizzy went into the garden – but it was not the garden she had left that morning with its narrow flagged terrace edged with lavender, its square of grass – ‘my pocket handkerchief lawn,’ Miss Brooke called it – that sloped down to the vegetable patch which was bounded by a high hedge overgrown with honeysuckle; the chicken house was in the corner opposite the built-out L of Miss Brooke’s bedroom where the thatch came past her dormer window low to the ground. The terrace, the lavender and the hedge were still there, but the chicken house and vegetables were gone, ‘spirited away’ Kizzy could have said had she known those words. Indeed, it seemed as if elf hands had been at work. ‘Funny sort of elves,’ Nat would have chuckled. ‘Me and old Peters and the Admiral – worked like slaves we did. Everything brought at dead of night in the horsebox lorry and hidden in the garage so the Paul Prys wouldn’t see. Anyway, those who were awake were glued to the telly,’ but it was magic to Kizzy.

  Below the small lawn, what had been the vegetable patch was turfed now, and planted with trees that made a screen from the house, little bush apple trees, not much higher than Kizzy’s head, but there were apples on them, rosy ones; she put out a finger and touched one. It was real, wi
th a real smell. Apple trees cannot be planted when they are in fruit, but Miss Brooke had skilfully threaded small red apples with fine string and tied them to the trees, so that they looked as if they were growing on them. Through the trees Kizzy could see firelight – ‘and somethin’ else,’ whispered Kizzy. On tiptoe with wonder she stepped between the apple trees that, she saw now, made a little orchard round a clearing where a fire had been built, not a heaped bonfire like Miss Brooke’s, but a proper cooking fire built in a hollow. Over the fire was a kittle iron, not big and heavy like Gran’s, but ‘small enough for me,’ and from it hung a stout doll-size kettle from which a plume of steam was coming out; when she saw the steam Kizzy’s knees went weak with wonder. The shelter had become half-size, with a half-size bench, a smaller box, and, drawn up to the fire, was a wagon, a true real wagon, exactly like Gran’s, ‘only hers was so shabby.’ This was new and painted blue and green with a carved and gilded front, its wheels hooped with iron; its bottom half-door was shut, the top half open, a flight of steps led up to it, all the right size for Kizzy, a child’s wagon; no grown-up could come into it. Even Miss Brooke, small as she was, could only have put her head in or else bent double.

  There were crisp muslin curtains at the windows and window boxes with earth in them. ‘They are planted with bulbs – miniature bulbs,’ said Miss Brooke, who had followed Kizzy out. ‘Tiny daffodils and tulips. In spring they will come out.’ A line of washing was stretched between two apple trees, ‘like ours used to do,’ hung with Kizzy’s jeans and socks and a small apron held by doll clothes pegs. The shafts were lowered into the grass; the only thing missing was the net of hay for Joe that Gran had kept slung under the wagon.

  Inside the wagon a light was burning and, going up the steps, Kizzy could see a lamp with a pink shade just like Gran’s, only the lamp was six inches high. There were two bunks – ‘as there were for Gran and me,’ – with pillows and blankets and patchwork quilts. ‘Can – can I sleep here?’ ‘When it’s warmer,’ said Miss Brooke. There was a child-size table and chair – Gran had had a chair – a strip of carpet, a postcard-size mirror and, on a shelf, a set of china, white with pink roses, doll-size. ‘They belonged to the Admiral’s grandmother,’ said Miss Brooke. ‘Kezia!’ whispered Kizzy.