Familiar and Haunting Read online

  At the end of the school day, William took the headmaster’s note with him back to Aunt Rosa’s house, but Aunt Rosa was out. There was a message for him on the kitchen table saying that there was no tea for him today and that she would be back during the evening.

  He did not mind about the food, but—later—he did mind about not being able to get into his bedroom. Bessy lay along the threshold, watching him and growling. She would not let him pass. He said aloud, “You don’t want me here, but I don’t want to be here. So we’re quits.” That made him feel better about Bessy.

  He took the headmaster’s note from his pocket, put it on the floor, and pushed it with his foot toward Bessy. She seized it angrily in her teeth and tore it into shreds.

  He went downstairs and into the garden, to the bottom of it. All the hens were out in the orchard, and he could see the cockerel among them. He went to the henhouse, opened the door, and looked in. The fresh straw smelled pleasantly, and there was his dear nest egg. …

  He stooped and crept inside the henhouse and pulled the door after him as closely shut as possible. He fumbled in the straw for the nest egg and found it and shook it gently, to hear the comforting sound of the chain moving inside.

  He settled in the fresh straw on the far side of the henhouse from the roosting perch. At first he sat there; then, beginning to feel drowsy, he lay down in the straw. He fell asleep with the nest egg up to his cheek.

  He slept deeply, dreamlessly, and better than he had ever slept in Aunt Rosa’s house.

  So he never noticed the fading of daylight and the hens and cockerel that came stooping in through their pophole, into the henhouse for the night. They saw William there and were disturbed at the sight, but he made no movement or sound, and they reassured themselves. One by one they flew up on the perch, and roosted there, and slept.

  He never heard later the voice of his aunt Rosa calling distractedly up and down the garden and in the orchard, as she had already done inside the house. Neighbors were consulted and gave advice; at last the police were summoned; there was a great deal of telephoning. William slept through it all, his nest egg to his face.

  With the first of daylight the hens and cockerel left the henhouse for the run and then—since no one had thought of shutting them up last night—for the orchard. The cockerel often stopped to crow, but William did not hear him. He slept on.

  The sun was high in the sky before William woke. At first he did not remember where he was. In his own old room at home? In Aunt Rosa’s cold house? Neither. He was in a henhouse; he had slept there, the whole night through, with the hens and with his old enemy, the cockerel. He laughed aloud. He felt lighthearted, as he had not done for many weeks. He also felt very hungry.

  The hens and cockerel had gone; it was time for him to go, too. He did not know what was going to happen next, but at least he had had a long night’s sleep in freedom, and he had his precious nest egg safe in his pocket.

  He let himself out of the henhouse. He began walking up the garden path toward the house—toward Aunt Rosa’s house. As he came nearer, his spirits sank lower; he was walking toward a prison.

  Aunt Rosa would be waiting for him. And there she was, a figure standing on the garden doorstep, and—but no! It was not his aunt Rosa. It was his father.

  With a wild cry William ran into his father’s arms, and his father picked him up and hugged him safe. “William! William!” he repeated, over and over again.

  It was some time before any scolding began: “Why on earth did you run away? You bad boy, you silly boy! Where did you go? Your aunt was out of her mind with worry, so she telephoned me, and I drove all through the night to come. William, you should never, never have run away like that!”

  “But I didn’t run away,” said William. “I was here all the time.”

  “Where?”

  “Just in the henhouse at the bottom of the garden.”

  William’s father began to laugh. “And you’ve straw all over your clothes!”

  He took his son indoors to Aunt Rosa—Aunt Rosa, sleep-starved, haggard with many fears, and by now, fortunately, speechless with fatigue. He explained that William was back. (“But I’ve never been away,” protested William. “The henhouse isn’t away.”)

  William’s father said that now he was here, he might as well take William off Aunt Rosa’s hands. She nodded. It wasn’t that he wasn’t grateful to her—Aunt Rosa nodded again—but he needed his son to be with him, after all. William was all he had now. “And somehow we’ll manage,” said William’s father. “I’m not sure how, but we shall manage.”

  Then Aunt Rosa said she was going to bed, and she went, with Bessy following her. Bessy had had an extraordinarily disagreeable night, with upsets and unwanted visitors.

  William’s father telephoned the police and told the neighbors about William’s return. Then he took over Aunt Rosa’s kitchen and made an enormous breakfast for himself and William. After that, they packed everything into William’s suitcase, got into the car, and drove off. They did not wake Aunt Rosa to say good-bye, but William’s father left a note on the kitchen table.

  When the car had taken them well away from Aunt Rosa’s house, William said, “I liked her henhouse and her hens.”

  His father said, “But Rosa said you were frightened of the cockerel.”

  “I was afraid of him,” said William, “but I liked him, too. He was only fierce when he was defending his hens, his family.”

  His father glanced down at something William had just taken out of his pocket. “Did Rosa give you that dummy egg?”

  “No,” said William. “I took it.”

  His father frowned. “That’s stealing.”

  “I just needed it.”

  “It’s still stealing. You’ll have to send it back.”

  “It might break in the post. Couldn’t we send the money instead?” William had a brilliant idea. “You could stop it out of my pocket money, and you could tell Aunt Rosa that. That would really please her.”

  So it was settled. But after a while, hesitantly, William asked, “Did Aunt Rosa ever say I’d stolen anything?”

  “No,” his father said, quite positively. “But then, she didn’t know about this egg, did she?”

  William thought: She’d tell the headmaster, but she wouldn’t dare tell my dad about the chain. Because he knew it was my mum’s, and I’d given it to my mum. I wasn’t stealing. I just took back.

  He tilted the egg in his hands, to feel the movement inside it. He said, “I shall always keep this egg. On my mantelpiece.”

  “You do that,” said his father. “Only we shall have to find somewhere to live with a room with a mantelpiece in it.”

  “We’ll manage somehow,” William said comfortably. “You said so.”

  Inside Her Head

  It was a hot, hot afternoon, and for once Elm Street was empty of children. A good many of the Elm Street lot had gone away on summer holidays; the rest had gone round the corner to the Lido to splash and swim and eat ice cream with their toes in the water. Except for one.

  Except for Sim Tolland.

  Sim Tolland was at home having chicken pox. He lay in bed with the window down as far as possible: the heavy, still air lay—so he thought—like an enormous plank balanced across the top sash. Only a sheet covered his sweaty, spotty body. He felt awful. The chicken pox made him feel awful, and the heat of the bedroom—which was the heat of the bedroom plus the heat of the downstairs rooms which had risen to join it—also made him feel awful. And he felt particularly awful when he thought of the others at the Lido or by the sea or in a cool green countryside.

  His mother poked her head round the bedroom door, gave a quick glance to check that his lemonade jug was full, and said, “Mrs. Crackenthorpe to see you.” She went away again.

  Old Mrs. Crackenthorpe, from the other end of Elm Street, was known to have a soft spot for Sim Tolland. Sim groaned. This was even more awful than awful.

  He heard the slow, heavy tread
on the stairs, the little gasps of effort. Mrs. Crackenthorpe eased herself into the room and onto a chair. She perspired gently.

  “I’ve had chicken pox, dear,” she said. She took something from a brown paper bag. “Jelly babies to cheer you up. You need jelly babies.”

  “Thanks,” said Sim. “But just now I couldn’t…”

  “It’s the heat, dear.”

  “Yes,” said Sim.

  “And the chicken pox.”

  “Yes,” said Sim.

  They fell silent, while Mrs. Crackenthorpe tried carefully to think of some other way of cheering up Sim Tolland. At last she said, “I didn’t bring any comics or anything for you to look at. I thought you wouldn’t want to read.”

  “I don’t,” said Sim, and then added quickly, “And I don’t want to watch any more telly. Or listen to things.”

  Mrs. Crackenthorpe was still following her own train of thought. “I didn’t want to read, either. When I had chicken pox. And it was very hot weather, too, just like now. Here, in Elm Street.”

  It was, after all, unexpectedly soothing to listen to old Mrs. Crackenthorpe rabbiting on.

  “Nobody much ever came to see me,” Mrs. Crackenthorpe was saying sadly, “because of the chicken pox. It was dull. I was an only child—just about your age, or younger—and I’d never really had friends, anyway.” (Sim thought of his friends, all the Elm Street lot, coolly enjoying themselves elsewhere; he could have wept.) “I didn’t have friends because my mother liked to keep herself to herself. You know. She was very particular about me. So it was dull for me that summer.”

  In the silence that followed, Sim could see that Mrs. Crackenthorpe was pondering something difficult. She came to a decision. She began: “When you’re in bed, you think a lot.” She tapped the side of her head just above her ear. “Inside your head. I mean, right inside your head. Oh, you’d be surprised!”

  “Yes?” said Sim.

  “In the middle of the night, when you can’t sleep for the heat and the chicken pox, and it’s so dull…”

  “Go on,” said Sim.

  “Well, to begin with, there was the elm tree—”

  “The elm tree stump,” corrected Sim. It was well known in the Street as the meeting place for the Elm Street lot—always had been. It had always been there: a stump.

  But Mrs. Crackenthorpe was surprisingly firm. “A tree,” she said. “In those days, when I was a child in Elm Street, it was a tree—not a cut-down stump. A tree, taller than the houses, reaching from side to side of the street. Green leaves. When there wasn’t a breath of wind anywhere else, there was always a breath up among those leaves. The leaves—” She searched for a word. “The leaves rustled. It sounded cool up there, where the leaves rustled. So I thought.”

  Sim thought of green leaves and cool breezes. Greenness; coolness … “Yes…”

  “So one night I decided to go up there.”

  “You what?”

  “Decided to climb up there,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe. “And I did.”

  “Decided or climbed?”

  “Both.”

  There was a disbelieving silence from Sim’s bed.

  “I was a little girl then,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe. “Plump, of course, but light, small, neat. Do you know, I’d never even thought of climbing a tree before?”

  This was another extraordinary thing for Sim to have to believe.

  “My mother always liked me to keep my clothes clean, you see. She insisted. But that particular night they’d gone to bed, and I lay awake, too hot and chicken poxy to sleep. I could see the elm tree from my window. I could see the leaves at the top moving in the breeze that was always there. The moon shone through the leaves. Bright moonlight, or I don’t think I’d have dared. …”

  “Dared…” repeated Sim Tolland. He looked at Mrs. Crackenthorpe sitting there, overflowing the bedroom chair; then he closed his eyes for a moment to try to imagine her a plump, small, neat little girl, daring. …

  “Just in my nightie,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe. “Not even bedroom slippers. I went downstairs and into the street, all moonlit, and to the tree and up it—”

  “How ‘up it’?” interrupted Sim. “A tree like that doesn’t have branches near the ground. They start high up—too high for you to reach, if you were a little girl.”

  “Let me think, then,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe. “A ladder?”

  “No,” said Sim. “You couldn’t have lugged a ladder out. Not if you were just a little girl.”

  “You’re right, of course,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe, dashed. Then she brightened: “How about this, then? There happened to be one of those very tall vans with a sort of roof rack and sort of rungs up the side of the van to the roof rack—you know! And this van—well, it happened to be parked just under the elm tree.”

  “Well…” said Sim.

  “A real bit of luck for me, that van,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe, overriding any possible objection or doubt from Sim. “So I just climbed up the side of this van to its roof. From there I could easily reach the lowest branch of the tree and climb onto it. Then up and up, from branch to branch. I turned out to be a natural climber. From branch to branch,” Mrs. Crackenthorpe repeated dreamily, “up and up, breezier and breezier, cooler and cooler…” She was fanning herself deliciously with the brown paper bag from which she had taken the packet of jelly babies.

  She stopped suddenly, as a thought occurred to her. “Oh, dear! Do you think I ought to have taken a cushion with me?”

  “Whatever for?” said Sim.

  “To sit on, of course. The branches would have been uncomfortable without a cushion. So I did take a cushion. And do you know how high I climbed with that cushion?”

  “No. How high?”

  “To the top. To the very top. I wasn’t afraid—not one bit. I climbed to where the branches grew quite thin and whippy. I settled that cushion in the elbow of a branch, and I settled myself on it, and I was comfortable and cool—so cool. All night long I stayed there. Do you think I might even have dozed off up there? I wasn’t a bit afraid, you know.”

  “No,” said Sim. “Too risky. You might have fallen.”

  Mrs. Crackenthorpe was only a little disappointed. “Oh, well… So I stayed awake all night, but cool and comfortable. I suppose I saw the dawn from that treetop.” She sighed. “Oh, the dawn was so beautiful. …”

  “What happened when your mother …”

  “Let’s see. Yes, I think they all came rushing out of the house. They shouted and cried and tried to get me to come down. But I was like a cat caught up a tree; I’d gone too high. My dad came up the tree after me, but he was a big, heavy man—it runs in the family. He got scared when he got really high and the branches began to be thin and whippy, as I’ve said. So he climbed down again.”

  “And did no one else try?”

  “All the neighbors had come out by then and were calling up the tree to me. So—let’s see. … Yes, some young fellow thinner than my dad came climbing up the tree, but even he daren’t come right to the top, where I was. All he could do was reach up and tickle the sole of my foot. I shrieked, and everyone shouted to him to leave me alone and come down again. So he did.”

  “I like that bit,” said Sim.

  Mrs. Crackenthorpe smiled and bobbed her head in acknowledgment and went on. “Then my mother fetched all the blankets out of the house and made everybody hold the corners of them, drawn taut, all round the tree, close in. In case I fell. And they waited. …”

  “Did you fall?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then how on earth did you get down?”

  “There was a clanging and a rushing up,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe, “and they’d sent for the fire brigade.”

  Sim couldn’t help being impressed. “I say!”

  “The first I knew of it was one of those shiny brass helmets coming up through the leaves at the top of the tree.”

  “You hadn’t seen the firemen below, on the ground?”

/>   “No,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe. Then, anxiously: “Why?”

  “Well, how come you could see the people with the blankets, if you couldn’t see the firemen?”

  “Oh, dear!” said Mrs Crackenthorpe, taken aback. Then she pulled herself together. “I just couldn’t. The leaves must have shifted in the breeze, I suppose. Anyway, as I’ve told you, there was this fireman’s helmet coming through the leaves at me. The fireman was on one of those special ladders they have that go straight up into the air. You know.” Mrs. Crackenthorpe waved a hand vaguely.

  “Go on.”

  “He called to me, all jolly, as if I were a cat caught up there. ‘Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!’ he called. I let him help me off my branch, and he carried me down the ladder to the bottom.”

  “What about the cushion?”

  “That fell.”

  “You could have carried it down, if you carried it up.”

  “Have it your own way,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe. “I carried it down.”

  There was a long pause.

  “That’s the end of the story,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe.

  “Not a story,” said Sim. “It happened. You said.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  “It was true,” said Sim.

  “It happened,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe.

  “But there’s no proof,” said Sim, suddenly discontented.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Crackenthorpe slowly, “what about this? Ever after that, people have called me Kitty, as a joke. They still do. Kitty Crackenthorpe.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Crackenthorpe calls you Kitty, too?”

  Mrs. Crackenthorpe flinched, but, “Yes,” she said.

  Exactly at that moment Sim’s mother called from downstairs: “Mrs. Crackenthorpe, Mr. Crackenthorpe’s here asking if you’re coming home to tea.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes!” cried Mrs. Crackenthorpe, gathering her flesh together, flustered. All Elm Street knew that Mr. Crackenthorpe was not a good-tempered man.