Eva Ibbotson - Not Just a Witch

‘I wonder if I should write to Heckie,’ said Dora to herself as she lowered a soya sausage into boiling water for her supper. ‘But why doesn’t she write to me?’

Then she went out to the shed to feed her hat. She too had gathered up the snakes that hissed and slithered on the lawn after the quarrel and brought them with her to her new home. But the hat was really the only pet that Dora had so she was feeding it too much and it was getting fat. The Black Mamba was like a barrel — soon it would be impossible to tie it into a bow.

Oh dear, thought Dora, nothing seems to be going right.

There was plenty to do in Kidchester. She had plans for Dr Franklin who kept twelve dogs in the basement of his laboratory and was doing the most horrible experiments with them. Not experiments to test new medicines, just experiments to test face creams for silly women who were afraid of getting old. Dr Franklin would look nice in granite and she knew exactly where she was going to put him: by the fountain in the shopping centre so that the children could climb on him and the pigeons would have somewhere to sit.

But nothing is much fun if you are lonely, not even Doing Good — and when poor Dora got back to the kitchen, the saucepan had boiled dry and the sausage had exploded in a most unpleasant way.

Should I move to Wellbridge in secret? thought Dora, scraping the sausage into the dustbin. Perhaps if we met by accident, Heckie and I would fall into each other’s arms? But if she cut me dead, I couldn’t bear it.

And poor Dora stood rubbing her nose, not knowing what to do.

Warthogs are not beautiful, with their hairy grey bodies and messy snouts, but the new warthog which had arrived in Wellbridge Zoo was very popular. Lots of people came and watched it snort and snuffle and wallow in its trough, and the way it ignored the other warthog in the cage, barging into him as though he wasn’t there, made everybody laugh. Perhaps it was the mysterious way the animal had arrived, sent by an unknown person as a gift to the zoo, that made people so interested. It had turned up in the middle of the night with a label round its neck which said MY NAME IS WINNIE. But whatever the reason, it certainly pulled in the crowds.

The dragworm, meanwhile, settled down happily in Heckie’s shop. Everyone made a fuss of him, even the wizards and witches who had sneered, but he was not at all conceited. What he liked best was a quiet life, sleeping in his basket, going for careful walks with enough time to think about which of his legs was which — and having baths. Because of having been a duck, the dragworm loved to be in the water, and he was never happier than when he was sitting in Heckie’s bathtub with Sumi washing his hair and Daniel scrubbing his back.

Heckie was still hoping that he would learn to talk. Familiars often do and it is a great comfort to witches having someone to speak to when they are alone. But though he understood so much of what was said to him, the dragworm didn’t open his mouth except to smile or yawn… or eat.

The dragworm was very fond of eating and what he ate (because he was, after all, a dragon) were princesses. Not real ones, of course; they would have been too big and anyway there weren’t any in Wellbridge, but princesses made out of gingerbread which the children baked for him in Heckie’s oven.

And it was a batch of these princesses which led Heckie to a man called Ralph Ticker who must have been about the nastiest person in the world.

Heckie wasn’t after Ralph Ticker, she didn’t even know he existed; she was after a mugger who had broken the skull of an old lady in a back lane and snatched her handbag. Heckie had decided to turn him into an okapi which is a beautiful animal halfway between a zebra and a giraffe. Wellbridge Zoo didn’t have one, and she thought it would be nice if they did, so she spent the evenings tottering through the back alleyways of Wellbridge with a handbag full of money, waiting for the mugger to come, but so far he hadn’t.

It was half-term. This was usually a bad time for Daniel. Sumi’s aunts and uncles came to visit and she went on outings with her cousins, and Joe spent his time with his father in the zoo. Up to now, Daniel had dreaded the holidays which meant being alone in the tall, gloomy house while his parents went on going to the university.

But now it was Daniel who was the lucky one because he could spend all his time in Heckie’s shop. And it was Daniel who went to the market to buy half a dozen eggs, and Daniel who baked the princesses for the dragworm’s supper.

He was whistling as he took the baking tray out of the oven and put in the currants for the princesses’s eyes and the slithers of glacé cherries for their mouths. They had come out beautifully, with their crowns scarcely wonky at all, and as soon as they were cool enough, he scooped one out and put it on the dragworm’s plate.

The dragworm bounded out of his basket; he put his snout down on the plate. Then he lifted his head and gave Daniel a look. And what the look said was: ‘What exactly is this rubbish?’

Daniel was annoyed. ‘They’re absolutely fresh. I baked them myself. Now please eat up and don’t make a fuss.’

He held the princess up to the dragworm’s nose. The dragworm closed his eyes and shuddered. Then he turned his back on Daniel and climbed back into his basket.

It was at this moment that Heckie came back. She was not in a good temper because as she had been hovering in a dark lane, hoping for the mugger, a kind policeman had come and insisted on seeing her home.

‘The dragworm’s off his food. He won’t eat his princess.’ Daniel was upset. When your parents have told you for years and years that you’re no good, you don’t have much confidence, and Daniel was beginning to wonder if he’d done something wrong.

Heckie frowned. ‘It doesn’t look to me as if he’s sickening for anything. I hope he’s not going to turn faddy.’

She broke off a leg and held it under the drag-worm’s nose. Once again, the dragworm turned away and if he’d been able to speak, there’s no doubt that what he would have said was: ‘Yuk!’

Daniel now took Heckie into the kitchen and showed her exactly what he had used to bake the gingerbread: the flour, the sugar, the spices, the honey…

‘And one of these,’ he said, holding up the carton which had the words FRESH FARM EGGS stamped on the box. ‘But it wasn’t rotten. I smelled it carefully.’

There were five eggs left in the carton. Heckie picked up one and carried it to the window. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, oh dear !’ And then: ‘No wonder the poor dear creature wouldn’t eat. For a wickedness detector an egg like this would be quite impossible to swallow.’

Daniel was puzzled. ‘But surely… an egg can’t be wicked, can it?’

Heckie was still holding the egg to the light and shaking her head to and fro. ‘Not wicked, perhaps. But unhappy… full of bad vibes.’

‘An egg !’

‘Why not? An egg is made up of the same things as a person. Everything in nature can suffer — plants… seaweed… Seaweed can be absolutely wretched , you must have seen that.’

So they gave the dragworm some dog biscuits, which he ate, and it was decided that Daniel would go to the market first thing in the morning and ask the stallholder where she got her eggs.

‘Because an unhappy egg means an unhappy chicken,’ said Heckie, ‘and an unhappy chicken we cannot and will not allow.’

The lady who had sold Daniel the fresh farm eggs was helpful. They came, she said, from the Tritlington Poultry Unit, about ten miles north of Wellbridge.

‘They weren’t bad, I hope?’ she said anxiously. ‘I’ve been promised they’re not more than two days old.’