Eva Ibbotson - Not Just a Witch

‘Can I watch you?’ begged Daniel when they had unpacked the animal and set it down on the kitchen floor. ‘Can I watch you make a dragon, please?’

‘No, dear boy, I’m afraid not. And you wouldn’t like it, you know. It’s not just my knuckle — a lot of power comes from my feet. Things happen down there that are not suitable for anybody young.’ She looked down at her toes and sighed. ‘If you come tomorrow after school, the dragon should be ready,’ said Heckie, and Daniel had to be content with that.

In the staffroom at Wellbridge Junior School, the deputy head was in a temper. ‘I’ve had another letter from those professors complaining about Daniel’s work. They say they’ll take him away and send him to a private school if he doesn’t do better.’

Miss Jones, who was Daniel’s class teacher, put down her cup with a clatter. ‘I wish they’d leave him alone. There’s nothing wrong with Daniel; he’s a thoroughly nice boy and his work’s perfectly all right. If they spent a bit more time at home with him instead of nagging about his marks, there’d be some point.’

The deputy head nodded. ‘I’ve gone past that house again and again and there’s no one in. He’s got a lost look in his eyes sometimes, that child. It’s a pretty turn of affairs when the most deprived child in the class is the son of two rich professors.’

But when Miss Jones went to take her class for English, she thought that Daniel looked more cheerful than he had done of late — and indeed Daniel wasn’t worrying about how he was going to do in the spelling test or whether he had passed his music exam. He was thinking that in a few hours he would see a dragon made out of an Aylesbury duck, and nobody who thinks that can look unhappy.

Of course, it would happen that on the one day on which Daniel was longing to get away, his parents were both in for tea.

‘Well, how did you get on with your spelling test?’ asked the Professor Trent who was Daniel’s father. He was tall, with greying hair and a big nose.

‘I hope you got ten out of ten,’ said the Professor Trent who was Daniel’s mother. She too was tall, with thick spectacles and a strong chin. When they were both standing looking down at him, Daniel felt a bit like a puppy who has made a puddle on the carpet.

‘I got eight out of ten,’ said Daniel, hoping that this would be all right, but it wasn’t.

‘Really?’ said Daniel’s father. ‘And what words did you get wrong?’

Daniel sighed. ‘Separate,’ he said. ‘And mystify.’

Daniel’s parents thought this was odd. Daniel’s father had been able to spell mystify when he was four years old, and Daniel’s mother said that surely when one understood that separate came from the Latin word separare there could be no difficulty. ‘How many did Sumi get right?’ she wanted to know.

‘She got them all right. She always does.’

Both professors shook their heads. ‘It seems extraordinary, Daniel, that a girl who does not even speak English at home should do so much better than you.’

Daniel said nothing. One day he meant to do something that would surprise his parents and make them proud of him — only what? If the house burnt down he could drag them from the flames (though they were rather large) and if there was a flood he could commandeer a boat and row them to safety. But so far there had been no fire, nor had the streets of Wellbridge turned into rivers, and sometimes Daniel thought that he would never be the kind of boy they wanted.

But when tea was over at last and he slipped out of the house, his face soon lost its pinched, dejected look. He took a deep breath of air and then he began to run.

Heckie seemed pleased to see him, but there was something a little odd in her manner.

‘Is he finished? Have you done it?’ asked Daniel eagerly.

‘Of course,’ said Heckie stiffly. ‘What I do, I do. It’s just…’

She led him upstairs and pointed to a dog basket she had brought up from the shop. The new familiar was sitting in it: a Chinese dragon about the size of a dachshund, with a black topknot of hair, big red eyes, fiery-looking nostrils and a pair of wings set close behind his ears.

‘Oh!’ said Daniel. ‘He’s beautiful! He’s the most beautiful dragon in the world!’

‘Yes, he is, isn’t he,’ said Heckie. ‘Most of him, anyway…’

Daniel moved closer. The dragon’s neck and shoulders were covered in green and golden scales, his pearl-tipped talons gripped the rim of the basket and his teeth were pointed and razor-sharp.

So far so good. It was the back of the dragon that was… unexpected.

Heckie cleared her throat. ‘You see, I was just in the middle of changing him when the bell rang and it was the postman. You know how exciting it is when the postman rings. It might mean anything.’ And Heckie blushed, for she had thought it might mean a letter from her friend Dora to say that she was sorry. ‘I left the window open and the pages blew over in the book and… well, you see.’

‘Yes,’ said Daniel.

The front end of Heckie’s new familiar was a dragon, but the back end was a worm. It was not an earthworm, it was a Loathly Worm like in the book — but it was a worm. There were twelve segments, each bulgy and carrying a pair of blobby legs, and though the dragon part was green and gold and scaly, the worm part was smooth and pale with faint pink spots.

‘What shall I do?’ asked Heckie, and Daniel was very touched that she, a witch of such power, should turn to him.

Daniel was usually a shy, uncertain boy, but he knew exactly what she should do. ‘Nothing! Please don’t do anything. He’s absolutely splendid as he is. I mean, any old witch could have a dragon for a familiar, but there can’t be a single witch in the whole wide world who has a dragworm !’

Heckie smiled. ‘I’m glad you feel like that, dear boy. Because, to tell the truth, it would hurt me now to change him. We’ll soon get him trained up. He doesn’t talk yet, but he understands quite a lot already.’ She patted the dragworm’s head and he shot out his forked tongue and licked her hand. ‘We’re in business, Daniel. You’ll see. This time next year there won’t be a single wicked person left in the length and breadth of Wellbridge!’

The Wellbridge Wickedness Hunters met in Heckie’s sitting-room the following week.

Heckie had asked all the wizards and witches in the town to join and she had hoped that they might turn out to be a bit like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, but they had not. Mr Gurgle, a wizard who kept a grocer’s shop in Market Square, was not at all like Robin Hood. He was a small, bald man who spent his time trying to make a cheese that could walk by itself. Not a cheese that could crawl — quite a lot of cheeses can do that — but a cheese that could walk right across a room without help. And Boris Chomsky, the mechanical wizard who serviced the hot air balloons the witches used, wasn’t like Robin Hood either. He was a Russian with a long, sad face and wore a woollen muffler which was stained with oil because he worked in a garage.

Next to Boris sat Frieda Fennel, the garden witch who had grown Heckie’s carrot. Frieda had green fingers which meant that anything would grow for her, but it was difficult to stop it growing. When Frieda scratched her ear or rubbed her neck, little buds or leafy shoots burst out where she had touched herself, so anyone sitting near her had to keep her tidy with garden shears.

And there was Madame Rosalia, who had been Miss Witch 1965 and didn’t let anyone forget it. Like most beauty queens, she was a show-off and was sitting with her chair floating halfway to the ceiling, just to be different. She kept a beauty parlour and always knew exactly what every witch should wear.