Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

New gas masks were issued, but Mrs. Dawson, whose dachshund Tally took for walks, refused to be fitted for hers unless there was a gas mask also for the dog. The blackout began and Dr. Hamilton’s surgery was filled with patients who had fallen downstairs in the dark or walked into lampposts. No one knew whether laying in stocks of food was sensible or unpatriotic. Aunt Hester thought it would be hoarding and therefore bad, but Aunt May thought it must be good to save space on ships which had to bring food from overseas, and bought a large sack of pepper which she put under her bed.

“They say pepper is going to be very hard to get,” she said.

Statues were boarded up and the aunts found a paragraph in the newspaper that excited them very much. Among the paintings which were being crated up and sent for safety into a disused mine in Wales were the pictures in the Battersea Arts Museum, which included The Angel of Mercy for which Clemency had posed.

“So she’ll spend the war underground,” they told Tally. “She’ll be as safe as can be.”

Evacuation of schoolchildren to the country began, but without Maybelle and Kenny.

“They didn’t even try to make me go,” said Maybelle. “I drew blood last time.”

Two days after the outbreak of war, Tally’s aunt Virginia telephoned to say that she was taking Roderick and Margaret down to safety in the West Country till it was time for term to begin. Fortunately she had been able to buy their new uniforms before there was talk of shortages or even rationing.

“Roderick has had such a good term,” she told them. “He has made friends with the Prince of Transjordania — such a nice boy — and Foxingham has won their cricket match against Eton. It really is a splendid school.”

She kindly offered to take Tally away with them, but Tally told her father she would rather be hung, drawn, and quartered than go with her cousins to Torquay — and Dr. Hamilton, endlessly busy at the hospital with the evacuation of patients, did not argue.

On the last night before she was due to go back to Delderton, Tally and her father climbed up the hill past the convent and looked out over London. Their own barrage balloon had been joined by dozens of others, silvered in the moonlight. They did not look like kindly uncles now, nor like benevolent sausages — but like serious sentinels protecting the much-loved city.

“We shall come through,” said Dr. Hamilton, and took his daughter’s hand. “You’ll see, in the end we shall come through.”

The next morning, just as the taxi arrived to take them to Paddington Station, the postman came — and there was a letter for Tally in an unfamiliar hand. In an instant she was filled with certainty and happiness. Karil had written at last — he must have been ill; she had been completely wrong to doubt him. She tore the letter open.

It was not from Karil. It was from Anneliese, the German girl who had befriended them in Bergania and who had said she did not want to die young like St. Aurelia. She had managed to write before mail between her country and Great Britain ceased; she hoped that when the war was over they would still be friends and she sent “so much, much love indeed” to Tally and her friends.

She could write from an alien country declaring her friendship, but not Karil.

At Paddington there were throngs of men in uniform and evacuees with labels around their necks saying good-bye to their tearful mothers. Among the bustle and confusion the boys of Foxingham marched, as they had done before, toward their platform, their brand-new striped red-and-yellow uniforms standing out in the gloom of the station, but Roderick was not among them. He was going straight to Foxingham from Torquay. Tally thought she could make out the serious dark-haired boy who might or might not be the Prince of Transjordania — but she turned away. She had had her fill of princes.

Then she saw David Prosser, peering at a clipboard. Even he, efficient though he was, looked as though he had mislaid a child. Not Augusta Carrington — Tally could make her out at the end of the platform. And then she saw her other friends — Julia and Barney and Borro — and ran eagerly toward them.

It was time to forget Karil and move on.

Karil stood looking out of his bedroom window at the gray London street. He had pushed aside the heavy damask curtains, and the dusty net curtains, and the blackout curtains which had just been put up, but the view of tired-looking people going about their business did little to lift his spirits.

Rottingdene House was packed from the roof to the basement with his relations, yet he had never felt so alone.

His grandfather’s home was not far from Buckingham Palace where the king lived with his two small daughters, and in many ways it resembled it. Rottingdene, too, was surrounded by spiky railings and boasted a sentry box in the courtyard and a flagpole on the roof with a flag to raise and lower to show whether the owners were at home.

It was not till one got up close to the building that one noticed that though the house was so imposing, it was actually somewhat shabby; that the woodwork needed painting and the stonework was crumbling and that altogether Rottingdene was rather a rundown place. But if the building was run down, the people who lived in it were very grand indeed.

They never went out of doors without a footman or a maid; the carriage or motor that took them through the streets of London had the Rottingdene arms emblazoned on the side, and the soldier who guarded the door had to present arms whenever anybody entered or left.

Which was only right and proper, because the house had as many blue-blooded and royal personages living in it as there are woodlice under a stone.

The Duke and Duchess of Rottingdene had had four daughters and all of them had made brilliant marriages.

The eldest daughter, Diana, had married a Russian prince; the second one, Phyllis, had married a European archduke; the third daughter, Millicent, had captured the heart of a South American ruler who governed a country the size of France.

And the youngest daughter, Alice, had married a proper king — Johannes of Bergania.

But the map of the world had changed cruelly, and one by one the proud Rottingdene daughters came home as their husbands were deposed or hounded out of their country or fell victim to sinister plots.

In Russia, Prince Dmitri, who had married Diana, had to flee his country after being attacked by peasants with pitchforks when the tsar was overthrown.

In central Europe, Archduke Franz Heinrich, who had married Phyllis, had to leave his land and his castles when his country became a republic. And in South America, Millicent and her husband only just escaped being slaughtered in one of the bloodiest uprisings the country had known.

Only Alice did not return home but lay in the soil of Bergania beside her husband.

The daughters who came home did not come alone. They brought their husbands — proud men with mustaches or monocles, who were used to drinking the best champagne and smoking the rarest cigars and clicking their fingers at their valets when they wanted anything. Some came with ancient relatives, who had never in their lives put on their own stockings and would have starved to death if they had had to boil an egg. Some brought nurses or governesses, who had to be crammed into distant attics and boot cupboards where they coughed and quarreled and cried.