Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

He himself had written straightaway, long letters that he had been careful to seal tightly before he laid them in the brass bowl in the hall where all letters were put for the footman to stamp and carry to the letter box. It was a relief to know that Rottingdene House had a system for posting letters, because he had no money and even buying stamps would have been difficult. He had told Tally about Pom-Pom, who had to be accompanied by two footmen, one at each end, when he went out, in case he was kidnapped by anarchists and eaten. He had told her about the monkey, who looked sweet but bit as soon as one came too close, and about the duke’s hearing aid, which had fallen into the soup but not actually been swallowed. Gradually he found it harder to think of lighthearted things to write — he had begun to plead a little for an answer to his letters, and then to tear them up and try again because he did not want to seem to be making a fuss or admitting his unhappiness.

But as the weeks passed and there was only silence, Karil realized he had been wrong to trust his friends so utterly — and he remembered his father’s words when he asked if he could meet the children who had come to his country.

It never works trying to make friends with people outside our world, he had said. You’ll only get hurt.

The king had been right. Karil had got hurt, and it served him right for being such a fool. Yet tonight, because the outbreak of war was after all not an ordinary day, he got up and walked over as he had done at the beginning, to look at the envelopes laid out on the salver.

But there was nothing. Nothing from Tally — nothing from Barney or Julia or Tod. Nothing from Matteo, who had been his father’s friend.

It was a long time before he slept, that first night of the war, and when he did he found himself floating through a dark sky trying to chase a giant tray — a silver salver from which torn pieces of paper fell and whirled downward. When he managed to catch one it melted like a snowflake and he was left with nothing except a sense of misery and dread.

Daley sat in his big room overlooking the courtyard and watched the children arrive. The headache he always had at the beginning of term was magnified tenfold — he had already swallowed four aspirins, but the throbbing in his temples was no better and even looking at the cedar tree gave him no comfort.

On his desk were the Blackout Regulations for Schools and Institutions and the First Aid Instructions in the Event of Casualties.

There was also an urgent letter from the founders, once again urging Daley to evacuate the school to America. It was a generous offer, and the pictures of the bombing of Warsaw should have made the decision easy — but it was not easy. Outside, the peaceful Devon countryside slumbered in the sunshine; the idea that airplanes would come and drop bombs over Delderton was hard to believe — indeed Delderton village was full of evacuee children from London who had been sent here just because it was safe. But if Hitler invaded Britain, that might be a different matter.

Half an hour later, Tally knocked on the door of his room. Daley had sent for her because he had been worried about her at the end of the summer term. The adventure in Bergania and the rescue of the prince had been kept from the newspapers, and the children seemed to have settled down well — but he had an idea that Tally was still troubled about something.

“Well, how has it been? Is your father well?”

“Yes, he is. Terribly busy with evacuating the hospital and everything, but he is well.”

“And have you had any news from the prince? From Karil?”

“No, nothing. The others haven’t heard anything either. We’ve all written and written.”

“And you think he has forgotten you, and is ungrateful?”

“What else can we think?”

“There are other things that occur to one,” said the headmaster.

But he left it at that.

“I’m going to put him out of my mind,” said Tally — and while it was a lie, it was a brave one. She changed the subject. “Is Matteo still my tutor?”

“Yes, for now.” Everything was so unsettled and uncertain in this first fortnight of the war.

All the same, it was good not being new, thought Tally, knowing one’s way about. Magda was still Tally’s housemother and she was still worrying about Schopenhauer. She had got to the part in Schopenhauer’s life where he was supposed to have thrown a washerwoman down the stairs because she was talking on the landing and disturbing him, and she didn’t know whether to leave it in or not.

“It seems so unlike him to do that,” she told the children.

She also had a new anxiety — Heribert would almost certainly be called up to fight in the German army and she was very much afraid for him.

“I don’t think he will make a good soldier; he was very absent-minded,” she said.

In the village, groups of children evacuated from London wandered about looking for fish and chips and cinemas and crying for their mothers. A fire-watching roster was pinned up — members of staff would take it in turn to watch for incendiary bombs from the flat roof of the gym.

To everyone’s amazement, David Prosser volunteered for the army. No one especially liked him, but that didn’t mean they wanted him to be killed. Before he went he asked Clemmy to marry him and she refused him, but so nicely that he was hardly hurt at all. The man who replaced him was as old as the hills, but he knew his subject.

The children who had shared the Berganian adventure still met on the steps of the pet hut to talk about their lives. When they first came back, expecting Karil to join them, they had been full of plans. Barney had bought a tree frog in a pet shop in St. Agnes as a present for the prince; it was an attractive animal with its shining pop eyes and glossy skin, but they did not try to name it — Karil would want to do that himself, they thought, but as the weeks passed the frog remained nameless.

“Amphibians don’t really need to be called anything,” Borro had said. “They’re all right as they are, so there’s no hurry.”

But as they met for the new term they stopped trying to make plans for Karil.

The axolotl was in good health, and Tally now had charge of the white rabbit that had belonged to the little French girl who had not returned to school. Her parents didn’t want to risk sending her across the Channel and being attacked by the U-boats that now patrolled the waters. She had written to say that Tally could have her rabbit, but though Tally cleaned it out and fed it and took it on her knee, she found it difficult to love it.

“Rabbits are not really very interesting,” she complained — but Julia said that rabbits weren’t meant to be interesting; they were meant to be nice, and this one was.

Barney was very indignant about what had happened in the London Zoo. On the very day that war was declared all the black widow spiders and poisonous snakes had been killed in case their cages were bombed and they escaped and bit people.

“And the boa constrictors, too,” he said angrily. “Just killed outright, which is ridiculous — people would have seen them coming. Or they could have sent them to Whipsnade like the elephants. But cold-blooded murder like that!”

It was really strange, realizing the difference these last weeks had made to their friends overseas. Borro could write to the French girl whose mother bred Charolais cows, because France and Britain were allies, on the same side in the war, but the German and Italian children had become “the enemy” and were as unreachable as the moon.

“It seems so silly,” said Tally. “Only a month ago we were just people.”