Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

Other members of the sisterhood were called in, honorary aunts to the child, and consulted: Aunt Delia, an inky lady who ran the Left Book Club Shop in Gower Street, and the headmistress of Ellen’s school, a full-bosomed and confident person whose bottle-green girls were the most academically motivated in London.

“She is clever, isn’t she?”’ Dr Carr demanded. “You wouldn’t lie to me, Lydia, after all we’ve been through together.”

And Lydia, who had shared a cell with Charlotte after they threw a brick through the windows of No. 10 Downing Street, said:

“I tell you she is very bright indeed. Her last exam results were excellent.”

But at the end of the following term Ellen came to her and asked if she could take cookery lessons in the Sixth Form.

“Cookery! But my dear, that’s just for the girls who aren’t going to university.”

“I don’t want to go to university,” said Ellen. “I want to go to a Domestic Science College. A proper one where they teach you to sew and to cook and clean. I want,” she said, opening her soft brown eyes in a look of entreaty, “to use my hands.” And she spread them in the air, as pianists spread their fingers over an invisible keyboard, as if cooking was equivalent to the playing of a Chopin étude.

In facing this crisis, Ellen’s mother and her aunts knew whom to blame. A woman who was the embodiment of everything they disliked in their sex: an abject doormat, a domestic slave, a person without a mind or will of her own-an Austrian peasant who kept house for Ellen’s grandfather and whom Ellen, since the age of six, had inexplicably adored.

The grandfather in question did not come from the Norchester side of the family. He was Alan Carr’s father; a scholar engaged in a great work, the compilation of a glossary of Greek fishes, which seemed unlikely to be completed before he died. He had travelled to Vienna shortly after the end of the war to consult some manuscripts in the Hofburg library and had taken lodgings in an inn in Nussdorf where Henny, the landlady’s daughter, had looked after him. She was a quiet, fair girl, gentle and deft, who both admired and pitied the serious Professor, for he had lost a son in the war and a wife soon afterwards with cancer.

When he returned to Britain he asked her if she would come and keep house for him and she agreed.

No house was ever so “kept” as Walnut Tree Cottage in Wimbledon. Henny cooked the Professor’s meals and washed his clothes and polished his furniture but she did much, much more. She found the pieces of paper with their Greek hieroglyphics which he had dropped on to the floor; she warmed his slippers; she cultivated the little London garden in which, inexplicably, there was no sign of a walnut tree.

“Well, you see, he is a very clever man and I like to make him Comfortable,” was the only defence she could put up against the shocked comments of Ellen’s family.

After she had been with him for three years the Professor said he thought they should be married.

Henny refused. She was not of his world, she said; it would not be suitable. She had shared his bed from the start, understanding that this was as important to gentlemen as the proper preparation of their food and the certainty of hot water for their baths, but when visitors came she retreated to the kitchen which alone she had claimed for herself and turned into a replica of the country kitchen in the Austrian mountains where she had grown up.

Ellen was six years old when she was first taken to Wimbledon. Wandering away from the drawing room where literature was being discussed, she found Henny with a cullender in front of her, shelling peas.

Afterwards Henny always remembered the child’s first words. She did not say “I want to help,” or “Can I help?”’ She said: “I have to help.”

So it began. In Henny’s kitchen with its scrubbed table and red and white checked curtains, its potted geranium and cuckoo clock, she spent the hours of her greatest happiness. Together she and Henny tended the little garden with its rockery of alpine flowers; they baked Krapfen and Buchteln and embroidered cross-stitch borders on the towels. Ellen learnt to hang up muslin to make Topfen and that cucumber salad could have a smell-and she learnt that it was all right to be pretty. Being pretty had worried her because she had noticed that when visitors came and praised her silky curls or big brown eyes, her mother and her aunts had not been pleased. But Henny laughed and said being pretty came from God and gave people pleasure and it meant one had to brush one’s hair and buff one’s nails just as one had to scour out the saucepans to keep them shining.

Henny held coloured stuffs against her face and said, look how it brings out the gold of your eyes, and without her saying a word about love, Ellen knew that Henny loved her, and loved the selfish old professor with his Greek fishes, and learnt that this much discussed emotion could be about doing and serving and not about what one said.

One day they were making Apfel Strudel.

The white cloth was spread on the table and they were lifting the paper-thin dough from below… lifting it with spread fingers so slowly, so gently, making it thin and ever thinner without once letting it go into holes, and Henny stopped for a moment and said more seriously than she usually spoke: “You have a real talent, Hascherl. A proper one.”

Even so, when the time came to choose her career, Ellen didn’t have the heart to rebel; she took her Higher Certificate and went to Cambridge to read Modern Languages because she spoke German already and was extremely fond of chatting. As it happened, not much chatting went on during her tutorials and her supervisor found the Austrian dialect in which she recited Schiller’s poetry singular in the extreme. But she liked Cambridge well enough-the river and the Backs, and the friendly young men who paid her compliments and took her punting and asked her to dances. She learnt to deflect their proposals of marriage and made good friends among her fellow students, the shopkeepers, and the ducks.

With Kendrick Frobisher she was less adroit. He was a blond, serious, painfully thin young man of twenty-eight with pale blue eyes, and belonged to her life in London where he assiduously attended the meetings at Gowan Terrace, addressed envelopes, and showed a proper concern for the Higher Education of Women.

Kendrick was the youngest son of a domineering mother who lived in Cumberland and had, when she was a young woman, personally delivered a camel on the way to church. This had happened in India where she grew up, the daughter of an army colonel stationed in Poona. The camel was pregnant and in difficulties and though she was only nineteen years old, Kendrick’s mother had unhesitatingly plunged an arm into its interior and done what was necessary before passing on, indifferent to her blood-stained dress and ruined parasol, to worship God.

Returning to Britain to marry a landowner, this redoubtable woman had produced two sons, young men who hunted, shot, fished and would presently marry. Then came Kendrick who was a disappointment from the start-an unsporting, pale, nervous boy who was bullied at school and read books.

In the London Library, researching the minor metaphysical poets on whom he was planning a monograph, or at the many lectures, art exhibitions and concerts he attended, Kendrick was happy enough, but real people terrified him. It was causes that he espoused, and what more worthy cause than the education of women and the emancipation from slavery of the female sex?

So he started to attend the meetings in Gowan Terrace and there found Ellen handing round sandwiches.

“The egg and cress ones are nice,” she said-and that was that.

Because he was so obviously a person that one did not marry, Ellen was not careful as she was with the young men who kissed her in punts. It seemed to her sad to have a mother who had delivered a camel on the way to church, and Kendrick had other problems.