Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

They stopped at a convent where two nuns came out with wheelbarrows to fetch their provisions, passed a small wooded island and stopped again by a group of holiday houses.

“That’s where Professor Steiner lives,” said an old peasant woman in a black kerchief, pointing to a small house with green shutters standing alone by the water’s edge. “He didn’t get on with the Nazis so he lives here now.” The boat drew away again and she moved closer to Ellen. “You’re bound for the school then?”’ she asked.

Ellen turned and smiled. “Yes.” “Visiting someone?”’

“No. I’m going to work there.”

A rustle of consternation spread from the old woman to her neighbours. They drew closer.

“You don’t want to go there. It’s a bad place. It’s evil. Godless.”

“Devilish,” agreed another crone. “It’s the devil that rules there.”

Ellen did not answer. They had rounded the point and suddenly Schloss Hallendorf lay before her, its windows bathed in afternoon light, and it seemed to her that she had never seen a place so beautiful. The sun caressed the rose walls, the faded shutters… greening willows trailed their tendrils at the water’s edge; a magnificent cypress sheltered the lower terrace.

But oh so neglected, so shabby! A tangle of creepers seemed to be all that held up the boathouse; a shutter flapped on its hinges on an upstairs window; the yew hedges were fuzzy and overgrown. And this of course only made it lovelier, for who could help thinking of the Sleeping Beauty and a castle in a fairy tale? Except that, as they came in to land, Ellen saw the words EURYTHMICS IS CRAP painted on the walls of a small Greek temple by the water’s edge.

“The children are wild,” hissed the old woman into her ear. “They’re like wild animals.”

The steamer gave an imperious hoot. A boy came forward with a rope.

“You can always come back,” called a youth in lederhosen. “They’ll find room for you at the inn.”

Ellen made her way down the gangway, left her suitcase and walked slowly along the wooden jetty. There was a scent of heliotrope. Two house martins darted in and out of the broken roof of the boathouse with its tangle of clematis and ivy-and in the water beside it she saw, among the bulrushes, a round black head.

An otter? An inland seal?

The head rose, emerged and turned out to be attached to the somewhat undernourished body of a small and naked man.

It was too late to look away. Ellen stared and found unexpected feelings rise in her breast. She could feed him up, whoever he was; help him, perhaps to cut his hair-but nothing now could be done about the manic zigzag which ran like disordered lightning across his lower abdomen.

“Chomsky,” said the dripping figure suddenly. “Laszlo Chomsky. Metalwork,” — and with extreme formality, he clicked his heels together and bowed.

Which at least explained what had happened. A Hungarian, born perhaps in the wildness of the puszta; a place abundantly supplied with horses, geese and windmills, but lacking entirely the skilled doctors who could deal competently with an inflamed appendix.

Moving up the shallow stone steps which lifted themselves in tiers between the terraces towards the house, she saw a girl of about twelve come running down towards her.

“I’m late,” said the child anxiously. “We forgot the steamer’s on the summer schedule now. I’m supposed to be meeting the new matron but she hasn’t come.”

Ellen smiled at the first of the “wild” children to come her way. She had long dark hair worn in pigtails which were coming unfurled, and a sensitive, narrow face with big grey eyes. Her white ankle socks were not a pair and she looked tired.

Ellen put out her hand. “Yes she has; I’m her,” she said. “I’m Ellen Carr.”

The wild child shook it. “I’m Sophie,” she said, and put one foot behind the other and bobbed a curtsy. The next minute she blushed a fiery red. “Oh I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Done what?”’

“Curtsied. No one does it here like they don’t go to bed much and they don’t wear white socks, but I haven’t been here very long and in Vienna in my convent it was all different.”

“I liked it,” said Ellen, “but I won’t give you away. However I have to tell you that now I’m here people will go to bed and if they want to wear white socks they will wear them and they’ll match and be clean.”

The child turned to her, transfigured. “Will you do that? Can you really?”’ Then her face fell; the look of anxiety returned. For Ellen Carr had shoulder-length tumbled hair and gentle eyes; she wore a green jacket the colour of moss and a skirt that made you want to touch it, it looked so soft. And that meant lovers-lots of lovers- as it had meant with Sophie’s mother, who was beautiful too and had left Vienna for Paris and Paris for London because of lovers and was now in Ireland making a film and did not write. “No,” she said. “You’ll fall in love and go away.”

“No I won’t,” said Ellen.

She put her arm round Sophie’s shoulders but their progress towards the house was slow. A pink camellia detained Ellen and a white snail, fragile as a snowflake, swaying on a blade of grass.

Then suddenly she stopped. “Sophie, what on earth is that?”’

They had reached the first of the level terraces. Coming across a patch of grass towards them at an amazing speed was a tortoise. It looked much as tortoises do, its neck extended, its demeanour purposeful-but fastened to its back end was a small platform with two wheels on which it scooted as if on roller skates.

“It’s Achilles,” said Sophie.

“His back legs were paralysed and he was dragging himself along. We thought we’d have to have him destroyed and then Marek came and made him those wheels.”

Ellen bent down to the tortoise and picked him up. Retreating only briefly into his shell, Achilles submitted to being turned upside down. The contraption supporting his withered legs was unbelievably ingenious: a little trolley screwed to his shell and supporting two highly oiled metal wheels.

She put him down again and the tortoise scooted away over the grass like greased lightning.

“It took Marek hours to do. He shut himself up in the workshop and wouldn’t let anyone come near.”

“Who’s Marek?”’ Ellen asked-but before Sophie could answer, a stentorian and guttural voice somewhere to their right cried: “No, no, no! You are not being rigid, you are not being steel. You are not being pronged. You must feel it in your spine, the metal, or you cannot become a fork!”

Deeply curious, Ellen crossed the terrace. A second, smaller set of steps led down on to an old bowling green surrounded by a yew hedge. On it stood a large woman with cropped hair wearing a hessian tabard and a pair of men’s flannel trousers, shouting instructions to a dozen or so children lying on their backs on the lawn.

“Now open the fingers… open them but not with softness. With these fingers you will spear… you will jab… you will pierce into the meat.”

“That’s Hermine. Dr Ritter,” whispered Sophie. “She’s terribly clever-she’s got a PhDo in Dramatic Movement from Berlin University. She makes us be bunches of keys and forks and sometimes we have to give birth to ourselves.”

But before the children could exhibit proper forkdom there was a fierce, mewing cry from what seemed to be a kind of herring box under the yew hedge and Dr Ritter strode over to it, extracted a small pink baby, and inserted it under her tabard.

“That’s her Natural Daughter. She’s called Andromeda. Hermine got her at a conference but no one knows who the father is.”

“Perhaps we should show her how to make an opening down the front of her smock,” said Ellen, for the baby had vanished without trace into the hessian folds. “And I didn’t see any nappies?”’