Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

Perhaps I’m wrong, thought Steiner. Perhaps he is not what I think he is.

But he knew he was not wrong.

By the end of the first week, Ellen had settled into her work. She had begun with her own room, for she wanted the children to feel that they could come to her whenever they wanted, and this had involved her in some creative “borrowing”, for by the time she had disposed of the archaeological remains of previous housemothers she was left with bare boards and a bed.

In refurnishing the room, she called on the help of Margaret Sinclair, the school secretary, to whom she had taken an instant liking. Margaret trotted round the picturesque confusion of Hallendorf in a neat two-piece, lace-up shoes and a crisp white blouse. She had been perfectly happy as a secretary in Sunny Hill School, Brighton, where the girls wore plum-coloured gym slips, addressed the teachers as “Ma’am” and charged round frozen hockey fields shouting, “Well played, Daphne!” — and she was perfectly happy at Hallendorf. Chomsky’s sun-dappled appendix scar troubled her not at all, nor the oaths of the noisier children, and for Lucas Bennet, who had founded, and now carried selflessly the burden of running, this idealistic madhouse, she had a respect which bordered on veneration. That she would have carried the portly little headmaster between her teeth to safety if the school ever caught fire, was the opinion of most members of staff. Certainly Hallendorf would have run into the ground pretty soon without her.

“I should just take anything you find, dear,” she’d said to Ellen, in whom she recognised a kindred spirit. “If anyone comes looking for it, I’ll give you warning.”

So Ellen borrowed two beaten down mattresses from the gym and made them into floor cushions which she covered with an Indian cotton tablecloth she had found scrunched up in a dressing-up trunk. She took an armchair which had suffered enough from a common room, stripped the covers and polished the arms. She “borrowed” a kitchen trolley and painted it… and decided that a small lime tree in an earthenware pot would be in less danger with her than in the courtyard.

But what Sophie saw, after she knocked timidly on the door, was mostly light.

“Oh!” she said. “How did it get like that? What did you do?”’

“It was like that already. So is your room. Rooms tell you what they want, you just have to listen!”

Sophie’s life had so far been devoid of certainties. The marriage of her beautiful English mother to an austere scientist in the University of Vienna was a mistake both partners quickly put right. Carla wanted to be an actress, have parties, have fun; Professor Rakassy needed routine, silence and respect for his work. The only thing they had in common was an ego the size of a house and an apparent indifference to the happiness of their little daughter.

They separated and Sophie began her travels across the continent of Europe: on the Train Bleu to Paris, on the Nordwest Express to Berlin when Carla got a walk-on part at the UFA studios… on the Golden Arrow to London and back again… always trying to please, to change identities as she arrived… To be charming and prettily dressed and witty for her mother; to be serious and enquiring with securely plaited pigtails for her father…

Then suddenly the tug of war stopped. Both parents dropped the rope and she was packed off to a school that was unlike any she had known. That it was the beginning of a permanent abandonment, Sophie was sure.

But now there was Ellen. Ellen had kept her promise about ringing Czernowitz and she kept other promises. Sophie attended lessons assiduously; she endured eurythmics and did her stint being a bunch of keys or a fork, but when there was a spare moment in her day she came back to her base, trotting behind Ellen with laundry baskets or piles of blankets and curling up in the evening on the floor of Ellen’s room.

And with Sophie came Ursula, bringing the red exercise book in which she was chronicling the brutalities the American Army had inflicted on the Red Indians, still scowling, still committed to hatred-but sometimes turning over what Ellen had said that first night. She had said it was sensible to go to Wounded Knee, and the calm word dropped into Ursula’s turbulent soul like a benison.

Others came, of course: Janey, and Ellen’s bodyguard, Bruno and Frank, and a long-legged American girl called Flix who was said to be a brilliant actress but wanted only to be a vet and kept a plaster of Paris ant nest under her bed.

And a dark, irritating, handsome boy called Leon who used his origins to secure sympathy.

“You have to be nice to me because I’m Jewish,” he would say, which drove Ursula into one of her frequent rages.

“You’re only half Jewish,” she said.

“And I bet it’s the bottom half so I’ll be nice to that but not to your horrible top.”

Leon was a committed Marxist and filled his room with posters of Lenin rallying the proletariat, but the carefully unravelled jerseys he wore were made of purest cashmere and his underclothes were silk. Leon’s father (whom he referred to as a “fascist beast”) was a wealthy industrialist who had transferred his business interests from Berlin to London when Hitler came to power, and his devoted mother and sisters sent him innumerable parcels of chocolate and delicatessen from Harrods which he despised, but ate. But if it was difficult to like the boy, no one could dispute his gift; he was intensely and unmistakably musical.

Ellen had expected the children to come, but she hadn’t quite bargained for the staff, abandoning their cluttered bedsitting rooms to eat her Bath Oliver biscuits and drink her Lapsang Souchong tea. Hermine Ritter came with her love child in its herring box and sat with her grey-flannelled legs apart and spoke of the historic conference in Hinterbruhl where she had been overcome, virtually in her sleep, by a Professor of Vocal Rehabilitation who had drunk too much gentian brandy and left her with Andromeda, who was being brought up to be self-regulating but always seemed to be in a temper.

“I will be glad to mind her for you sometimes,” Ellen said. “But you must get her some proper nappies.”

“Oh surely not? In the book by Natalie Goldberger—”’

But Ellen, watching the puce, distempered baby flaying about inside Hermine’s tabard like Donald Duck in a tent, said she thought nappies would be nice for Andromeda.

Jean-Pierre came, with his boudoir eyes and practised cynicism; a brilliant mathematician who professed to loathe children and could send them out of his classes reeling with excitement about the calculus, and Freya, a sweet-natured Norwegian who taught history and PE and was in love with a hard-hearted Swede called Mats who lived in a hut in Lapland and did not write.

David Langley came, the bony-kneed biology teacher who was busy identifying the entire frit fly population of Carinthia, and Chomsky of course, fixing his congenitally despairing eyes on Ellen, and eating a quite remarkable number of biscuits.

There was one member of staff, however, who was conspicuous by her absence. The Little Cabbage did not come and when Ellen met her, two days after her return, the encounter was unfortunate.

Ellen during those first days worked as she had not worked before. She scrubbed, she sewed on name tapes, she set up her ironing board in the laundry room, she brought pots of flowers upstairs and emptied washing baskets and mended curtains.

Soon the words “Where’s Ellen?”’ could be heard with increasing frequency as children came in with grazed knees, bruised foreheads or more complex bruising of the soul. They learnt by the state of her hair how much time she could give them: when it was screwed up on top of her head it was best to fall in behind her with a cloth; when it was in a plait over one shoulder she was bound for the garden; when it was loose she had time to talk. Her clean, starched aprons, pink or white or blue, became a kind of beacon. On the days that they were blue, Chomsky would make an excuse to leave the metalwork shop and tell her that she reminded him of his nursemaid, Katya, whom he had deeply loved.