Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

Mrs Danby frowned. “Well, generally they came from an agency called Useful Aunts. I’ve used them for years — they’re very reliable. But I think…” She rubbed her forehead. “I’m not sure…I think this one may have been labelled Unusual Aunts. Yes, I think so. And there was some writing above that which said ‘My Name is Edna’. Or maybe it was Etta.”

“If you hadn’t rotted your brain with tobacco you might be able to remember,” said the professor under his breath.

But at that moment the secretary came back with a blue folder. “Yes,” said the detective as he opened it. “Yes. The two cases are extraordinarily similar.” He looked up at the Danbys. “Another child disappeared on the same day as your daughter and he too was put in the charge of an aunt. I think we’re getting somewhere at last!”

The old Mountjoys were always pleased when Hubert-Henry went back to boarding school. They hated having children about and they could never quite forgive their son for having married a foreign dancer in a nightclub and producing such an unsuitable grandson.

Then just a week after Hubert-Henry had left for Greymarsh Towers, a letter came from the headmaster which told old Mr Mountjoy that even though Hubert was not at school because of Burry-Burry fever, the full fees for the term would still have to be paid.

That did it of course. Mr Mountjoy rang the headmaster and said what nonsense was this about Burry-Burry fever and where was the boy, who had been delivered to school on the first day of term?

And the headmaster said, no he hadn’t, the aunt from the agency had told Matron that Hubert-Henry was ill.

So after the old Mountjoys had shouted down the telephone and threatened to sue the headmaster they went to the police. They might not be fond of Hubert-Henry but he was their grandson and their property and if anyone had taken him they wanted to know the reason why.

Which meant the police knew of two cases in which a child had vanished in the care of an aunt and it was now that the Great London Aunt Hunt began.

The police only knew about two aunts because Lambert’s father was still in America, so that the boy had not yet been reported missing. But two aunts were enough to be going on with — and the newspapers and the police and the general public now went slightly mad.

Aunt Plague Menaces the City screamed the headlines, and Monster Aunts on Killer Spree!

Once people had been warned they saw these murdering women everywhere.

An aunt was caught outside a supermarket trying to impale a sweet little baby with a giant knitting needle while his mother shopped inside.

“I was only trying to spear a wasp,” she quavered, “I didn’t want it to sting the child.” But she was hauled off to the police station and it was only when they found the back end of the squashed insect in her knitting bag that she was set free.

An even more sinister aunt was seen in Hyde Park, kicking in the head of a little boy who lay in the grass.

“I seen her clear as daylight,” said a fat man who’d been walking his dog and sent for the police. “Kicking like a maniac she was!”

And, “Look how he’s crying, the poor little fellow,” said the other dog owners who had crowded round — and it was true that the boy, holding on to his football, was crying. Anyone would cry, seeing their aunt bundled into a police van when she’d been showing them how to curl a penalty into the top right hand corner of the goal. She’d been a striker for the Wolverhampton Under-Eighteens and he thought the world of her.

There was talk in Parliament of a curfew for aunts, forcing them to be in bed by eight o’clock; the Daily Echo said aunts should be electronically tagged like prisoners — and an elderly lady was arrested in the shoe department of a department store for abusing her great-niece who was trying on shoes for a party.

“She was shouting and screaming at the child and her eyes were wild,” said the woman who had turned her in — and the aunt would probably have gone to prison, but while she was in the cells, the shop assistants downed tools and marched on the police station with banners, demanding that she should be freed.

“I wouldn’t just have shouted at the girl, I’d have wrung her neck,” said a motherly shop assistant to the reporters standing round.

“The poisonous child had thirty-nine pairs of shoes out and she was throwing them round the floor,” said another shop girl. “If you ask me, that aunt had the patience of a saint not to scream at her earlier.”

So the police let her go and then the newspapers said they were too soft and aunts should be flogged like in the good old days.

Meanwhile posters of Etta and Coral were stuck up in police stations and public libraries and bus shelters everywhere. These pictures had been drawn by an artist from the descriptions he had been given by the people who had seen them last, and they were extremely odd. Aunt Etta had a nose like a pickaxe, a blob of hair like a jelly bag on top of her head and a moustache she could have twirled, it was so big. Aunt Coral had a mad squint in one eye, seven pairs of earrings in each ear and absolutely no neck.

Have you seen these women? it said at the bottom of the posters.

But of course no one had, because women like that do not exist. And so the days passed and still the police had no clues to go on. The Aunts’ Agency had closed down and it seemed as though the stolen children and their kidnappers had vanished off the face of the earth.

Aunt Etta woke and stretched and immediately felt very strange. Something had happened. And the something was important: perhaps the most important thing that had ever happened to her.

She got out of bed and went to the window. Her long grey pigtail hung down her back; her hairy legs and bony feet stuck out from under her flannel nightdress, but her mud-coloured eyes were as excited as a young girl’s.

Yet there was nothing unusual to be seen. A flock of gulls were out fishing; the sun was just beginning to come up behind the two islands to the east.

“All the same, there is something,” thought Aunt Etta, and the excitement grew in her. “Only what?”

Then she realized that the excitement was coming from her feet. It was being sent through her toe bones, and up her ankle bones and through her body.

For a moment she felt quite faint. Could it be…? But no…that would be a miracle; she had done nothing to deserve anything as tremendous as that.

The sound of heavy breathing made her turn. It was Coral. She too was in her nightdress, folds of it wrapped round her like a bell tent, she too was barefoot and she too was panting with excitement.

“Oh, Etta,” she gasped. “I feel so strange.”

Coral’s long hair, which she dyed an interesting gold, hung down her back; she. looked like a mad goddess. “I feel as though…only it can’t be, can it? Not after a hundred years?”

“No…it can’t.”

But they clutched each other’s hands, because it hadn’t stopped, the extraordinary, amazing…feeling.

“We must wake Myrtle. She’s musical.”

But there was no need to wake Myrtle. Myrtle did not wear a nightdress; she wore pyjamas because she often went out before dawn to talk to the seals and she thought that pyjamas were more respectable. They were made of grey flannel so that she did not show up too much in the dusk and for a moment her sisters did not see her lying on the floor with her face pressed to the threadbare carpet.

“Myrtle, do you feel—” her sisters began.

But before she could answer, Myrtle lifted her head. They had never seen their sister look like that.