Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

She was almost her old brisk bossy self as she sent the children to scour out the goat sty and swill down the floor of the mermaid shed and pick up the litter washed ashore.

Almost, but not quite. None of the aunts were quite the same. Etta still hung her navy-blue knickers on the line each morning, but sometimes she patted her bun of hair like a young girl invited to a party. Coral’s clothes got wilder and wilder; she was painting a great underwater mural on the back of the house in all the colours of the rainbow, and the tunes that Myrtle played on her cello had become very powerful and loud.

“If only Dorothy was here,” said Etta, who missed her sister badly. Hitting people on the head with their own woks was nothing to the excitement of what was to come.

The Captain insisted on clean pyjamas every day so that he would not be caught short, and the old Sybil danced about in her cave in a frenzy of excitement. She still thought it was unwise to wash her face and hands but she decided bravely to wash her feet. This took a long time (mould had grown between her toes and mould can be interesting — the blue-green colours, the unusual shapes) but once one has heard the Great Hum life is never the same.

The creatures, in their own way, were as excited, and now the aunts understood why it had been so difficult to get anyone to go away. They must have known that something special was going to happen, even if they did not know exactly what.

Even the animals that never talked; even the herrings and the haddock and the flounders…even the lugworms buried in the sand seemed to be excited.

“How can a lugworm be excited?” Minette wanted to know, but when Aunt Etta dug one up for her, she saw that it might be so.

As for Art, he baked buns — hundreds and hundreds of buns which overflowed his cake tins and had to be stored in sealed bin bags in the larder. But the buns he baked were not ordinary buns, and nor were the omelettes they had for lunch and tea and supper ordinary omelettes.

Because something very wonderful had happened out there on the hill after Ethelgonda vanished. They were turning to go home when they heard a sound from the boobrie’s nest which stopped them in their tracks.

It wasn’t the mournful honking they were used to: it was a proud and cheerful clucking — a noise full of motherhood and joy. Pressing and pressing her muscles together to try and follow the others had not made the boobrie airborne, but it had done something else. And there it was; an enormous, blue-spotted and totally egg-shaped egg!

But the most touching thing happened the next day when they went up to congratulate the bird once more. For the egg she had laid when the Great Hum went through her body and she had pressed so hard, had been followed by three more. Four gigantic spotted eggs had rolled together and were keeping warm beneath her body, but when she saw the aunts and the children the boobrie moved aside, examined each egg very carefully — and then pushed one out towards them with her great yellow foot.

“Be careful, dear,” said Myrtle. “It mustn’t get cold.”

With difficulty, for the egg was heavier than a cannonball, they rolled it back…and the boobrie pushed it out again with her enormous foot.

The same thing was repeated three times — and then they understood.

“It’s a present,” said Minette, awed. “She wants us to have it.”

Minette was right. The boobrie wanted to share. There was nothing to be done except to fetch Art and load the egg on to a barrow — and since seventy-two omelettes are an awful lot of omelettes, the great bun bake began.

It was hard for the children to be patient during those days of waiting. They knew that when the time came they would find out what the Great Hum meant and who was coming. But on a day when Fabio was sent out for the third time to make sure that not so much as half a cigarette carton or a cotton reel had been washed up on the north shore, he dug in his heels.

“I think you should tell us,” he said. “Me and Minette, I mean. We can keep secrets.”

“We will tell you when the time is ripe,” said Aunt Etta, and they had to be content with that.

But what had been happening to Lambert?

The aunts were right. Lambert had slept through the beginning of the Hum and heard nothing.

When he did wake up at last, he realized that the house was empty. Doors stood open; there was no sign of Art in the kitchen. Everyone, though Lambert did not know it, was out on the hill.

“I want my breakfast,” said Lambert crossly, but there was no one to hear him.

By the time he was dressed he did hear a kind of thrumming noise, but to Lambert the magical sound seemed to be the kind of noise a generator might make, or some underground machinery.

But he was interested in the open bedroom doors. Since he had begun to work, Lambert had been allowed to come back into the house to sleep, but Myrtle and the others kept him firmly out of their rooms. Myrtle had not forgotten how he had frightened the ducklings when he first came.

Now, though, Myrtle’s door stood open. Her bed was unmade and the ducklings had grown enough to manage out of doors.

Lambert crept in. His shifty eyes took in all Myrtle’s little treasures and he sneered. Fancy bothering to pick up bits of driftwood and veined pebbles and arranging them on the bookcase as though they were ornaments. There wasn’t a single thing in her room, as far as he could see, that was worth tuppence.

Then he stopped dead. Propped against the corner of the room was Myrtle’s cello case. The cello wasn’t inside it; he could see it leaning against another wall, half covered with a shawl, so the case would be empty.

Lambert crept closer. He knew he had been carried away in it though he could remember nothing. He had overheard Myrtle talking about it to her sisters.

And that meant that anything he had been holding when he was snatched might still be there!

Lambert’s face was flushed with excitement, his thin lips were parted. If only the case wasn’t locked!

And it wasn’t! He tried the clasp, and it opened easily. The inside of the case was lined with blue velvet, faded and torn in places because it was so old.

At first there seemed to be nothing there except a crumpled silk scarf and a spare bow. Then as Lambert groped about in the back of the case, his hand found something dark and small which had been covered by the cloth.

Lambert’s fingers closed round it with a cry. He had found it. He had found his mobile telephone!

He would get away now! He was safe. Hiding the telephone under his shirt, Lambert went back to his room and pulled the chest of drawers across the door. Then he crouched down like an animal with its prey and began to dial.

Three days after Lambert found his telephone, the children woke shortly after midnight to find Aunt Coral and Aunt Etta standing by their beds.

Fabio was so sleepy that he thought at first it was the full moon and he was expected to dance the tango with Aunt Coral, but it wasn’t that.

“Put some clothes on,” said Aunt Etta. “And clean your teeth.”

“We cleaned them before we went to bed,” said Minette.

“Well, clean them again. No one with gunge on their molars is worthy to hear what we have to tell.”

Still half asleep, the children stumbled up the hill after the two aunts. At the top they found Aunt Myrtle sitting over a fire she had made, ringed by stones, and it was by the flicker of the flames and to the sound of the sea sighing against the rocks below that the children learnt what they wanted to know.

“Mind you, what I’m going to say won’t mean much to you unless you know your history, and I doubt if you know a lot of that,” said Aunt Etta. “So let me start by asking you a question. What does the word kraken mean to you?”