Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay behind, Myrtle?” said Coral now. But Myrtle had decided to be brave and said she thought that she should come along and do her bit.

“Only we won’t say anything to Daddy,” said Etta. “After all, kidnapping is a crime and he might worry.”

Captain Harper lived upstairs in a big bed with a telescope, looking out to sea. They had mostly given up telling him things. For one thing, he was stone deaf so that explaining anything took a very long time, and for another, as soon as he saw anybody he started telling them stories about what life had been like when he was a boy. They were good stories but every single aunt had heard them about three hundred times so they didn’t hang around if they could help it.

But they did go and tell the Sybil. She was the old cousin who had come to the Island soon after them. Sybil was bookish and one day she had read a book about Greek mythology and about a person called the Sybil (not just Sybil) who was a prophetess and could foretell the future. So she had started prophesying about the weather, mumbling on about depressions over Iceland and the wind-chill factor and really she didn’t get it wrong much more often than the weathermen on the telly. Then she had gone on to other things, and had gone to live in a cave with bats because that was where prophetesses were supposed to live, and had stopped washing because she said washing would weaken her powers, so that she was another person one did not visit for too long.

When the aunts told her that they were going to the mainland to kidnap some children the Sybil got quite excited. Her face turned blue and her hair began to stand on end and for a moment they hoped that she was going to tell them something important about the journey.

But it turned out that what she was foreseeing was squally showers, and what she said was “take seasick pills”, which they had decided to do anyway for the boat.

They still had to make sure that their cook, who was called Art, knew exactly what to do while they were away on their mission. Art was an escaped convict who had been washed up in a rowing boat on their shore. He had killed a man when he was young, and now he wouldn’t kill anything with arms or legs or eyes — not even a shrimp — but he made excellent porridge. Then they gathered together all the things they would need: chloroform and sleeping powders and anaesthetizing darts which they used for stunning animals that were injured so that they could set their limbs. All of them had things to carry the children away in: Aunt Etta had a canvas holdall and Aunt Coral had a tin trunk with holes bored into it and Aunt Myrtle had her cello case. As they waited for the wind to change so that they could sail the Peggoty to the next island and catch the steamer, they were terribly excited.

It was a long and difficult journey — many years ago the army had tried to use the Island for experiments in radio signals and so as to keep its position secret they had changed the maps and forbidden boats to come near it. In the end they hadn’t used it after all but it was still a forgotten place and the aunts meant to see that it stayed that way.

“Of course it won’t be a real kidnap because we shan’t ask the parents for a ransom,” said Etta.

“It’ll be more of a child snatch,” Coral agreed.

But whether it was a kidnap or a child snatch, it was still dangerous and wicked, and as they waved goodbye to the Island their hearts were beating very fast.

By the time she was ten years old Minette had made the journey between London and Edinburgh forty-seven times. Forty-seven station buffet sandwiches; forty-seven visits to the loo on the train and forty-seven stomach-aches because changing families always churned up her insides.

Minette’s father lived in Edinburgh in a tall grey house and was a Professor of Grammar. Minette’s mother lived in a flat in London and was an actress — at least she would have been if anyone had given her any work. They had been separated since Minette was three years old and they hated each other with a bitter and deadly hatred.

“Tell that louse of a father of yours that he’s late with his money again,” was the sort of message that Minette’s mother usually sent as she took her daughter to King’s Cross to put her on the train to Edinburgh. Or:

“No doubt your mother is still running a doss-house for drunken actors,” her father would say as he fetched her from the train.

Minette never gave her parents these messages. She made up polite friendly messages for them to send each other but neither her mother nor her father believed her when she delivered them. And on the journey, which took five hours when she first began to travel, Minette would look out of the window searching for houses where she and her mother and her father would live together one day like an ordinary family with a cat and a canary and a dog. For it went on hurting her, hurting and hurting — not that her parents were separated; lots of children she knew had separated parents — but that they hated each other so much.

On these journeys Minette was usually put in the charge of an aunt. The aunt came from an office called Useful Aunts and what she was like was important because if she talked all the time or wanted to play silly games, Minette couldn’t give her mind to finding houses for her parents to live in, or imagining beautiful scenes where she was run over and taken to hospital and her mother and father rushed to her bedside and looked at each other over their daughter’s bleeding body and found that they loved each other after all.

Then as she got up to go on her forty-eighth journey, Minette suddenly realized that it didn’t matter what kind of aunt they sent to take her because she had given up hope. Her parents would always hate each other and she would spend the rest of her life travelling from London to Edinburgh and back again, never quite knowing which was her home or where she properly belonged.

And as though someone Up There had heard her, they sent her that day a quite extraordinary aunt.

She was so unlike the other aunts she had travelled with that both Minette and her mother stopped dead as they came up to where she waited, by the bookstall on Platform One of King’s Cross Station.

“Are you…?” began Mrs Danby.

The woman nodded. She was very tall with a small moustache and carried a large holdall which smelled slightly of fish.

“I am your aunt,” she said in a deep voice and pointed to her lapel on which there was a label saying Unusual Aunts and above that the words “My name is Etta”.

If Minette’s mother hadn’t been in a hurry to go to the cinema with her latest boyfriend she might have asked more questions. After all an Unusual Aunt is not quite the same as a Useful one, but as it was she handed over the money for the tickets and Minette’s lunch, took the cigarette out of her mouth long enough to kiss her daughter, and went away.

And presently Minette and the aunt sat opposite each other in one of those old-fashioned compartments which have no corridor and watched the train make its way through the London suburbs.

Aunt Etta and her sisters had had a hard week in London. They found a boarding house full of people like themselves — aunt-like persons who had come to town to show their pug dogs at dog shows or go to meetings about setting up retirement homes for ancient donkeys. But they hated the noise and the traffic and the dirty air, and they did not find it easy to get taken on by an agency.

Even when Etta got her label and was sent out on jobs, the children she was given were unspeakable. She took a little boy on a trip down the river who spent the whole time stuffing himself with ice cream and popcorn and crisps and dropping the wrappers in the water. She was sent to take a small girl to have her teeth cleaned and saw her bite the dentist’s hand, and she sat with a whining brat called Tarquin Sterndale-Fish who had the measles.