Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

And then he sank and the birds that had been resting on him flew upwards like a white cloud.

He was gone for a few minutes — and when he surfaced again there was someone on his back.

The someone was very small compared to the kraken; not much bigger than a mini car or a dolphin — but it was absolutely clear who he was. He had the same round eyes, the same wide mouth, the same rainbow-coloured skin…

But he was worried.

“Will I be all right, Father?” said the kraken’s son, as he had said again and again on the journey.

“You will be all right,” said the kraken as he had said a hundred times. And then: “Look — there are children to play with and care for you,”

They spoke in Polar but what they said was perfectly clear to everyone. In particular what was clear was the look the infant kraken gave to Fabio and Minette as they stood quietly on the shore.

And to the aunts there came a great thunderclap of understanding. When they had kidnapped the children they had done it because they wanted help, but even at the time it felt strange to find themselves behaving like criminals. Now they realized that there had been a Higher Purpose, as there so often is.

For they understood that the kraken was bringing his child to the Island to be cared for while he circled the oceans of the world, and that he wanted him to be with people of his own age, not elderly aunts.

“We are most truly blessed,” said Aunt Etta. She still had her megaphone to her mouth and the word “blessed” echoed over the whole Island, and was taken up by all the watchers on the shore.

“Blessed,” nodded the stoorwom, and “Blessed,” said the naak (but in Estonian) and “Blessed,” cried the mermaids from the rocks.

Only Minette and Fabio were silent. Minette was remembering how she had wanted to serve the great beast when first she heard of him. Fabio, on the other hand, was wondering what infant krakens ate.

The kraken stayed for several days, resting after his long journey from the Arctic. Mostly he lay quietly in the bay keeping an eye on his child, but just having him there made everything flourish.

The children would run down to the shore barefoot every morning.

“It isn’t just that the sand is more yellow,” said Minette. “It’s as if it feels more like itself. Like sand is meant to be.”

It was the same with everything while the kraken guarded them. The turf was greener and springier, the wheeling birds were whiter and the patterns they made in the sky were lovelier.

Everybody on the Island felt it — everyone except Lambert who stayed huddled in his room.

“Imagine we hadn’t been kidnapped,” said Fabio. “Imagine we’d never known there was such a thing as a kraken!”

If the kraken had been anyone else — if he’d been one of those saints whose feet people wanted to touch because they were so holy, or a pop star from whose head silly people tried to cut bits of hair — the aunts would have been worried because absolutely everyone wanted to be where he was. Art rowed out in the little dinghy very early one morning, and they could see him talking earnestly to the kraken’s head, and when he came back he was different.

“I told him,” he said to the aunts. “I never told no one else and I didn’t tell you neither, but, well…when he opened those great eyes of his I saw it didn’t matter, so I’ll tell you now. All those years it’s been on my mind but I was afraid to come clean.”

And then he told them that he hadn’t killed a man at all. He’d been in prison for shoplifting but that didn’t seem very exciting so he’d told the lie because he thought the aunts would think him more manly.

“But when I was with him, I reckoned you’d forgive me,” he said — and of course they did, and said that telling the truth was far more manly than killing people, which any creep could do if he set his mind to it and had the right tools.

The stoorworm swam out every day and slithered on to the kraken’s back and they could hear the clatter and boom as they spoke together in Icelandic. No one knew what the kraken said to him but when he came back the worm was always calmer and never said anything about being too long for his ideas and needing to be made shorter by plastic surgery.

The mermaids too became different. They left the de-oiling shed and swam round the wonderful beast and sang — and though Oona was still croaky her voice came slowly back as she laid her head against the kraken’s hide and the memory of the chinless Lord Brasenott became fainter and fainter.

As for the boobrie, she did something extraordinary. She plucked Aunt Coral’s cloak from her shoulders and spread it over the eggs with her beak and then she flapped down to the bay and sat on the kraken’s back and honked at him.

She honked for a whole hour and it was hard to believe that he understood her, but he did. She was telling him how sad she was without her husband and asking the kraken to look out for him when he swam on again in case he had lost the way.

“He was always a forgetful bird,” she said.

Herbert hardly came out of the water; he was always close to the kraken in the bay. He had a new strength and dignity now that he knew he would spend his life as a seal, because there is nothing more calming than making up one’s mind. Myrtle missed playing the cello to him very much, but she understood. As for Herbert’s mother, who was very old now and very frail, she completely stopped nagging him, for she realized that if Herbert had decided to become a man with trousers and a zip he would only have been able get up to the kraken in a boat and speak to him through a megaphone and that would hardly be the same.

But it wasn’t just the special creatures, those with a touch of magic in them, who wanted to see and talk to the kraken. Everything that moved or crawled or swam wanted to be with him. Processions of sludge worms, schools of pilchards and puffer fish, platoons of lobsters and countless moon snails, all made their way towards him.

“Is he getting enough rest?” Aunt Etta wondered.

But when she asked the kraken he only turned his marvellous eyes towards her and said (at least she thought he said — his English was rather strange) that there was no living thing he did not welcome.

There were two people, though, who did not row out to the kraken and tell him their troubles. Minette did not ask him how to make her parents kind to each other, and Fabio did not ask him how to blow up the headmaster of Greymarsh Towers. This was partly because their past lives now seemed quite unreal to the children, but it was mostly because they were busier than they had ever been in their lives.

For the kraken wasn’t just resting. He was watching. And what he was watching was his son. Or rather, he was watching how Fabio and Minette coped with his son.

It had been difficult for the kraken, deciding what to do with his child. At first he thought he would put off his healing journey round the world till his son was older. But baby krakens grow very slowly — he would have had to wait for more than a hundred years for the child to grow up, and when he realized what a mess the world was in, he knew he couldn’t risk it.

Then he thought maybe he could leave his motherless infant in the Arctic among the walruses and polar bears and narwhals he was used to. But this plan had gone down badly with his son who wanted to travel with his father.

“You can’t. It’s too far,” the kraken had said.

It takes a year and a day to circle the oceans of the world and it was much too far. The baby swam slowly and often needed lifts on his father’s back and no one can really give himself to healing the world when they are worried about their child.