Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

“Porridge or cereal?” asked Aunt Etta, as the children came in.

Minette blinked at her. “Cereal,” she managed to say.

“Porridge,” said Fabio.

“Please,” said Etta briskly, picking up the ladle. “Porridge, please.”

Fabio was the first to shake himself awake. “This is a very odd kidnap,” he said crossly. “And I won’t eat anything drugged.”

Aunt Etta leant forward, scooped a spoonful of porridge from his plate and gulped it down.

“Satisfied?” she said.

Fabio waited to see if she yawned or became dopey. Then he began to eat. The porridge was delicious.

They were both on second helpings when the screams began again. This time they were even worse than before and were followed by sobs and wails and a low shuddering moan. Then the door opened and a woman they had never seen before ran into the room. She had long, reddish-grey hair down her back; a bloody scratch ran along one cheek and she seemed to be quite beside herself.

The children shrank back in their chairs, their fear returning. The woman looked every inch a torturer.

“Really, Myrtle,” said Aunt Etta, “I’ve told the children they mustn’t be late for breakfast and now look at you.”

But no one could be cross with Myrtle for long, not even her bossy sister. The scratch on Myrtle’s cheek had begun to bleed again, there were tooth marks on her wrist, and though she took a helping of porridge she was quite unable to swallow it.

And when she was introduced to Minette and Fabio, her tears began to flow again.

“Yours are so nice,” she sobbed. “They look so intelligent and friendly.”

“That’s as maybe,” said Etta. “We haven’t tried them out yet.” She frowned as more bangs and thumps came from across the corridor. “He can’t stay in the broom cupboard, Myrtle. What would happen if he goes for the Hoover? We’d never get the place cleaned up again.”

“It’s just for now,” said Myrtle. “I gave him my bedroom when he first came round but I was afraid for the ducklings.”

Myrtle often had motherless ducklings keeping warm in her bed and her underclothes drawer.

“I suppose we shall have to un kidnap him,” said Coral. “But how? No one’s going to pay a ransom for Lambert Sprott.”

“We could offer to give his father some money if he’ll take Lambert away,” suggested Myrtle, blowing her nose.

“Don’t be silly, Myrtle,” said Etta. “For one thing we haven’t got any money — and for another he’d tell everyone about the Island and photographers would come, and journalists.” She shuddered. Keeping the position of the Island secret was the most important thing of all.

“We could turn him round and round till he was completely giddy and leave him in a telephone kiosk somewhere on the mainland,” said Coral. But she did not sound very convinced by her idea.

Myrtle began to sob again. “I should have left him on the floor,” she gulped. “I should never have brought him. But it seemed so cruel just to leave him there unconscious.”

“Hush. What’s done is done.”

But Myrtle couldn’t be consoled. “And my cello case smells of the awful child,” she wailed. “He puts terrible stuff on his hair.”

“Perhaps he’ll settle down when we’ve got some breakfast into him.”

Judging by the screams and thumps coming from across the corridor though, this did not seem likely.

But Fabio was getting impatient. “What about us? Are you going to unkidnap us?”

The aunts stared at him. “Are you mad?” said Etta. “After all the trouble we took. In any case, you haven’t been kidnapped exactly. You’ve been chosen.”

Minette and Fabio stared. “How?” asked Minette.

“What do you mean?” enquired Fabio.

Aunt Coral put down her coffee cup. “It’s time we explained. But first you’d better come and meet Daddy. He gets upset when things are kept from him.”

Captain Harper was a hundred and three years old and spent most of the day in bed looking at the Island through his telescope.

He was very deaf and very grumpy and what he saw through the window didn’t please him. When he was young there had been far more geese coming from Greenland — hundreds and thousands of geese — and their feet had been yellower and their bottoms more feathery than the geese who came nowadays. The sheep had been fleecier when he was a boy and the flowers in the grass had been brighter and the seals on the rocks ten times larger and fatter.

“Huge, they were,” Captain Harper would say, throwing out his arms. “Great big cow seals with big bosoms and eyes like cartwheels, and look at them now!”

No one liked to say that it was probably because he couldn’t see or hear too well that things had changed, and when he told the same stories for the hundredth time, his daughters just smiled and tiptoed out of the room because they were fond of him and knew that being old is difficult.

“Here are the children, Father,” yelled Coral. “The ones that have come to stay with us.”

The old man put down his telescope and stared at them.

“They’re too small,” he said. “They won’t be a mite of use. You need ones with muscles. When I was their age I had muscles like footballs.”

He put out a skinny arm and flexed his biceps, and they could see a bump like a very small pea come up on his arm. “We were all strong in those days. There was a boy in my class who could lift the teacher’s desk with one hand. Freddie Boyle he was called. He was the one who put the grass snake down the teacher’s trouser leg.”

The aunts let him tell the story about the grass snake and the teacher’s trouser leg because it was a short one, but when he began on the one about Freddie Boyle’s brother, who’d run over his own false teeth in a milk float, they shepherded the children out quietly.

“He won’t notice,” they said.

When they went downstairs again they found Art, the cook, wiping porridge off his trouser leg. He had tried to give Lambert some breakfast and had it thrown in his face.

“Nasty little perisher you’ve got in there,” he said. “Best drown him, I’d say. Shouldn’t think his parents would want him back.”

Before he escaped and was washed up on the Island, Art had worked in the prison kitchens, which was why he made such good porridge. Because he’d killed a man once, Art didn’t like the sight of blood and it was always the aunts who had to chop the heads off the fish before they went into the frying pan or get the chickens ready for the pot. Another thing Art didn’t like to do was anything energetic.

“I don’t know my own strength,” he would say, when there was anything messy or difficult to be done. “I might forget myself and do someone an injury.”

This didn’t seem likely — Art was a skinny person who hardly came up to Aunt Etta’s shoulder — but he’d quickly locked the door on Lambert and, leaving him to scream for his mobile telephone, retreated to his kitchen.

But Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral now led the children into the garden behind the house. It was time to explain.

The garden was surrounded by grey walls to give shelter from the wind; but no walls on the Island were built so high that they shut out the view of the sea. Aunt Myrtle had gone down to play her cello to the seals. A bumblebee droned on a clump of thrift. It was very peaceful.

“Perhaps I’d better tell you a story,” said Etta. “It’s a true story and it begins with five girls coming to an island with their widowed father to look for a new life.

“They found a lovely and deserted place, but ruined, abandoned. All the people who had lived there had left long, long ago. Even the ghost in the old graveyard seemed to have gone away.”