The Borrowers Collection

by Mary Norton

  “Now, my idea,” Pod went on, “is this. We’ll work our way all round this field, like I said last night, by the edges—”

  “Hedges,” corrected Arrietty, under her breath, without thinking.

  “I heard what you said, Arrietty,” remarked Pod quietly (he seldom grudged her superior education). “There’s hedges and edges, and I meant edges . . .”

  “Sorry,” murmured Arrietty, blushing.

  “As I was saying,” Pod went on, “we’ll work our way round, systematic-like, exploring the banks and—” he looked at Arrietty pointedly, “hedges—and camping as we go: a day here, a day or two there, just as we feel; or depending on the holes and burrows. There’ll be great bits of bank where there couldn’t be no badger’s set—we can skip those, as you might say. Now you see, Homily, we couldn’t do this if we had a settled home.”

  “You mean,” asked Homily sharply, “that we’ve got to drag the boot?”

  “Well,” said Pod, “was it heavy?”

  “With all our gear in it, it would be.”

  “Not over grass,” said Pod.

  “And uphill!” exclaimed Homily.

  “Level here at the bottom of the field,” corrected Pod patiently, “as far as them rushes; then uphill at the top of the field, alongside the stream: then across—level again; then the last lap of all, which brings us back to the stile again, and it’s downhill all the way!”

  “Um-m-m,” said Homily, unconvinced.

  “Well,” said Pod. “Out with it—speak your mind: I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Oh, Mother—” began Arrietty in a pleading voice and then became silent.

  “Has Arrietty and me got to drag all the time?” asked Homily.

  “Now, don’t be foolish,” said Pod. “We take it in turns, of course.”

  “Oh, well,” sighed Homily, “what can’t be cured, needs must.”

  “That’s my brave old girl,” said Pod. “Now about provender— (food,” he explained as Homily looked up bewildered). “We better become vegetarians, pure and simple, one and all, and make no bones about it.”

  “There won’t be no bones to make,” remarked Homily grimly, “not if we become vegetarians.”

  “The nuts is coming on,” said Pod. “Nearly ripe they’ll be down in that sheltered corner—milky like. Plenty of fruit—blackberries, them wild strawberries. Plenty of salad, dandelion, say, and sorrel. There’s gleanings still in that cornfield t’other side of the stile. We’ll manage—the thing is you got to get used to it: no hankering for boiled ham, chicken rissoles, and that kind of fodder. Now, Arrietty,” he went on, “as you’re so set on hedge-climbing, you and your mother had better go off and gather us some nuts. How’s that, eh? And I’ll get down to a bit of cobbling.” He glanced at the boot.

  “Where do you find the nuts?” asked Arrietty.

  “There, about halfway along”—Pod pointed to a thickening of pale green in the hedge—“before you get to the water. You climb up, Arrietty, and throw ’em down and your mother can gather ’em up. I’ll come down and join you later: we got to dig a pit.”

  “A pit? Whatever for?” asked Arrietty.

  “We can’t carry that weight of nuts around,” explained Pod, “not in a boot this size. Wherever we find provender, we got to make a cache like, and mark it down for winter.”

  “Winter . . .” moaned Homily softly in the bleak voice she reserved for that season.

  Nevertheless, as Arrietty helped her mother over the rough places in the ditch which because it was shallow, well drained and fairly sheltered could be used as a highway, she felt closer to Homily than she had felt for years—more like a sister, as she put it. “Oh, look,” cried Homily when she saw a scarlet pimpernel. She stopped and picked it by its hair-thin stalk. “Isn’t it lovely?” she said in a tender voice; touching the fragile petals with a work-worn finger, she tucked it into the opening of her blouse. Arrietty found a pale blue counterpart in the delicate bird’s-eye, and put it in her hair; and suddenly the day began to seem like a holiday. “Flowers made for borrowers . . .” she thought.

  At last they reached the nutty part of the hedge. “Oh, Arrietty,” exclaimed Homily, gazing up at the spreading branches with mingled pride and fear, “you can’t never go up there.”

  But Arrietty could and would: she was delighted to show off her climbing: in a workmanlike manner, she stripped off her jersey, hung it on a gray-green spike of thistle, rubbed her palms together (in front of Homily she did not like to spit on them) and clambered up the bank.

  Homily watched below, her two hands clasped and pressed against her heart, how the outer leaves shivered and shook as Arrietty, invisible, climbed up inside. “Are you all right?” she kept calling, “oh, Arrietty, do be careful. Suppose you fell and broke your leg?” And then after a while the nuts began to come down and poor Homily, under fire, ran this way and that, in her panting efforts to retrieve them.

  Not that they came down fast enough to be really dangerous. Nut-gathering was not quite as easy as Arrietty had imagined. For one thing, it was still a little early in the season and the nuts were not quite ripe. Each was still encased in what, to Arrietty, looked something like a tough, green fox-glove bell and was fixed firmly to the tree. It was quite an effort, until she learned the trick of a sharp twist, for Arrietty to detach the clusters. And what was more, even to reach them was not easy. It meant climbing or swinging or edging her body along a perilously swaying branch tip (later Pod made her—out of a piece of lead, some twine and a supple dock root—a kind of swinging cosh with which she could strike them down) but she persevered and soon there was a sizeable pile in the ditch, neatly stacked up by the perspiring Homily.

  “That’ll do now,” Homily called out breathlessly after a while. “No more or your poor pa will never get through with the digging,” and Arrietty, hot and disheveled, with scratched face and smarting hands, thankfully climbed down. She flung herself full length in the speckled shade of a clump of cow-parsley and complained of feeling thirsty.

  “Well, there’s water farther along, so your pa says. Do you think you could walk it?”

  Of course Arrietty could walk it: tired, she might be but determined to foster this new-found spirit of adventure in her mother. She caught up her jersey and they set off along the ditch.

  The sun was higher now and the ground was hotter. They came to a place where some beetles were eating a long-dead mole. “Don’t look,” said Homily, quickening her step and averting her eyes, as though it were a street accident.

  But Arrietty, more practical for once, said, “But when they’ve finished, perhaps we ought to have the skin. It might come in useful,” she pointed out, “for winter.”

  “Winter . . .” breathed Homily, “you say it to torment me,” she added in a sudden spurt of temper. The stream when they reached it seemed less a stream than a small clear pond disturbed as they approached by several plops and spreading silvery circles as the frogs, alarmed, dived in. It meandered out of a tangled wood beyond the hedge and, crossing the corner of the field, had spread into a small marsh of cresses, mud and deepsunk cattle-tracks. On the farther side of the stream, the field was bounded, not by a junction of hedges but by several mildewed posts hung with rusty wire slung across the water. Beyond this frail barrier, the shadowed tree trunks of the wood seemed to crowd and glower as though they longed to rush forward across the strip of water into the field and the sunlight. Arrietty saw a powdery haze of wild forget-me-not, with here and there a solitary bulrush. The dry-edged cattle tracks were water-filled chasms criss-crossed with dykes, and there was a delicious smell of fragrant slime, lightly spiced with spearmint. A sinuous, feathered current of clear ripples broke the still, sky-reflecting surface of the miniature lake. It was very beautiful, Arrietty thought, and strangely exciting; she had never seen so much water before.

  “Watercress!” announced Homily in a flat voice. “We’ll take a bit o’ that for tea. . . .”

  They picked thei
r way along the raised ridges of the cow craters whose dark pits of stagnant water reflected the cloudless sky. Arrietty stooping over them saw her own clear image sharply focused against the dreaming blue but oddly tilted and somehow upside down.

  “Careful you don’t fall in, Arrietty,” warned Homily. “You only got one change, remember. You know,” she went on in an interested voice, pointing at a bulrush, “I could have used one of those back home, under the kitchen. Just the thing for cleaning out the flues. Wonder your father never thought of it. And don’t drink yet,” advised Homily (as though Arrietty intended to!). “Wait till we get where the water’s running. Same with watercress, you don’t want to pick it where the water’s stagnant. You never know what you might get.”

  At last they found a place from where it would be possible to drink: a solid piece of bark, embedded firmly in the mud yet stretching out into the stream forming a kind of landing stage or rough jetty. It was gray and nobbly and looked like a basking crocodile. Arrietty stretched her length on the corklike surface and cupping her hands took long draughts of the cool water. Homily, after some hesitation and arrangements of skirts, did the same. “Pity,” she remarked, “we don’t have a jug nor a pail, nor some kind of bottle. We could do with some water in the boot.”

  Arrietty did not reply; she was gazing happily down past the drifting surface into the depths below.

  “Can vegetarians eat fish?” she asked, after a while.

  “I don’t rightly know,” said Homily. “We’ll have to ask your father.” Then the cook in Homily reasserted itself. “Are there any?” she asked, a trifle hungrily.

  “Plenty,” Arrietty murmured dreamily, gazing down into the shifting depths. The stream, she thought, seemed to be gently breathing. “About as long as my forearm. And some invisible things,” she added, “like shrimps. . . .”

  “How do you mean—invisible?” asked Homily.

  “Well,” explained Arrietty in the same absent voice, “I mean you can see through them. And some black things,” she went on, “like blobs of expanding velvet. . . .”

  “Leeches, I shouldn’t wonder,” remarked Homily with a slight shudder, and added dubiously, after a moment’s thought, “Might be all right stewed.”

  “Do you think Papa could make a fishing net?” asked Arrietty.

  “Your father can make anything,” asserted Homily loyally. “No matter what—you’ve only got to name it.”

  Arrietty lay quiet for a while, dozing, she seemed, on this sun-soaked piece of bark, and when at last she spoke Homily gave a startled jump—she, too, lulled for once into quietness, had begun to float away. Never do, she thought, to drop off to sleep on a log like this. You might turn over. And she roused herself by an inward shake and rapidly blinked her eyes.

  “What did you say, Arrietty?” she asked.

  “I said . . .” Arrietty went on after a moment in a lilting lazy voice, “couldn’t we bring the boot down here? Right beside the water?”

  Chapter Eight

  “Every man’s house is his castle.”

  Oxford & Harvard boat race 1869

  [Extract from Arrietty’s Diary and Proverb Book, August 27th]

  AND THAT is just what they did do. Pod, consulted, had looked over the site, weighed the pros and cons and rather ponderously as though it was his own idea decided they should move camp. They would choose a site further along the hedge as near as was safe to the brook. “Homily can do her washing. You got to have water,” he announced, but rather defensively as though he had only just thought of it. “And I might make a fish net, at that.”

  The boot, though fully loaded, ran quite easily along the shallow ditch with all three of them in harness. The site Pod had chosen was a platform or alcove halfway up the steepish bank below the hedge.

  “You want to keep fairly high,” he explained (as, to make it lighter for hauling, they unpacked the boot in the ditch), “with rain like we had the other night and the brook so near. You got to remember,” he went on, selecting a sharp tool, “that flood we had back home when the kitchen boiler burst.”

  “What do you mean,” sniffed Homily, “‘got to remember’? Scalding hot, that one was, too.” She straightened her back and gazed up the slope at the site.

  It was well chosen: a kind of castle, Arrietty had called it, in which they would live in the dungeons, but in their case the dungeon was more like an alcove, open to the sun and air. A large oak tree, at one time part of the hedge, had been sawn off at the base. Solid and circular, it stood up above the bank where the hedge thinned, like the keep of a fortress, its roots flung out below as flying buttresses. Some of these were not quite dead and had shot forth here and there a series of suckers like miniature oak trees. One of these saplings overhung their cave, shading its lip with sun-flecked flickering shadow.

  The underside of a large root formed the roof of their alcove and other smaller roots supported the walls and floor. These, Pod pointed out, would come in handy as beams and shelves.

  He was busy now (while the boot still lay in the ditch) extracting some nails from the heel.

  “It seems a shame,” remarked Homily as she and Arrietty sorted out belongings for easier transportation. “You’ll lose the whole heel.”

  “What good’s the heel to us?” asked Pod, perspiring with effort. “We ain’t going to wear the boot. And I need the nails,” he added firmly.

  The flat top of the tree trunk, they decided, would come in useful as a look-out, a bleaching ground for washing, and a place for drying herbs and fruit. Or for grinding corn. Pod was urged to chip out foot-holds in the trunk for easier climbing. (This he did later and for years after these foot-holds were considered by naturalists to be the work of the great spotted woodpecker.)

  “We got to dig a cache for these nuts,” remarked Pod, straightening his aching back, “but better we get all ship-shape here first and snug for the night, as you might say. Then after the digging we can come home straight to bed.”

  Seven nails, Pod decided, was enough for the moment (it was tough work extracting them). The idea had come to him when he had been mending the hole in the toe. Heretofore, he had only worked on the softest of glove leathers and his little cobbler’s needle was too frail to pierce the tough hide of the boot. Using the electric bell-clapper as a hammer, he had pierced (with the help of a nail) a series of matching holes in the boot itself and the tongue which was meant to patch it: then all he had to do was to thread in some twine.

  By the same token, he had made a few eyelet holes round the ankle of the boot so they could, if necessary, lash it up at night—as campers would close a tent flap.

  It did not take them long to drag the empty boot up the slope, but wedging it firmly in the right position under the main root of the alcove was a tricky business and took a good deal of maneuvering. At last it was done—and they left panting but relieved.

  The boot lay on its side, sole against the rear wall and ankle facing outwards so that if disturbed at night they could spot the intruder approaching, and so when they woke in the morning they would get the early sun.

  Pod drove a series of nails along one shelf-like root on the right wall of the alcove (the left wall was almost completely taken up by the boot) on which he hung his tools: the half nail scissor, the fret-saw, the bell-clapper, and the piece of razor blade.

  Above this shelf was a sandy recess which Homily could use as a larder. It went in quite deep.

  When Pod had placed the larger hat pin in a place of strategic importance near the mouth of the alcove (the smaller one they were to keep in the boot in case, Pod said, “of these alarms at night”) they felt they had met the major demands of the moment and, though tired, they felt a pleasant sense of achievement and of effort well-spent.

  “Oh, my back,” exclaimed Homily, her hands in the small of it. “Let’s just sit down, Pod, for a moment and rest quietly and look at the view.” And it was worth looking at in the afternoon sunlight. They could see right away across the fiel
d. A pheasant flew out of the far group of trees and whirred away to the left.

  “We can’t sit down now,” said Pod. “We got to dig that cache.”

  Wearily, they collected the half nail scissor and a borrowing-bag for anything they might see on the way, and the three of them climbed down the bank.

  “Never mind,” Pod comforted Homily as they made their way along the ditch. “We can go straight to bed after. And you haven’t got no cooking,” he reminded her.

  Homily was not comforted. As well as tired she realized suddenly she was feeling very hungry (but not,—she reflected glumly—somehow, for nuts).

  When they reached the place and Pod had removed the first sods in order to reach the soil (great shrubs these were to him, like uprooting a clump of pampas), Homily revived a little—determined to play her part (courageous help-mate, it was today). She had never dug before but the prospect faintly excited her. Strange things are possible in this odd world and she might (one never knew) discover a new talent.

  They had to take it in turns with the half nail scissor. (“Never mind,” Pod told them. “I’ll set to work tomorrow and rig us up a couple of spades.”)

  Homily screamed when she saw her first worm: it was as long as she was—even longer, she realized, as the last bit wriggled free. “Pick it up,” said Pod, “it won’t hurt you. You got to learn.” And, before Arrietty (who was not too keen on worms herself) could volunteer to help, she saw her mother, with set face and tensed muscles, lay hold of the writhing creature and drop it some inches beyond the hole where it writhed gratefully away among the grasses. “It was heavy,” Homily remarked—her only comment—and she went back to her digging; but (Arrietty thought) she looked a trifle pale. After her third worm, Homily became slightly truculent—she handled it with the professional casualness of an experienced snake charmer—almost bored, she seemed. Arrietty was much impressed. It was a different story, however, when her mother dug up a centipede—then Homily not only screamed but ran, clutching her skirts, halfway up the bank, where she stood on a flat stone, almost gibbering. She only consented to rejoin them when Pod, tickling the angry squirming insect with the tip of the nail scissor, sent it scuttling at last into what Arrietty always thought of as “the bush.”