The Mennyms

by Sylvia Waugh

  Lots of love,

  Albert and Hildegarde Pond

  “So it’s over,” said Vinetta with relief. “Let’s tell them all. Let’s tell them all now.”

  There was no formal meeting in Granpa’s room and no precedence as to who should be told first or last. The news was shouted round the house from top to bottom.

  At three-thirty, after everyone had settled down again, Miss Quigley crept out of her cupboard and slyly put her gloves on the chair in the hall before going silently out past Vinetta who was busy pretending in the kitchen.

  The front doorbell rang.

  “I wonder who that can be,” said Vinetta, straightening her hair and making her way to the door still clutching the tea towel.

  “Miss Quigley,” she said with a smile of welcome. “This is a surprise.”

  “I hope I’m not intruding, Vinetta my dear,” said the visitor. “I think I must have left my gloves here this morning. Ah yes! There they are.” She gathered the gloves up from the hall chair and looked at Vinetta expectantly.

  Vinetta took her cue.

  “By the way, Hortensia,” she said. “Remember that letter we got in the second post?”

  “The airmail, you mean?” (As if there were any other.)

  “Yes. Well, it was from Albert Pond. He’s married and has gone back to Australia with his new wife. So he won’t be paying us a visit after all.”

  “What a pity!” said Miss Quigley. “I’ve been telling my friends in Trevethick Street all about him. They were hoping to meet him. They’ll think I’ve made it all up! Never mind! I’d best get along now, dear. My nephew is coming for tea.”

  In the lounge, Soobie heard Miss Quigley’s high, silly voice and winced.

  18

  * * *

  Pilbeam

  “WHERE IS APPLEBY?” Soobie asked his mother one warm day at the beginning of June. It was an unusual question. Soobie did not normally show any interest in the whereabouts of his siblings. The twins and Googles were in the back garden with Tulip. Joshua was having his afternoon nap.

  Vinetta was in the kitchen doing her favourite job. In a world of pretends, reals were very precious. Cooking was all pretend, and eating, and washing cups and saucers (except for every few months when they were freshened up to take the dust off them). But washing clothes and ironing were real. Washing, even with a modern washing machine, was not pleasant for a rag doll. Damp clothes are, well, damp. The dampness from a bundle of washing could soak right through to the kapok. Washing, personal washing, was also necessary from time to time, but wet. No one really liked washing. It took such a long time to dry, especially if the sponge were a little too saturated and the water got right inside. But ironing! Ironing was warm and dry and joyful!

  Vinetta stood the iron on its heel and looked at Soobie curiously.

  “I’m not sure where she is, but she’s not in the house. She went out about ten minutes ago, dressed for town and carrying her shoulder bag. Did you want her to get something for you?”

  “No,” said Soobie. “I just want to know that she is out of the way. She’s too nosy and I have something special to show you.”

  “Well, what is it?” asked Vinetta, pulling one of Joshua’s shirts from the washing basket and spreading it out on the ironing board.

  “You’ll have to switch the iron off and come with me,” said Soobie.

  “Well, where is it?”

  “In the attic.”

  Had it been anyone else in the family, except perhaps Joshua, Vinetta would have insisted upon knowing what she was going to see. She would have been very reluctant to leave a real to indulge someone else’s pretend. But Soobie was different. Left to himself he did not have pretends. If there was something to be seen in the attic it would be real and it would not be trivial. Remembering Joshua’s experience with the rat at Sydenham’s, Vinetta shivered as she followed Soobie up the narrow, uncarpeted stairs that led to the attic.

  When they went in, Vinetta was pleasantly surprised. In forty years she had seldom ventured into this unwanted space and, as she remembered it, it should have been dark, untidy and dirty. It was an alien area. Yet what she saw now was a very neat, huge, double room with two quite clean windows in the roof letting in broad shafts of sunlight. Near the door was a rocking chair and a single-stemmed round table. Junk there was too, of course, but orderly junk, tidily stacked and distributed. The other side of this enormous attic, beneath the second skylight, was empty except for two large basket-work chests. At the far end was another door, an architectural oddity, since there was no second staircase.

  Soobie led his mother to the chest that held the bales of cloth. He threw open the lid.

  “I found these whilst I was clearing the place ready for Albert Pond’s visit,” he explained.

  Vinetta drew out a length of cloth and tossed it on her arm till yards of it unwound. The sunlight from the roof illuminated a pattern of twining flowers in shades of red, brown and gold. Vinetta exclaimed at the beauty of the design and the quality of the material. Real stuff for another of her realities.

  “I am a lucky woman,” she often said. Seeing this cloth made her feel very lucky indeed.

  Soobie felt happy at seeing Vinetta so pleased, but, of course, there was more to be revealed. There was the other chest.

  “What is in the other chest?” asked Vinetta. “Surely not more material like this?”

  “No,” said Soobie gently. “There is something very surprising. I got quite a shock when I saw it.”

  Vinetta looked alarmed and took a step back from the chest she had just been going to open.

  “I don’t like surprises, Soobie. I can do without surprises. Albert Pond was more than enough.”

  “I know, Mother. But there is no way round it. It is certainly not a surprise I have deliberately prepared for you. It is just there, and it is surprising. It is not really terrible,” he went on, trying to reassure her. “It is just that when Aunt Kate died she must have been in the middle of making something she had no time to finish.”

  “Something?” queried Vinetta, fingering the lid of the chest.

  “Someone,” said Soobie, correcting himself. “There is a doll in there that needs to be put together. It is like us, but it is unfinished.”

  Vinetta flung the lid open and looked down into the puzzled, sad black eyes of Nuova Pilbeam. She put one hand gently on the painted cheek. She lifted the head in its tissue paper and saw the body underneath, the name still pinned to its Fair Isle jumper, the sort that Appleby had worn in her bobbysoxer days. For some minutes, Vinetta stared without speaking and Soobie stood by her silently waiting.

  “Say nothing of this to any of the others,” said Vinetta at last. “This is my business and nobody else’s. Poor, poor Pilbeam!”

  Carefully, with the eyes of a needlewoman, Vinetta examined every part of her unfinished child. Then she and Soobie tucked her back into the box and went down into the house heavy-hearted.

  Appleby came home ten minutes after Vinetta had returned to the ironing board.

  “Where have you been?” asked her mother.

  “You’ll never guess,” said Appleby in her usual irritating manner.

  “Of course I won’t,” said Vinetta crisply, “and I don’t intend to try.”

  “All right, huffy! Well, I’ll tell you anyway. I went to the booth in the station and had my photograph taken. I took eight of them altogether and I’m sending the best two to Albert Pond. I’ll bet I look every bit as good as his Hildegarde.”

  The photos were good. They showed a dazzling redhead in green-framed sunglasses wearing a black and green striped sweatshirt.

  “They’re lovely,” said Vinetta generously. “I hope you’ll be giving one to me. I can’t see that it would do any harm sending a couple to Albert, but don’t write too soon. Granpa thinks a very cautious and slow pen-friendship is probably what’s needed to keep everything safe. Albert has his own interests now. He doesn’t need us. He’ll probably wri
te two or three times. Then it will be just a card at Christmas, and eventually perhaps not even that.”

  19

  * * *

  Appleby’s Birthday

  “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO you, happy birthday to you!

  Happy birthday, dear Appleby,

  Happy birthday to you!”

  Tulip, Vinetta, Joshua and the twins sang in unison, Poopie managing to sound louder and flatter than all the rest put together. They were all in the dining room, a little-used room with highly-polished dark furniture, a special occasion room. A dining table that could seat twelve people stretched from the doorway to the French window that faced onto the back garden. It was spread with a pure white linen cloth, deeply edged with fine lace, and on it were beautiful china plates pretending to be a feast. A few of the plates had some old sugary biscuits on them. The centre-piece was what looked like a real birthday cake, with candles and a frill round the edge and HAPPY BIRTHDAY APPLEBY written across the top. Against the longest wall was a high, ruggedly carved sideboard on which today was a pile of packages all ready to be opened by the birthday girl.

  Appleby was proud of her birthday. Every fourth of July she reached the age of fifteen yet again. It was never clear at what stage of the year she reverted to being fourteen. Certainly at Christmas she was always fourteen. At other times she would be fifteen if being a little older gave her more prestige. Occasionally, in an argument, she might claim to be nearly sixteen. But the birthday always had to be her fifteenth.

  No one else in the family ever had a birthday. The grown-ups were all too grown-up. Googles was only a few months old and her first birthday never came. The twins were ten at Christmas, every Christmas naturally, and that was part of the festive celebrations. Soobie could have laid claim to a sixteenth birthday, but he thought it stupid to pretend and wouldn’t let it happen. He never came to Appleby’s parties and no present from him was to be found in the pile on the sideboard.

  “I’ll open Granpa’s present first,” said Appleby, tearing open the wrappings on the parcel labelled, with ornate flourishes, ‘To my dearest grand-daughter’. She always opened his present first, partly ritual, partly knowing that he usually bought the dearest for his dearest. This year it was a dark red leather writing case with a full set of pink, scented writing paper, envelopes and notelets inside. It fastened with a zip and had the initials ‘A.M.’ embossed in gold on one corner.

  “I’ll write to Albert Pond,” she exclaimed excitedly.

  “I thought you might,” smiled Tulip, “and you’d better open my present next.”

  Appleby took the small oblong box her grandmother indicated. Inside was a stainless steel pen with ‘Appleby’ engraved on the side.

  “It’s a ball-point,” said Tulip quickly, “but it’s a good one. I hope you’ll take care of it.”

  “It’s lovely, Granny,” said Appleby giving Tulip a quick hug before going on to the rest of her presents. Vinetta had given her an album for her fashion photos.

  “It makes a change from stamp albums,” she explained. “You must have dozens of them by now.”

  Joshua gave his daughter a bronze elephant to add to her collection. Appleby was always collecting something and this had been the year of the elephant.

  “That’s ten I’ll have now and this is the nicest. Look at its ears!”

  The twins began to giggle when she came to their large parcel.

  “The usual joke,” said Appleby with a grin, but began nevertheless to tackle the layer upon layer of paper that would be hiding a present of very small size and probably little value. Last year it had been a Mars Bar.

  When she came to it at last it was even smaller and could easily have been thrown away with the wrappings. The twins waited eagerly for her reaction.

  “Well, that settles it,” she said holding up a book of postage stamps. “I really will write to Albert Pond. You couldn’t have got me a nicer present.”

  Poopie and Wimpey were delighted with their sister’s approval.

  “We went for it ourselves,” said Poopie. “We got it out of the machine. It’s not just the sort you buy at the counter.”

  “We thought you might think it was silly,” said Wimpey, still a bit anxious, “’cos you’re often at the Post Office yourself. Poopie said you might when I first suggested it.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s silly at all,” said Appleby sounding kind and quite grown-up. “It’s a lovely thought and a real encouragement. It goes well with the pen and the writing set.”

  It was Appleby’s day for being good and nice to everybody. They sat at the dining table and ate pretend cakes and sandwiches and drank pretend lemonade from real crystal tumblers. Then, finally, Appleby stood up, closed her eyes and made a wish as she pretended to blow out the fifteen unlit candles on the cardboard cake that Vinetta brought out and dusted year after year.

  When the party was over, Appleby went upstairs to thank Granpa for his present.

  “I’m going to write to Albert Pond,” she said, “and I’m sending him those photographs I showed you.”

  “Wait another week or two, my dear,” advised Granpa. “You don’t want to be too eager. If we get too friendly he might change his mind and come, wife or no wife.”

  20

  * * *

  Pilbeam’s Progress

  THE ROCKING CHAIR was rocking gently back and forward. All Soobie could see was the back of it as he stood in the attic doorway. Vinetta’s voice was somewhere, reading a story he recognised about some children on a flying carpet looking for the end of the rainbow.

  But where was Vinetta? And who was listening to this old tale?

  It was late August and Soobie had felt a wish to see the attic again and have one more look at poor Pilbeam. So, after the family hour, he had given the twins time to settle down and then gone silently up the attic stairs. Even treading in soft blue slippers, it was not easy – the uncarpeted stairs creaked. The odd-shaped attic door, one side much longer than the other, lurched open, and Soobie saw that movement of the chair before he had even reached the top step. Moving nearer, he felt a shiver down his back as he saw the rockers lift and fall. Then he was reassured by the sound of Vinetta’s voice reading the old familiar story.

  He stepped right into the attic and, rounding the rocking chair that was still in motion, he came face to face with Vinetta who was seated on the footstool with the book on her knee. She looked up and smiled sadly and uncertainly at Soobie.

  “Only you know anything of this,” she said, “and that’s how it must stay.”

  Soobie turned away from his mother to look at the chair and its mysterious occupant.

  Pilbeam was sitting there, smiling slightly but consciously and with black eyes that were taking on a look of intelligent interest. It was what Soobie had more than half expected. It was what he had wanted from the first time he had held the sorry little head in his hands. But that did not stop him from feeling amazed.

  “Tell me about it, Mother. Tell me all about it. Tell me everything.”

  Vinetta closed the book. Soobie knelt down on the floor beside her.

  “I have spent my spare time for the last few weeks completing Pilbeam, fixing all her parts together into the whole person she is now. It has not been easy, but I knew it was possible. Remember your father’s leg. No one would know that I had made it and not Aunt Kate. Time and time again I have mended Poopie and Wimpey when they have played too rough or fallen in the garden. This was more intricate, and it was difficult, but it was always possible. What I didn’t know, and still don’t know, is whether that poor child will ever come as fully to life as the rest of us.”

  “She looks alive,” said Soobie. He looked at the girl still rocking in the chair. She was wearing a floppy pink sweatshirt, black trousers and a pair of trainers. “I see you’ve changed her clothes,” he added.

  “I couldn’t leave her stuck in the style of forty years ago. If she is ever to join the family she must be on equal terms with other t
eenagers.”

  “With Appleby,” nodded Soobie, giving a smile that was almost a grimace.

  “Precisely.”

  “So what happens next? What is there left to do?”

  “She hasn’t spoken yet. Till we get over that hurdle she cannot be said to be truly alive. That is why I talk to her and read to her whenever I can.”

  Soobie picked up the book and looked at it affectionately but critically.

  “She’s too old for this sort of story.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” said Vinetta, “but it seems to me that when it comes to reading she has forty years of catching up to do. You like that book. I know you do. And she must be about your age. There is some part in each of us that is never too old for a good tale of magic. I do read other things – teenage magazines, murder mysteries, science fiction, newspaper articles. Soon I’m going to bring the portable television set up here, and perhaps we could have the old record-player.”

  Soobie thought awhile. He looked at the book he still held in his hands.

  “I have never read this book, you know. I was just born knowing that sometime in the non-existent past I must have read it. When I was about eleven years old – only I never have been eleven years old. Just thinking about it is a tremendous strain. How do we know what memories Pilbeam will be born with?”

  “We don’t,” said Vinetta. “It is a new situation. We can only stumble on and do our best.”

  Pilbeam was rocking a little harder and looking even more interested in all that was being said. When Soobie turned to her, it seemed to him that she was a reluctant prisoner of silence.

  “I’ll help,” he said. “I’ll be another voice and I’ll talk to her about music and plays and sport and all the things Appleby is interested in. How about movement? Can she walk?”

  Vinetta shook her head.