A Little, Aloud

by Angela Macmillan

  Nicholas made one or two sorties into the front garden, wriggling his way with obvious stealth of purpose towards one or other of the doors, but never able for a moment to evade the aunt’s watchful eye. As a matter of fact, he had no intention of trying to get into the gooseberry garden, but it was extremely convenient for him that his aunt should believe that he had; it was a belief that would keep her on self-imposed sentry-duty for the greater part of the afternoon. Having thoroughly confirmed and fortified her suspicions Nicholas slipped back into the house and rapidly put into execution a plan of action that had long germinated in his brain. By standing on a chair in the library one could reach a shelf on which reposed a fat, important-looking key. The key was as important as it looked; it was the instrument which kept the mysteries of the lumber-room secure from unauthorised intrusion, which opened a way only for aunts and such-like privileged persons. Nicholas had not had much experience of the art of fitting keys into keyholes and turning locks, but for some days past he had practised with the key of the schoolroom door; he did not believe in trusting too much to luck and accident. The key turned stiffly in the lock, but it turned. The door opened, and Nicholas was in an unknown land, compared with which the gooseberry garden was a stale delight, a mere material pleasure.

  Often and often Nicholas had pictured to himself what the lumber-room might be like, that region that was so carefully sealed from youthful eyes and concerning which no questions were ever answered. It came up to his expectations. In the first place it was large and dimly lit, one high window opening on to the forbidden garden being its only source of illumination. In the second place it was a storehouse of unimagined treasures. The aunt-by-assertion was one of those people who think that things spoil by use and consign them to dust and damp by way of preserving them. Such parts of the house as Nicholas knew best were rather bare and cheerless, but here there were wonderful things for the eye to feast on. First and foremost there was a piece of framed tapestry that was evidently meant to be a fire-screen. To Nicholas it was a living, breathing story; he sat down on a roll of Indian hangings, glowing in wonderful colours beneath a layer of dust, and took in all the details of the tapestry picture. A man, dressed in the hunting costume of some remote period, had just transfixed a stag with an arrow; it could not have been a difficult shot because the stag was only one or two paces away from him; in the thickly growing vegetation that the picture suggested it would not have been difficult to creep up to a feeding stag, and the two spotted dogs that were springing forward to join in the chase had evidently been trained to keep to heel till the arrow was discharged. That part of the picture was simple, if interesting, but did the huntsman see, what Nicholas saw, that four galloping wolves were coming in his direction through the wood? There might be more than four of them hidden behind the trees, and in any case would the man and his dogs be able to cope with the four wolves if they made an attack? The man had only two arrows left in his quiver, and he might miss with one or both of them; all one knew about his skill in shooting was that he could hit a large stag at a ridiculously short range. Nicholas sat for many golden minutes revolving the possibilities of the scene; he was inclined to think that there were more than four wolves and that the man and his dogs were in a tight corner.

  But there were other objects of delight and interest claiming his instant attention: there were quaint twisted candlesticks in the shape of snakes, and a teapot fashioned like a china duck, out of whose open beak the tea was supposed to come. How dull and shapeless the nursery teapot seemed in comparison! And there was a carved sandal-wood box packed tight with aromatic cottonwool, and between the layers of cottonwool were little brass figures, hump-necked bulls, and peacocks and goblins, delightful to see and to handle. Less promising in appearance was a large square book with plain black covers; Nicholas peeped into it, and, behold, it was full of coloured pictures of birds. And such birds! In the garden, and in the lanes when he went for a walk, Nicholas came across a few birds, of which the largest were an occasional magpie or wood-pigeon; here were herons and bustards, kites, toucans, tiger-bitterns, brush turkeys, ibises, golden pheasants, a whole portrait gallery of undreamed-of creatures. And as he was admiring the colouring of the mandarin duck and assigning a life-history to it, the voice of his aunt in shrill vociferation of his name came from the gooseberry garden without. She had grown suspicious at his long disappearance, and had leapt to the conclusion that he had climbed over the wall behind the sheltering screen of the lilac bushes; she was now engaged in energetic and rather hopeless search for him among the artichokes and raspberry canes.

  ‘Nicholas, Nicholas!’ she screamed, ‘you are to come out of this at once. It’s no use trying to hide there; I can see you all the time.’

  It was probably the first time for twenty years that anyone had smiled in that lumber-room.

  Presently the angry repetitions of Nicholas’ name gave way to a shriek, and a cry for somebody to come quickly. Nicholas shut the book, restored it carefully to its place in a corner, and shook some dust from a neighbouring pile of news papers over it. Then he crept from the room, locked the door, and replaced the key exactly where he had found it. His aunt was still calling his name when he sauntered into the front garden.

  ‘Who’s calling?’ he asked.

  ‘Me,’ came the answer from the other side of the wall; ‘didn’t you hear me? I’ve been looking for you in the gooseberry garden, and I’ve slipped into the rain-water tank. Luckily there’s no water in it, but the sides are slippery and I can’t get out. Fetch the little ladder from under the cherry tree—’

  ‘I was told I wasn’t to go into the gooseberry garden,’ said Nicholas promptly.

  ‘I told you not to, and now I tell you that you may,’ came the voice from the rain-water tank, rather impatiently.

  ‘Your voice doesn’t sound like aunt’s,’ objected Nicholas; ‘you may be the Evil One tempting me to be disobedient. Aunt often tells me that the Evil One tempts me and that I always yield. This time I’m not going to yield.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said the prisoner in the tank; ‘go and fetch the ladder.’

  ‘Will there be strawberry jam for tea?’ asked Nicholas innocently.

  ‘Certainly there will be,’ said the aunt, privately resolving that Nicholas should have none of it.

  ‘Now I know that you are the Evil One and not aunt,’ shouted Nicholas gleefully; ‘when we asked aunt for strawberry jam yesterday she said there wasn’t any. I know there are four jars of it in the store cupboard, because I looked, and of course you know it’s there, but she doesn’t, because she said there wasn’t any. Oh, Devil, you have sold yourself !’

  There was an unusual sense of luxury in being able to talk to an aunt as though one was talking to the Evil One, but Nicholas knew, with childish discernment, that such luxuries were not to be over-indulged in. He walked noisily away, and it was a kitchenmaid, in search of parsley, who eventually rescued the aunt from the rain-water tank.

  Tea that evening was partaken of in a fearsome silence. The tide had been at its highest when the children had arrived at Jagborough Cove, so there had been no sands to play on – a circumstance that the aunt had overlooked in the haste of organising her punitive expedition. The tightness of Bobby’s boots had had disastrous effect on his temper the whole of the afternoon, and altogether the children could not have been said to have enjoyed themselves. The aunt maintained the frozen muteness of one who has suffered undignified and unmerited detention in a rain-water tank for thirty-five minutes. As for Nicholas, he, too, was silent, in the absorption of one who has much to think about; it was just possible, he considered, that the huntsman would escape with his hounds while the wolves feasted on the stricken stag.

  REBECCA, WHO SLAMMED DOORS FOR FUN AND PERISHED MISERABLY

  Hilaire Belloc

  A trick that everyone abhors

  In Little Girls is slamming Doors.

  A Wealthy Banker’s Little Daughter

  Who liv
ed in Palace Green, Bayswater

  (By name Rebecca Offendort),

  Was given to this Furious Sport.

  She would deliberately go

  And Slam the door like Billy-Ho!

  To make her Uncle Jacob start.

  She was not really bad at heart,

  But only rather rude and wild:

  She was an aggravating child . . .

  It happened that a Marble Bust

  Of Abraham was standing just

  Above the Door this little Lamb

  Had carefully prepared to Slam,

  And Down it came! It knocked her flat!

  It laid her out! She looked like that.

  Her funeral Sermon (which was long

  And followed by a Sacred Song)

  Mentioned her Virtues, it is true,

  But dwelt upon her Vices too,

  And showed the Dreadful End of One

  Who goes and slams the door for Fun.

  The children who were brought to hear

  The awful Tale from far and near

  Were much impressed, and inly swore

  They never more would slam the Door.

  – As often they had done before.

  READING NOTES

  Is Nicholas a ‘ghastly child’? Would you want to know him? Aunts, bad behaviour, childhood punishments, attics, outings to the sea and the darkness of the story were some of the other things a library reading group talked about, but the subject that interested them most of all was the power of the imagination in childhood. As Nicholas explores the things stored away in the lumber room his imagination soars in a way that is so hard fully to experience as an adult. The group talked about their own capacity as children to daydream in fantastic and imaginative worlds; the trouble it got them into as well as the delight it brought about.

  Is the poem ‘Rebecca’ simply a poem for children? What is its appeal for adults?

  Innocence and Experience

  A MESSAGE FROM THE PIG-MAN

  John Wain

  (approximate reading time 17 minutes)

  He was never called Ekky now, because he was getting to be a real boy, nearly six, with grey flannel trousers that had a separate belt and weren’t kept up by elastic, and his name was Eric. But this was just one of those changes brought about naturally, by time, not a disturbing alteration; he understood that. His mother hadn’t meant that kind of change when she had promised, ‘Nothing will be changed.’ It was all going to go on as before, except that Dad wouldn’t be there, and Donald would be there instead. He knew Donald, of course, and felt all right about his being in the house, though it seemed, when he lay in bed and thought about it, mad and pointless that Donald’s coming should mean that Dad had to go. Why should it mean that? The house was quite big. He hadn’t any brothers and sisters, and if he had had any he wouldn’t have minded sharing his bedroom, even with a baby that wanted a lot of looking after, so long as it left the spare room free for Dad to sleep in. If he did that they wouldn’t have a spare room, it was true, but, then, the spare room was nearly always empty; the last time anybody had used the spare room was years ago, when he had been much smaller – last winter, in fact. And, even then, the visitor, the lady with the funny teeth who laughed as she breathed in, instead of as she breathed out like everyone else, had only stayed two or three nights. Why did grown-ups do everything in such a mad, silly way? They often told him not to be silly, but they were silly themselves in a useless way, not laughing or singing or anything, just being silly and sad.

  It was so hard to read the signs; that was another thing. When they did give you something to go on, it was impossible to know how to take it. Dad had bought him a train, just a few weeks ago, and taught him how to fit the lines together. That ought to have meant that he would stay; what sensible person would buy a train, and fit it all up ready to run, even as a present for another person – and then leave? Donald had been quite good about the train, Eric had to admit that; he had bought a bridge for it and a lot of rolling-stock. At first he had got the wrong kind of rolling-stock, with wheels too close together to fit on to the rails; but instead of playing the usual grown-ups’ trick of pulling a face and then not doing anything about it, he had gone back to the shop, straight away that same afternoon, and got the right kind. Perhaps that meant he was going to leave. But that didn’t seem likely. Not the way Mum held on to him all the time, even holding him round the middle as if he needed keeping in one piece.

  All the same, he was not Ekky now, he was Eric, and he was sensible and grown-up. Probably it was his own fault that everything seemed strange. He was not living up to his grey flannel trousers – and perhaps that was it; being afraid of too many things, not asking questions that would probably turn out to have quite simple answers.

  The Pig-man, for instance. He had let the Pig-man worry him far too much. None of the grown-ups acted as if the Pigman was anything to be afraid of. He probably just looked funny, that was all. If, instead of avoiding him so carefully, he went outside one evening and looked at him, took a good long, unafraid look, leaving the back door open behind him so that he could dart in to the safety and warmth of the house . . . no! It was better, after all, not to see the Pig-man; not till he was bigger, anyway; nearly six was quite big but it wasn’t really very big . . .

  And yet it was one of those puzzling things. No one ever told him to be careful not to let the Pig-man get hold of him, or warned him in any way; so the Pig-man must be harmless, because when it came to anything that could hurt you, like the traffic on the main road, people were always ramming it into you that you must look both ways, and all that stuff. And yet when it came to the Pig-man no one ever mentioned him; he seemed beneath the notice of grown-ups. His mother would say, now and then, ‘Let me see, it’s today the Pig-man comes, isn’t it?’ or, ‘Oh dear, the Pig-man will be coming round soon, and I haven’t put anything out.’ If she talked like this Eric’s spine would tingle and go cold; he would keep very still and wait, because quite often her next words would be, ‘Eric, just take these peelings,’ or whatever it was, ‘out to the bucket, dear, will you?’ The bucket was about fifty yards away from the back door; it was shared by the people in the two next-door houses. None of them was afraid of the Pig-man, either. What was their attitude? he wondered. Were they sorry for him, having to eat damp old stuff out of a bucket – tea-leaves and eggshells and that sort of thing? Perhaps he cooked it when he got home, and made it a bit nicer. Certainly, it didn’t look too nice when you lifted the lid of the bucket and saw it all lying there. It sometimes smelt, too. Was the Pigman very poor? Was he sorry for himself, or did he feel all right about being like that? Like what? What did the Pig-man look like? He would have little eyes, and a snout with a flat end; but would he have trotters, or hands and feet like a person’s?

  Lying on his back, Eric worked soberly at the problem. The Pig-man’s bucket had a handle; so he must carry it in an ordinary way, in his hand – unless, of course, he walked on all fours and carried it in his mouth. But that wasn’t very likely, because if he walked on all fours what difference would there be between him and an ordinary pig? To be called the Pig-man, rather than the Man-pig, surely implied that he was upright, and dressed. Could he talk? Probably, in a kind of grunting way, or else how could he tell the people what kind of food he wanted them to put in his bucket? Why hadn’t he asked Dad about the Pig-man? That had been his mistake; Dad would have told him exactly all about it. But he had gone. Eric fell asleep, and in his sleep he saw Dad and the Pig-man going in a train together; he called, but they did not hear and the train carried them away. ‘Dad!’ he shouted desperately after it. ‘Don’t bring the Pig-man when you come back! Don’t bring the Pig-man!’ Then his mother was in the room, kissing him and smelling nice; she felt soft, and the softness ducked him into sleep, this time without dreams; but the next day his questions returned.

  Still, there was school in the morning, and going down to the swings in the afternoon, and altogether a lot of different t
hings to crowd out the figure of the Pig-man and the questions connected with him. And Eric was never farther from worrying about it all than that moment, a few evenings later, when suddenly he came to a crisis.

  Eric had been allowed, ‘just for once’, to bring his train into the dining-room after tea, because there was a fire there that made it nicer than the room where he usually played. It was warm and bright, and the carpet in front of the fireplace was smooth and firm, exactly right for laying out the rails on. Donald had come home and was sitting – in Dad’s chair, but never mind – reading the paper and smoking. Mum was in the kitchen, clattering gently about, and both doors were open so that she and Donald could call out remarks to each another. Only a short passage lay between. It was just the part of the day Eric liked best, and bed-time was comfortably far off. He fitted the sections of the rail together, glancing in anticipation at the engine as it stood proudly waiting to haul the carriages round and round, tremendously fast.

  Then his mother called: ‘Eric! Do be a sweet, good boy, and take this stuff out for the Pig-man. My hands are covered with cake mixture. I’ll let you scrape out the basin when you come in.’

  For a moment he kept quite still, hoping he hadn’t really heard her say it, that it was just a voice inside his head. But Donald looked over at him and said: ‘Go along, old man. You don’t mind, do you?’

  Eric said, ‘But tonight’s when the Pig-man comes.’

  Surely, surely they weren’t asking him to go out, in the deep twilight, just at the time when there was the greatest danger of actually meeting the Pig-man?