by Sam Angus
‘Halt. About-turn. Salute. Yes, yes, very good.’
Ada, standing at the centre in front of the girls, fell back two paces and clicked her heels, and everyone copied her, just like a game of Simon Says.
‘Take aim.’
She raised her hockey stick and levelled it the unseen enemy.
‘Fire!’
After a while Ada decided that the enemy had fled and that it was all very satisfactory and she began to declaim some rousing Shakespeare that belonged to another war entirely.
Then she herded the regiment of rosy-cheeked, chattering girls and hobbling staff back into the Painted Hall, plumped herself down on to her chair and firmly shook open The Times.
49
ISLANDS
The following Monday, Lyla’s class once again enjoyed the dubious benefits of Threadgold’s weekly visit to the dentist in Ladywood.
‘Dreaming deepens the soul,’ Great Aunt Ada began fiercely, her eyes fixing on each girl in turn. ‘Dreaming is how you discover what sort of person you want to be. If you don’t dream, hmmm, you’ll end up being quite the wrong sort of person for you, d’you see? Certain grown-ups –’ Ada narrowed her eyes – ‘are telling you to be a certain sort of person, but you may well want to be an entirely different sort of person. That is why you must allow your dreams to ramble, like –’ Aunt Ada cast about for inspiration – ‘like climbing roses. Or skylarks. Yes, yes – to soar, like skylarks.’
Lyla glowered at her desk. Why couldn’t Great Aunt Ada be more like other people’s aunts?
‘Outside, girls – chop-chop. No, no scarves, Brenda, for the Greeks have need of them.’ Great Aunt Ada steamed down the corridor. ‘One two, one two, no Brenda, no hats. They’re a great impediment to clear thinking.’
The girls hurried to keep pace with Great Aunt Ada, gathering around her on the lawn, waiting for her next pronouncement.
‘Yes, over there.’ She gestured vaguely about. ‘Empty your heads, fill your minds with dreams, as sponges with water.’
Lyla looked around surreptitiously to discover what Garden Hill girls thought of Great Aunt Ada’s approach to education, for this wasn’t like the classes other teachers gave. But their heads were tilted up, eyes shut, and only Imelda was looking about, her mouth half open as if dreams might enter her head that way, because there didn’t seem to be anything in Imelda’s head unless someone put it there for her. Lyla quickly turned her own face upward to show Imelda that Lyla Spence was fit to burst with the dreams that were inside her head.
And soon enough, thoughts of Mop were drifting about in Lyla’s head, and she dreamed how one day she’d be just like Mop. Then she thought perhaps she wouldn’t wear her hair like a lampshade or such trailing clothes. Perhaps she wouldn’t have such a careful, tidy house as Mop’s either. No, she would live on an island. Lyla’s dream of an island blossomed and spread, and soon she was floating among a sea of islands because a world had come into her head in which every child had their own island, and they lived there with only their parents and the people who loved them, and everyone on every island wore grass skirts.
‘To your desks, girls! Don’t waste time – take your seats and quickly write down your dreams before they run away. Be brief. Brevity encourages clarity of thought and vision. We don’t want to waste anyone’s time, do we now?’
Aunt Ada plonked her slippered feet on to Threadgold’s desk.
The girls glanced uncertainly at one another. Lyla smiled to herself and began:
Mothers will always be with the children they belong to and never become separated. There will be no wars, and there will be no women called Ethel.
Soon the words were racing across her page.
‘Good, good,’ said Great Aunt Ada abruptly. ‘Your papers, girls. Your papers.’ She gestured vaguely about the room.
The girls rose, clutching their papers. Imelda was always first to do anything a teacher asked, so she placed her paper beside Aunt Ada’s velvet slippers.
‘No, no!’ barked Aunt Ada, scandalized.
Imelda started with fear.
‘Not for me, Imelda – for the chimney. Those dreams are an entirely private matter, for yourselves, girls, not for me.’ Aunt Ada lifted The Times but continued to expound aloud to the baffled class. ‘Yes, the chimney. That is a most convenient place for all concerned, is it not?’
Aunt Ada’s mind had drifted, for she shook The Times in the satisfied kind of way that denoted she felt she had caused enough mischief for the morning.
50
PINK DANDELIONS
‘Outside, girls – chop-chop. Coats on, over your bed jackets. It is a high and starry night, just the right kind of night.’ Great Aunt Ada was making sweeping movements with her arms across the Painted Hall and all those that were gathered in it for evening prayer, shooing them and the cowed staff outside.
‘Tomorrow I will launch my invention classes, and by way of preparation I’ll show you a small sideline of my own: my Dandelions – my very own fireworks. They’re just a minor by-product of my own inventions. They were created, d’you see, to protect us all from the German shipping. Yes, yes, should Hitler dare to send his shipping up the Bristol Channel, he will meet with my Pink Dandelions.’ Ada tilted her chin and beamed to indicate that the Pink Dandelions would be – of course, and undoubtedly, and without question – the absolute and irrevocable undoing of the entire German navy.
‘Their instruments, don’t you see, they won’t be able to use them, won’t be able to navigate.’ Aunt Ada smiled. ‘They’ll be befuddled by the lights; they’ll run aground on the treacherous rocks of the North Devon coast, oh yes.’ Now Great Aunt Ada bellowed towards the currant bushes of the kitchen garden, ‘SOLOMON! ON THE COUNT OF THREE, PLEASE. There’ll be noise, girls – a lot of noise. Brace yourselves.’
There was an ear-splitting crack, and another, and another – and suddenly rose-coloured fireworks were erupting in the starry sky, bursting into showers that each in turn spawned yet more showers, which burst and spawned, and burst and spawned again – dizzying new constellations spawning new constellations, star after star rising and exploding in luminous showers that cast an other-worldly pink over all the girls, and sheep, and staff.
Ada looked about in satisfaction and, as the last star sank, said, ‘Tomorrow, we shall look at your inventions. What things can you think of that do not exist today? As we stand here, Great Men in Whitehall are hard at work on all manner of most amusing inventions. Bouncing Bombs. Skipping Bombs. Stink Bombs. Ah yes, the Stink Bomb, a most vicious thing. The men in Whitehall have dreamed up the precise combination of odours that will turn the German forces back to Berlin.’
Great Aunt Ada peered at the girls. ‘How wonderful. A smell that can disperse an army and yet not kill a single man.’ Her iridescent eyes twinkled. ‘Oh yes, all manner of skulduggery is being dreamed up in the dim caverns of Whitehall.
‘But which among you can conceive of things that do not yet exist? Hmm? Motors that propel us to the moon? Telephones that show you the face at the other end? Hmm? Nothing has ever been invented, girls, nothing has ever come into existence that did not first exist in someone’s imagination.’
Afterwards Cat asked Lyla, ‘How does your aunt know what goes on in Whitehall?’
Lyla answered promptly, ‘She doesn’t. She’s just dotty.’
51
A BETTER WORLD
After the brief Christmas break, classes started once more, and Threadgold’s teeth were again required by the dentist in Ladywood.
The girls of Form IV found Great Aunt Ada in a solemn frame of mind. After waiting a good long while, she raised her head, looked about and barked, ‘Can you imagine a better world? Hmm? Well, can you? What does it look like?’ Another pause. ‘Last night Hitler changed the city of Bristol from the City of Churches to the City of Ruins. The Jacobean Hospital destroyed, four ancient churches gone, five thousand incendiary bombs, twelve thousand high explosives, tens of thousands of homes destr
oyed. Now, you –’ Great Aunt Ada peered from girl to girl – ‘you are adults-IN-WAITING. There is, in fact, currently no point to you at all. For the time being, you have no purpose.
‘But one day, when we’ve done away with Hitler, you will rebuild the world. And what kind of world will you build for your children and children’s children? Write a CHARTER, girls, for the world you want. Freedom of speech? Women’s rights? Votes? Freedom for all from persecution? . . . Equal pay? Equal opportunity? A first-class education for all? Hmm? Chop-chop – pick up your pencils and remember: brevity. Brevity encourages clarity of vision. We’ll send your charter to the trenches. Yes, yes, our men must be entirely clear what they’re fighting for.’
52
GELIGNITE
Cat had told Lyla that she would spend Sunday with her, so Lyla had been looking forward to Sunday all week and was about to suggest going to Ladywood, when Cat said, ‘Come on. I want to find out what Aunt Ada is doing.’
‘Oh, I already know that – she’ll be reading in the Smoking Room. I can tell you what she’ll be wearing too, because she wears the same thing every Sunday: tweed plus twos left over, probably, by an ancient retainer.’
‘Come on. I think there’s a mystery about your aunt – and anyway, it’s what she’s been up to in the Billiard Room that I want to find out.’
So Lyla led Cat down the stone stairs and along the staff passage, rather proud to know her way around all the secret parts of the house. She put a finger to her lips and began to tiptoe. She pushed open the letter box of the Billiard Room door, peeked through it, and saw the bottles of ‘Gelignite’ and ‘Blasting Powder’ and wires. Nodding, she gestured to Cat to look in.
Cat peered in for ages, and Lyla began to grow impatient. Finally, Cat crept away from the door a little and whispered with a sense of urgency, ‘Do you think it’s all quite safe?’
‘Oh yes, quite safe,’ answered Lyla. ‘They’re only the Pink Dandelions she showed us that she invented to confuse the German shipping.’
‘I see,’ said Cat. As they turned and walked away, she added, ‘Father realizes he was at Oxford with your Great Aunt Ada. He says it was unusual for a lady to have gone to Oxford to study a science in those days.’
Lyla didn’t like people knowing too much about her or her relations. ‘I already know there’s nothing very usual about her.’
‘You’re very contrary, Lyla . . .’ Cat paused. ‘You’re the kind of person who goes down the up escalators and up the down ones. Well . . . you are, aren’t you?’
‘What’s wrong with that? Doesn’t everyone do that?’
Cat giggled and took her arm and asked if Lyla would come with her to Ladywood that following Sunday, so then Lyla didn’t mind about being called contrary.
53
PROBABILITY
Aunt Ada peered dolefully at the formulae on Threadgold’s blackboard and murmured, ‘Really, it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.’
Lyla’s classmates watched Ada nervously and braced themselves for another of her unusual stabs in the direction of mathematics.
‘Quadratic equations, I see. Did Threadgold explain why she is burdening you with quadratics, hmm? I suppose you’ve tired of them already, but they weren’t entirely invented to deaden the soul. They were invented by the Babylonians, taken up by the Ancient Greeks, and they’re used today not only to bore schoolgirls, but by Great Men to calculate World-Changing Things.’
Faye and Imelda exchanged confused glances, as Ada continued.
‘Well, girls, Prudence in the kitchen is in need of a clearer understanding of quadratics and of the laws of probability. Pick up the blackboard, girls, take your exercise books, chop-chop, follow me, for we must go to her. Dear Prudence has not removed her tin hat since we declared war on Germany, for she is certain that Hitler is planning to drop a bomb directly on to her pastry table.’
Arriving at the kitchen, Ada flung open the door, and the fourth-formers were presented with the spectacle of the pink-faced Prudence in the aforesaid tin hat, brandishing a rolling pin. Then they saw the cause of Prudence’s dismay: handsome Henny trotting about amidst the copper pots and pans and showing no signs of laying an egg.
‘Ah, Prudence,’ declared Ada.
Prudence’s indignation at Henny turned to alarm at the unaccountable appearance of her mistress and so many schoolgirls in her kitchen. ‘What’s happened? What’s going on?’ she asked, clamping a hand to her tin in fear at what this sudden invasion by Form IV might portend.
‘Now, now, dear Prudence, do sit – nothing untoward is happening. It’s only that the girls and I feel you’re in need of a clearer understanding of the laws of probability. Yes, yes, the blackboard next to me, please. Now, girls, let’s apply the laws of probability to the matter of the bomb and the pastry table.’
Resting their exercise books on said pastry table, the girls made feverish notes, trying to keep pace with Ada’s calculations. ‘The pastry table is four by four feet, and, yes, girls, that makes sixteen square feet, that goes on the top, draw a line underneath, now convert the United Kingdom into square feet and put that underneath. That’s sixty million acres in total. One acre represents forty thousand square feet, so yes, chop-chop, multiply forty thousand by sixty million and what do you have, hmm, what fraction of the overall land mass does Prudence’s pastry table represent? . . . Good, now you’ve done that, take the size of the German bomb, SC 250, the Sprengbombe Cylindrisch, that is, the general-purpose high-explosive carried by German bombers. I am sure you know, do you not, that the Sprengbombe Cylindrisch measures fifteen inches in diameter, so, chop-chop, do the maths, girls, convert fifteen square inches into feet, then put that over the pastry table . . .’
Ada’s conversions and fractions and parabolas ran dizzyingly over the edges of the blackboard and up Prudence’s walls. Some of the girls, including Faye, were still hastily scribbling down what they could, but Prudence, unimpressed by the procession of numbers across her walls, had nudged off her shoes and set about rubbing her bunions until Ada, with a flourish, concluded her calculations with a number that ran all the way along the top of the primus stove and had so many zeros that you couldn’t tell where it started and where it finished.
‘Hmm, d’you see, Prudence? So large a number is meaningless, is it not? We cannot even IMAGINE such a number, cannot envisage even what that number represents? No, no, what we need, d’you see, is a comparison; only by means of a comparison can we make a thing real to us.’
‘So, let us look at the likelihood of, for example, a sheep making her way to the top of the clocktower. For that is as unlikely, is it not, as the matter of a Sprengbombe Cylindrisch landing on Prudence’s pastry table?’
With this, Great Aunt Ada launched an entirely new set of calculations relating to the probability of the sheep and the clock tower. A dizzying stream of numbers and letters and brackets made its way across Prudence’s walls and finally, mercifully came to a conclusion that happened to be much the same in length as the conclusion of her first calculation, Ada threw down her chalk and said triumphantly, ‘D’you see, Prudence? The numbers are roughly the same because, of course, the probability of the sheep and the bomb are roughly comparable. So, you see, there’s nothing to fear – nothing to fear at all, is there? Oh dear, I see you don’t agree . . .’
Prudence, still rubbing her bunions, squinted sceptically at a number that seemed to have neither beginning nor ending. ‘. . . and of course, in a way, you’re quite right,’ continued Ada. ‘In fact, the problem is that algebra doesn’t have all the solutions; it can only take us so far. We must prove the matter of probability empirically, yes, yes. Come, dear Prudence – we must go in search of a sheep capable of scaling my clock tower, must we not, in order to be able to imagine just how improbable the matter of the bomb and the sheep actually are.’
At which juncture, Prudence leaped up in delight and waddled over to the copper pans, amidst which, it appeared, Henny had – most
improbably – laid an egg.
54
VESTS AND KNICKERS
When the weather grew warm again, and warmer still, and the summer break finally arrived, Lyla and Cat would often volunteer for roof-spotting.
One afternoon, growing tired of staring into a clear blue sky for German planes, they began to sun themselves and then grew hot, and stripped down to their vests and knickers. They were larking about among the statues of the parapet, striking classical poses and bursting into peals of laughter at each other, when Great Aunt Ada suddenly and most unexpectedly appeared amidst the turrets. Cat and Lyla leaped down and groped about for their clothes as she marched towards them in what appeared to be a state of great agitation.
‘Read it,’ she announced abruptly, thrusting an envelope into Lyla’s hands. ‘You cannot continue to ignore your father. I cannot stand by and let this happen – it’s too sad. Don’t you see? Lovell was like a son to me.’ She stalked away, pausing at the little door that led up to the roof, then turned and said with some anger. ‘What would you do if his letters stopped coming, Lyla – have you ever thought about that? If one day they just stopped?’
Lyla stared at the envelope, then, with determination, thrust it into Cat’s hands. ‘Give it to Solomon.’
Cat looked stricken and whispered, ‘Lyla, Ada knows something, I’m sure she does. That’s why she’s upset. I think you need to read it, otherwise she would just have given it to Trumpet instead of bringing it all the way up here.’ She thrust the letter back at Lyla.
Lyla shook her head and turned away.
‘Do you even know where he is?’ Cat pleaded. ‘Do you know what’s happening there? He’s fighting, Lyla, fighting for England, for us.’
‘I don’t care what happens to him.’