‘I wish I had hair long enough to let down out of the windows for you two to climb up,’ said Ida, shaking her two little pigtails, properly so called, for they were no longer.
They were to share a large attic room at the top of the house. It had windows on three sides, out of which they could see the river as if on a map. It was a beautiful river, flowing through meadows or under trees. As seen now, on a summer evening it looked smooth, sleepy and timeless. But it was a wilful river, ready to overflow its banks after any heavy rain even in summer, for which reason there were neither factories nor houses along this part of its winding course to the sea. If after several years of low rainfall people began to forget the past and put out plans for building housing estates on the meadows, or factories on the banks, the river would suddenly wake up, turn over in its bed, and pour deep lakes of water over half the country. However, the island on which Green Knowe stood was slightly humped, just enough to keep it clear of the floods, and that is how there came to be such an old house on it.
‘What a lot of islands the river makes,’ said Ida. ‘We are on one, and I can see at least three others. We must go exploring and sail round them all. Perhaps we shall find one where nobody has ever set foot. It looks beautifully wild.’ The boys leant out at her elbows. A hundred yards upstream there was a water gate controlling the flow into a branch that went off at right angles. The tumbling of the water over the bar filled the bedroom with its day-long, night-long sound. The main stream, undisturbed by the loss of half its volume, flowed quietly past Green Knowe, throwing out as it went, in its careless liberality, a loop of water that encircled the garden, and returned beside one wall of the house.
‘Look at this house reflected in the water,’ said Ping, calling the others to look out of the side window. ‘Isn’t it still. I can see us all looking out of the window, but our faces wiggle as if we were eating toffee.’ They ran from window to window, eager to see all there was.
‘The sky is so blue I wonder why it doesn’t reflect the river just as the river reflects it, like barber’s mirrors reflecting backward and forward for ever.’
‘Before it could reflect it would have to have something dark behind it like the bottom of the river. That’s why.’
‘Well, outer space is behind the sky,’ said Oskar, ‘and that’s dark, I suppose.’
‘Then I don’t know why it doesn’t reflect,’ said Ping. ‘But once is enough really. Look at the fish rising.’
‘Your eyes reflect,’ said Ida. ‘I can see a tiny pink sunset cloud and a tiny green pin-point earth. No colour photo was ever so minute.’
‘I see them huge, though,’ said Ping. ‘The cloud is so big that if it was a mountain you never could possibly climb to the top, and the earth stretches all the way to where the sky begins. Miles and miles and miles with woods and rushes and waterfalls and water-wheels and nightingales and bells and singing fishes.’
‘I shall like that,’ said Ida. ‘We’ll have to go quietly by starlight to hear singing fishes. Do you know there are some, Ping, or are you just thinking it?’
‘My father used to say,’ said Oskar, gazing far away at the sun which was shooting out rays like cartwheel spokes, ‘that there isn’t anything real except thoughts. Nothing is there at all unless somebody’s thinking it. He said thoughts were more real than guns. He got shot by the Russians for saying that. But the thought wasn’t shot, because I’m thinking it now. So if Ping has singing fishes, let’s try and hear some. Why not?’
‘I’m in a hurry to begin,’ said Ida. ‘I want the river. I could eat it. Let’s go down to tea. Bags I this bed in the corner.’ She threw her case on it. ‘Come on!’
*
THE CHILDREN WERE told they were to make their own beds and keep their room tidy, but as nobody ever came up to inspect, it soon became a lively and special place. Oskar had a photo of his father that he pinned up, and Ping had a Chinese picture off the side of a tea-box. If Ping wanted to burn smelly sausages made of rolled clay and twigs, and call them joss sticks, or Oskar to shape candle-ends into little images of Kruschev and stick pins into them, or Ida to keep newts and water-lilies in the wash basin, it was nobody’s business to know. The two old ladies fortunately seemed to think that children were as well able to take care of themselves as cats. You only needed to feed them and turn them out.
*
THE FIRST MORNING was fine and windless. Ida, Oskar and Ping went off after breakfast. At the bottom of the garden there was a wooden boat-house, its four corner posts planted in a marshy piece on the bend of the river. They ran across the unsteady gangway and opened the boat-house door. Inside it was half dark. There was a smell of concentrated river water. The roof and walls were greened with perpetual damp and wriggly with elastic water patterns. Low down, level with their feet, a canoe lay fretting and tugging gently on its mooring. It was painted blue and brown, and the water that reflected it received it as part of itself. The canoe was lightly built and beautifully balanced, and it would comfortably hold three children. When Ida put the weight of one foot into it, it was like treading on the water itself. It yielded so far that she feared it was sinking under her, but then the water resisted, and she sat down feeling like a water-lily on its leaf. The boys followed her in. Ping sat in front and Oskar in the stern. They parted the willow strands that hung like a net across the opening, and the river was theirs.
The sun had not yet pierced the haze of morning. The water was like a looking-glass with a faint mist of breath drying off it. The children felt it so bewitching that without even a discussion they turned downstream, drifting silently along, willing to become part of the river if they could. Along the edge of the water ran a ribbon of miniature cliff, the top edge undulating like the cliffs of Dover, the vertical sides pierced with holes the size of a golf ball. Sometimes the cliff was high enough to show seams of gravel or strata of different soils. Above it willow-herb or loosestrife or giant dock heavy with seed rose against the sky, and reflected themselves in the water with an effect like ‘skeleton’ writing. The canoe seemed to hover between two skies. The banks of the river were richly alive. Moorhens hurried from side to side trailing a widening V, fish leapt along the surface, water rats swam underwater, their V trailing from the end of their projecting noses. Or they peeped out from holes, or it might be mice, or martins, or a kingfisher. The rushes ticked like clocks, meadowsweet suddenly bowed down from above almost to the children’s noses as a bumble bee landed on it; or a rush waved desperately as something attacked it out of sight at the bottom.
They drifted happily along, a twist of the paddle now and again being enough to keep them on a straight course. Presently the sun came out and beautifully warmed them in the shell of the canoe, and with the sun appeared another host of living things, butterflies, dragonflies, water boatmen, brightly coloured beetles and lizards; and high up in the sky a weaving of swallows. The canoe drifted to a standstill.
Ping’s eyes were fixed on a small spider that was descending from the branch of a tree, playing out its rope as it came, its many feet all busy. It landed on the point of the prow, made its rope fast and immediately swarmed up again.
‘We’re tethered,’ Ping said, smiling indulgently. ‘Are there no big things in English rivers – no water buffaloes, no tigers in the bamboo, no crocodiles or hippopotamuses?’ As he spoke there was a sound of a large body being jerked up out of the mud, and a shadow-flecked bullock on the edge of the bank that had escaped Ping’s notice snorted in his ear. He fell over backward into Ida’s lap, while the other two laughed and the bullock squared its forelegs and lowered its head. Ping stared up at it from underneath.
‘I can see all of us in its eyes,’ he said, ‘reflected quite clearly. But you can see it means nothing to him. They are awfully stupid eyes. He isn’t quite sure that we aren’t a dog or a motor-car.’ Ping stuck one leg straight up in the air. ‘I don’t believe he knows it isn’t a stick.’ The bullock stared a long time and other bullocks came and stared too. The
n it lifted its nose and began a tremendous bellow which suddenly tailed off into a foolish query, mild and puzzled. Ping put his leg down again and the bullock sighed deeply in relief.
‘Let’s shut our eyes,’ said Ida, ‘and say everything we can hear.’
They all began together so that their voices sounded like a cluster of ducks or any other young things that might be sunning themselves on the river. Ida, however, said they must take it in turns so that they wouldn’t count anything twice.
Water under the canoe’s ribs, whirlpool round my paddle, drip off the end of Ping’s paddle, bird flying off tree, larks singing, rooks circling, swallows diving, rustling in grass, grasshoppers, honeybees, flies, frogs, bubbles rising, a weir somewhere, tails swishing, cow patting, aeroplanes, a fishing rod playing out; zizz, buzz, trill, crick, whizz, plop, flutter, splash; and all the time everywhere whisper, whisper, whisper, lap, chuckle and sigh. If someone moved in the canoe, a moment later on the far side of the river all the rushes nudged each other and whispered about the ripple that had arrived.
‘Everything’s trying to say something,’ said Ping. ‘Fishes poke up round mouths as if they were stammering.’
‘Do you think,’ said Ida out of a silence, ‘that the sound I can hear now might be singing fish!’
They all listened. There was a new sound coming from farther downstream, round the next bend, a musical bubbling, warbling whistle.
With one accord all three paddles went in and the canoe shot off. They were very vigorous after so much drifting and listening. The whistling grew louder every minute, and then appeared a huge white swan, sailing menacingly, a warship at action stations. Behind him came seven small grey cygnets, whose infant chatter was the noise that had brought the children, and behind them the mother swan guarding the rear. She now hurried forward tossing on the water with the violence of her foot strokes, and both parents bore down on the canoe, clapping their terrible wooden sounding wings, shooting out necks like snakes and hissing in the children’s faces. Their open beaks were rough-edged mincers. Fortunately the canoe had enough momentum to be swerved at speed to a safer distance. The mother swan turned back to her brood and the cob contented himself with patrolling up and down between them and the fleeing canoe, keeping his implacable eye sideways to the intruders. As soon as the children felt safe they paused to watch.
‘Look, there is one tiny cygnet quite left out. It’s only half the size of the others.’
While the ‘alert’ had been on there had indeed been seven cygnets in a cluster. The smallest having succeeded in joining them while the parents’ attention was elsewhere. Now, however, the mother swan had headed it off, and it swam with great agitation alone, uttering heart-rending peeps. Its only and persistent wish was to join the others, but this was not allowed. Whenever it thought it had, by sneaking round behind, achieved its aim, a long white snake would descend, and a beak used like a spoon flip it away.
‘Why is she so horrid to it? The littlest ought to be her favourite,’ said Ida in distress. ‘She won’t let it eat anything.’ But when the cob saw the poor little thing trying to get round behind him, he hissed, and closing his wicked mincers on its back held it under water.
This was too much for Ida, who leapt to her feet, nearly upsetting the canoe, and hurled her paddle. The attack and the noise – for the two boys shouted at Ida as the canoe rocked – brought the cob back to his duties. He wheeled to rap with his beak on the paddle that was now floating beside him. The poor dazed cygnet came to the surface and paddled away for dear life, straight into Ida’s hands. As she had now no paddle she cradled it tenderly in her lap while the boys worked to get out of range of the angry parent. They were not pursued. The six remaining cygnets cuddled up together and whistled contentedly. The mother swan up-ended herself and searched the river bottom for food. After a decent interval to cool his temper, the cob did so too.
‘Their feet remind me of umbrellas blown inside out,’ said Ping.
The little cygnet continued to make the most mournful squeaking.
‘Ours must be an orphan,’ said Oskar. ‘It’s a Displaced Cygnet.’
‘We’ll keep it and bring it up, and have a tame swan swimming beside us wherever we go,’ said Ida. ‘I wonder if swans fight? Suppose it’s a he-swan and there are fights whenever we go out. A sparrow fight is bad enough. Imagine a swan fight! Think of the noise their wings make taking off. Like a paddle steamer.’
‘I don’t think they fight like dogs,’ said Ping. ‘I think they wrestle, each holding the other’s right wing in his beak. I would like to see it.’
‘It won’t even be grown up by the end of the holiday,’ said Oskar. ‘It will still be a baby. And what are we going to do with it then? And where will it sleep?’
‘I’ll make it a nest in a box. In the cupboard there is an old eiderdown with a hole in the corner. We’ll shake out a lot of feathers and make it feel at home.’
But the grief of the cygnet was very hard to bear. It went on and on. The children could hardly talk because of it. It never stopped to take breath. It made the river journey one long execution party. The children got quite miserable.
‘It will go on squeaking till it dies,’ said Ida.
At this point they came to a mill and a lock. The lock-keeper happened to be on the bridge, so they paddled straight into the narrow stone passage and the gate was closed behind them. As the water sank, it was like going down in a lift. The walls rose and rose till it was frightening to believe that the river anywhere in its course was as deep as that. The plug gurgling of this giant’s bath sucked and tugged. The cygnet’s cries, magnified in the enclosing slimy walls, filled Oskar’s ears like anguish in a prison. At last the gate was lifted, and after a final rush and babble of conflicting waters the new level was established and the canoe could be paddled out into the mill pool. This was as big as a lake and as wild as a marsh. Near the mill it was overhung with trees, but its distant edge was fringed with tall rushes in which were openings where smaller streams flowed into the pool.
Just below the lock two more swans were sailing. They had none of the majesty and organization of the family upstream. They were restless, nervous and appeared to be looking for something, thrusting their long necks at water-level into the rushes, or turning round and round in one spot with necks stretched up into watch-towers.
When the canoe breasted the pool and carried the squealing cygnet into earshot, the two swans heard at once. They sailed along wing to wing turning their heads sideways to the canoe while they circled round it. As they drew nearer their bearing stiffened and grew fiercer, while the cygnet, now quite hoarse, yelled and fought in Ida’s hands. The swans came so close they could have overturned the canoe, their unwinking eyes level with the children’s.
‘What shall I do now?’ Ida cried, shrinking away.
‘Let it go,’ said Oskar, ‘I think these are its proper parents.’
Ida opened her hands, and the cygnet wildly scrambling on its elbowy little black legs and flapping wings hardly stronger than a butterfly’s, left the canoe for its mother’s back. She fluffed up her wing feathers to hold it there, and both swans paddled off at full speed into the distant rushes.
‘Whew! What a relief!’ said Ida, but Oskar was following the course of the swans with happy eyes, his jaw thrust out.
‘I suppose it got trapped in the lock the last time somebody went through in the other direction. Look, Ida, it’s off her back now and they are both showing it how to nibble water.’
While they were watching, the canoe drifted into a grass bank and Ping put his arm round a post that stood there.
‘Here’s a good place for mooring. Let’s have a bathe.’ They all scrambled out on to the bank, and soon had dived in like three frogs.
‘I’m going to practise up-ending like the swans, and see what I can find on the bottom,’ said Ida. ‘Let’s see who can find the most interesting thing on the bottom.’ She vanished leaving only her little feet and ankles on
the surface. When she came up for breath she saw Oskar’s long shanks waving madly about, and Ping’s neat gilded legs cool like fish. At the first attempt nobody found anything. The bottom felt unpleasant to the hands. It was deep slime with here and there the rusty edge of a tin, or things that did not feel quite alive and yet moved.
‘There must be all kinds of things,’ Ida persisted, looking with her wet plastered hair and chattering teeth very determined, like a hunting otter. ‘People always drop things getting in and out of boats. I expect this has been a mooring place ever since boats were invented. We might find Hereward the Wake’s dagger.’
Up came all their feet again; and again. The third time was lucky. Ida came panting to the surface with a bent piece of iron, and Ping with a live eel held firmly in both hands. When he had shown it to the others he hurled it up into the sky where it shone silver for a moment before entering the water again with no splash at all, like a needle entering silk. Ping seemed supremely satisfied, his almond eyes lifted at the corners making the same kind of smile as his mouth.
‘What’s this that I’ve got?’ said Ida. ‘It’s like a starting handle. It was awfully heavy to swim with. It would be useful if we had a motor boat.’
‘It’s a lock key,’ said Oskar. ‘Much more useful. Now we can go anywhere we want quite by ourselves.’ ‘What a lucky find! Because this pool seems the centre point for exploring lots of islands. I can see five or six waterways from here. We shall be always coming and going. What have you found, Oskar?’
‘I don’t know what it is – some kind of metal bowl. But it is such an odd shape – as if it really was for something special. It might be silver. Do you suppose this is all of it? It wouldn’t stand steadily on this knob thing underneath. Perhaps it’s the lid of something.’ He turned it the other way up.
The Children of Green Knowe Collection Page 13