Terak was dressed in tartan trews and a kilt, and a velvet jacket. His mother’s bagpipes were under his arm. He was disguised with a red beard and hair and false eyebrows. His boots were four times as large as his feet and his sporran was as big as a bear cub. It was a shock to Ida that he did not look like himself. But there was no mistaking his eyes, nor himself when he got going. It was an effort to take her attention off him even for a second, but she had to look to see how her Aunt Maud was taking it. Dr Biggin was sitting at the very edge of the ring. With her round back, her arms crossed and hugging herself, and her nice wrinkled monkey face, she looked as if she might be one of the performers. She was watching with black shifting eyes, but not showing more interest than she had done in the other items. She was steadily sucking bull’s-eyes.
Terak had the gift of stage presence, quite apart from his size, although at his first appearance it was this which had made everybody gasp. But oddly enough, though he had spent his life in unwilling invisibility, now that people saw him they could not look at anything else. He had a genius for making any silly little action both funny and lovable. The public took to him at sight and roared applause, which he acknowledged by blowing kisses and shaking himself by the hand, his incredible eyes creased up with joy at so much company. His own huge pleasure was in itself both ridiculous and infectious, it was a gathering snowball of success. The clowns meanwhile fooled around, shaking hands with each other, getting under his feet, and scattering with squawks when he shoo’d them, only to return. At last he cunningly caught them one by one, buzzing like flies, and after various attempts to get rid of them he hung them up by their trousers or the back of their coats to hooks on the main tent-poles. There they hung as if on a fly-paper. His great wish, it seemed, was to make music, for which he had his bagpipes, which he dusted and caressed. But something was wrong. He could not get them to play. He blew and pumped, but either no sound came or the wrong one – a moaning fog-horn, or a dreadful hee-haw just behind his ear, or a police whistle. At this last a clown with a blue helmet and a formidable rubber truncheon cycled in looking for trouble but quite unable to see Terak, against whose legs he leaned his bicycle. Both he and it were lifted up and hung on a post, simply to leave the would-be musician in peace. After much tinkering and shaking Terak drew out of the mouthpiece of his instrument the inevitable string of sausages, and settled down to some soulful playing. Immediately, out of his pockets, his sleeves, the back of his coat collar, his sporran, came half a dozen wriggling dachshunds, howling their hearts out to the music. He pushed them all back again and again. He bribed them with sausages, but it was no good. In the end they all made music together in their own fashion, the clowns hanging up on the poles joining in with mouth-organs, comb and paper, yodelling, whistles or any percussion that their position allowed them to make. The audience could not resist joining in too, till Terak, rising to his full height, roared in a voice that would have silenced lions:
‘SILENCE FOR THE ATOM BOMB!’
He held in his hand a shrivelled balloon, which he began to inflate. Instantly there was dead silence. It was a giant-sized balloon which slowly, slowly grew bigger. When it was beginning to get tight, Terak tried scratching it with his finger. At the squawk, out popped the dachshunds again barking as if at a snake. They were silenced and treated one by one with puffs of air out of the balloon. Its diminished size was then inflated again to the same point and bigger. The tension and expectation were kept up so long that the audience became quite hysterical. The clowns hanging on the poles kicked and pleaded for mercy as the balloon grew fabulously, filling the space of the ring and bouncing and wobbling on its mouthpiece. Terak seemed frightened of it himself. He brought it to his mouth for another blow, then let a little out instead. He became madly brave, taking in a last huge lungful and addressing himself to the balloon with distended cheeks. It exploded with a bang so loud you could hardly hear it. Terak went over on his back. The hooked-up clowns whizzed down to earth (they were all on pulleys) and ran for their lives leaving their coats and trousers on the hooks. The dachshunds swarmed out to lick Terak’s face and by an unrehearsed accident two of them ran off to have a tug-of-war over his beard which had come off. And there was Terak sitting up with his own face exposed, blowing kisses to Ping, Oskar and Ida and tossing them spare balloons. Before they could do anything but grin back, the midget clowns rushed in again with a strawberry net which they threw over Terak’s head and tied with ropes. Then an elephant was brought in to drag him away.
This was the end of the programme. The audience stood up to clap. They stamped and shouted: ‘Terak! We want Terak!’
The children turned to each other. ‘Isn’t he having a wonderful time! Let’s go and talk to him.’ Then they remembered that this was a benefit appearance for Dr Biggin.
‘What do you think of the Giant?’ they asked, but at that moment ‘God save the Queen’ began and everybody had to stand up and be quiet. When it was over, they all began again. ‘What did you think of the Giant? Were you surprised? That proves it, doesn’t it? No one can say your tooth isn’t real now.’
Dr Biggin smiled knowingly and condescendingly. ‘I enjoyed him immensely. He was a really wonderful fake.’
‘Fake!’ cried the children, appalled. ‘He was real, as real as anything. Didn’t you see his face when the dogs pulled his beard off? Didn’t you see his teeth, like your tooth?’
‘The rest of him was just as false as his beard. They can fake anything nowadays. There aren’t teeth like the one I found. That was the whole point of it. Probably this was a man on stilts, padded. It’s an old trick.’
‘But Aunt Maud! His eyes! They are as big as horses’ eyes and all laughing. And he saw us.’
‘Probably done with magnifying lenses. But it doesn’t matter how it was done. We weren’t meant to spot it.’
‘Let’s go and find him, and then you will see.’
‘My dear children! I almost envy you your credulity! We won’t go and find him, firstly because they would never allow us to see how it was done, and secondly, because if they did, it would be the first big disillusionment of your young lives. A heap of gadgets and an empty suit.’
‘But we thought you believed in giants.’
‘I believe there were giants once – 20,000 years ago. But not now. There aren’t any now. Because if there were we should know, shouldn’t we. They’re not things you could overlook.’
‘But …’ said the children, but gave it up in despair.
As they were walking back to the canoes, each with a large ice-cream which Dr Biggin had fallen behind to pay for, Ida said: ‘I’m sorry, Ping. One can’t do anything for grown-ups. They’re hopeless.’
Ping sighed. ‘I can’t understand, when it’s the thing they want most in the world, and it’s there before their eyes, why they won’t see it.’
‘They are often like that,’ said Oskar wisely. ‘They don’t like now. If it’s really interesting it has to be then.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucy Boston was born in 1892 in Southport, Lancashire, one of six children. She went to a Quaker school in Surrey, and was married in 1917. She later moved to a beautiful manor house near Cambridge which provided the setting for her Green Knowe stories. She started writing at the age of sixty and won the Carnegie Medal for A Stranger of Green Knowe in 1961. Her books are illustrated by her son, Peter. Lucy Boston died in 1990.
VISIT THE GREEN KNOWE HOUSE
Lucy Boston wrote the Green Knowe stories about her own house and garden. It is a very old house built nearly 900 years ago, so it was easy for her to imagine all the different children living in the house in the past. She used to enjoy showing people the garden and the house. She particularly enjoyed showing people who had read the books, because they could then recognize some of the things they had read about in the stories.
To find out more about the house today, go to: www.greenknowe.co.uk
Copyright
The Children of Green Know
e was first published in 1954 and
The River at Green Knowe was first published in 1959
This ebook collected edition first published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2013
All rights reserved
The Children of Green Knowe © Lucy Maria Boston, 1954
The River at Green Knowe © Lucy Maria Boston, 1959
Illustrations © Peter Boston, 1954, 1959
The right of Lucy Maria Boston to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–30348–9
The Children of Green Knowe Collection Page 22