Island of the Aunts

Chapter 5

When the children came down to breakfast the next day they saw at once that the aunts were worried. Etta’s moustache stood out dark against her pale face and her nose had sharpened to something you could have used to cut cheese.

“I really don’t want to operate,” they heard her say, “but it’s serious. She’s completely egg-bound.”

“Who’s egg-bound?” asked Fabio.

Aunt Etta ignored him.

“I’ve tried massage; I’ve tried Vaseline; I’ve tried a steam kettle,” she said to her sisters.

“What about castor oil?” suggested Coral.

“It’s worth a try, I suppose.”

“Can we help?” asked Minette.

“No.” Etta looked up briefly. “Well, perhaps you can carry the buckets. We’re going up the hill. And kindly fold your napkins properly when you leave the table. You left them in a disgusting heap yesterday.”

It was quite a procession which wound its way up the hill. Etta carried an enormous bottle of castor oil, Fabio lugged a footstool and a primus stove, Minette had two buckets and a bundle of rags.

The path was steep and the morning was warm but Aunt Etta kept up a fierce pace. She also chose to give them a lecture as she went.

“Now I want to make it absolutely clear to you that I will not have favourites on this island. The unusual creatures you will be working with are no more important than the ordinary ones. A sick water flea needs help just as much as a mermaid. A flounder is exactly as important as a selkie. I hope you understand this because if you don’t, you’re not going to be any use doing your job.”

The children said, yes, they had understood it, but when they reached the top of the hill they were pleased they had been warned.

There were two hills, actually, with a dip in between which held a loch of dark, peaty water. On the far side of the loch was a great pile of brushwood and boulders and bracken. It looked like one of the stockades that the settlers in America used to build to protect themselves from the Indians.

But what stuck out over the top of the stockade was not an American settler. It was the head of an absolutely enormous bird.

The head was black but its beak was a bright yellow and made the children think of those great machines — crunchers or diggers or shovellers — that one sees looming over building sites. Its eyes were yellow too, huge and round and mad-looking, and as they stared they were blasted backwards by the deep honking noise they had heard on the first day.

“What is it?” stammered Fabio.

“It’s a boobrie,” said Aunt Etta, striding round the edge of the loch. “And I can tell you there aren’t many of those left in the world. They’re a sort of cousin of the dodo — people thought they were extinct but they weren’t. They developed on a different island and the sailors didn’t find them so they just grew and grew and grew. But then people started doing atomic tests and that kind of nonsense and the ones that were left managed to fly away.”

She led them round the other side of the stockade and they saw a short ladder propped against the side of the nest. Aunt Etta climbed up it and beckoned to the children to follow but they hung back, thinking of the huge yellow eyes, the dreadful beak.

“Hurry up!” said Etta and, as they still hesitated, she turned round, took a deep breath, and let them have it. “I have to tell you that kidnapping you was quite the most unpleasant experience any of us have had: that boarding house full of yacking women, and the London Underground with all those fumes. If you think we’d have gone to all that trouble just to let you get eaten by some bird, you need to have your heads examined. Anyway boobries are vegetarians, at least this kind are — more’s the pity.”

So the children followed her up the ladder and jumped down into the nest which was trampled flat and lined with moss and feathers.

The boobrie was not really so enormous. She was smaller than an African elephant — more the size of an Indian one. It took a lot of courage to look up at her but when they did the children stopped being afraid. She could hurt you, of course, by stepping on your feet for example, but they could see that she was a bird with serious troubles of her own.

The nest was ready for eggs but there were no eggs to be seen. The boobrie’s chest looked sadly naked so that they knew it was her own feathers she had plucked out to make a warm lining, but a lining for what? Where were the eggs and where the chicks that would follow?

“I have to tell you that I am very worried about her,” said Aunt Etta. “Being egg-bound is a most serious business.”

“You mean her eggs are stuck inside her? She can’t get them out?” asked Minette.

“That’s right. And she’s too uncomfortable to go and look for something to eat.”

“Doesn’t she have a mate to bring her food?” asked Fabio.

Aunt Etta snorted. “She had but she’s lost him.”

“You mean he’s dead?”

“He may be, for all I know. Or he may have lost the way or forgotten all about her. You know what men are.”

This annoyed Fabio. “I’m a man, or I will be, and I’ll never leave my wife to starve in a nest. Never.”

“Why did you say it’s a pity she’s a vegetarian?” Minette wanted to know.

“Because it makes it hard for us to feed her. We could have thrown her a frozen side of beef, but to dredge up all those sludgy sea lettuces and sea noodles and gutweeds takes hours,” said Etta. She was stamping round the boobrie, batting her with a stick, thumping her. “Get up, you stupid bird. I’m trying to help you.”

At first the boobrie wouldn’t move; she sat hunched and shivering and from her throat came a single squawk which seemed to be her way of saying “Ow!” But Etta was merciless. She thumped and scolded and prodded the bird till she struggled to her feet and stood there swaying and honking.

Then she climbed on to the footstool and peered into the boobrie’s back end and there, sure enough, was a glimmer of white speckled with blue.

“You can make seventy-two omelettes from one boobrie’s egg,” said Etta when the children had had a look.

But of course she didn’t want seventy-two omelettes — she didn’t care for omelettes anyway — she wanted living chicks. “The next part is going to be messy,” she warned.

But the children stayed to help, dipping rags into the hot castor oil and handing them to her as she dabbed and swabbed at the opening.

“We’ll just have to wait and see,” she said when she’d finished. “But if this doesn’t work…”

“Could she…die…?” asked Minette in a quavery voice.

“Anyone can die,” said Etta snubbingly. “Including you and me.”

But before she marched the children down again she took them up the further hill, which was the highest point of the Island.

The view was incredible. To the west, miles and miles of unbroken water with the sun making a golden path between the clouds, and to the east, a long way off but with their outlines sharp and clear, two islands; one hilly, one low and long.

And on a grassy ledge overhanging the wild northern shore was an ancient burial ground, with leaning and broken gravestones covered in lichen and battered by the rain.

“There’s supposed to be a ghost here,” said Etta. “But she only turns up every hundred years or so.”

“What sort of a ghost?”

“A good ghost. A kind of hermit. She was called Ethelgonda and she lived on the Island and looked after the creatures.”

“Like you,” said Minette.

“Not in the least like me,” said Aunt Etta crushingly.

“I didn’t think good people became ghosts,” said Fabio.

“Well, a spirit then.”

The children spent the rest of the day collecting the special seaweeds that the boobrie ate and harrowing them up to her nest. Each time they watched anxiously for a sign of an egg but nothing seemed to be happening at all.

They were getting ready for bed that night when Myrtle came upstairs excitedly, her long hair flying.

“Come down for a minute,” she said. “Herbert’s mother has come and she wants to meet you.”

She hurried them down to the rocks and there, sure enough, sitting beside Herbert was a smaller seal, a cow with the same whitish mark on her throat as her son. Herbert’s mother was old — there was something weary about the way she held her head — but she lumbered up to them, and snorted in a very welcoming way, while her son looked on proudly.

“This is a great honour, you know,” said Myrtle, hopping about like a young girl. “She doesn’t come out of the water often now; it tires her to be on land. Herbert will have told her about you.”

Since it is difficult to shake hands with a seal, they bowed their heads politely, and Herbert’s mother came closer and said something, speaking in a low voice and in the selkie language. The children thought she was asking them to help Herbert make up his mind about whether to be a person or a seal and, when they were back in their rooms, Fabio had an idea. “We could just cut him with a knife. Not hard. Just a nick — then he’d become human and that would be that.”

“Oh, we couldn’t!”

“I don’t see why not. Then Myrtle would have a friend. He could learn the piano and they could play duets.”

But when he thought about it, Fabio knew that Minette was right. He couldn’t make even the smallest nick in that smooth and shining skin.

It was on the next afternoon that the children had a shock. They had taken yet another load of seaweed to the boobrie and were shovelling it into the nest when the bird gave the loudest honk they had heard yet. For a moment they thought it might be an egg, for the honk was a welcoming one.

But it wasn’t. The boobrie was looking at the loch.

The children turned to follow her gaze — and gasped.

A head had appeared in the middle of the lake.

But what a head! White and smooth and enormous…like the front end of a gigantic worm. After the head came a neck…also smooth…also white…a neck divided into rings of muscle and going on and on and on. It reared and waved above the surface of the water, and still more neck appeared…and more and more. Except that the neck was getting fatter, it couldn’t all be neck — the bulgier part must be the body of the worm: a worm the size of a dozen boa constrictors.

The boobrie honked once more and the children clutched each other, unable to move.

The creature was still rising up in the water, still getting longer, still pale and glistening and utterly strange. Then it turned its head towards them and opened its eyes which were just two deep holes as black as its body was white.

“Whooo,” it began to say. “Whooo”—and with every “oo” the air filled with such a stench of rottenness and decay and…oldness…that the children reeled backwards. And then it began to slither out of the water…it slithered and slithered and slithered and still not all of it was out of the lake — and suddenly the children had had enough. Leaving their wheelbarrows where they were, they rushed down the hill to the house and almost fell into the sitting room where the aunts were having tea.

“I didn’t expect you to knock,” said Aunt Etta, putting down her cup. “One knocks at the doors of bedrooms but not of sitting rooms when one is staying in a house. But I do expect you to come in quietly like human beings, and not like hooligans.”

But the children were too frightened to be snubbed. “We saw a thing…a worm…”

“As long as a train…Well, as long as a bus.”

“All naked and white and smooth and slippery…”

“It said ‘Whoo’ and came at us, and its breath…” Minette shuddered, just remembering. “It came out of the lake and now it’s coming after us and it’ll coil round and round us and smother us and—”

“Unlikely,” said Aunt Etta. She passed the children a plate of scones and told them to sit down. “It seems to be very difficult to get you to listen,” she said. “I’m sure that all three of us have told you how unpleasant we found the whole business of kidnapping you.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Coral. “That loathsome matron like a camel.”

“So it is not very likely that we would go to all that trouble to feed you to a stoorworm,” said Etta.

Being safe in the drawing room, eating a scone with strawberry jam, made Fabio feel very much braver.

“What is a stoorworm?”

“A wingless dragon. An Icelandic one; very unusual. Once the world was full of them, but you know how it is. Dragons with wings and fiery breaths in the skies. Dragons without wings and poisonous breaths in the water. The wingless ones were called worms. You must have heard of them: the Lambton Worm, the Laidly Worm, the Stoorworm.”

But the children hadn’t.

“If his breath is poisonous…he breathed on us quite hard,” said Minette. “He said ‘Whoooo’ and blew at us. Does that mean we’ll be ill or die?”

Aunt Coral shook her head. “He’s only poisonous to greenfly and things like that. We use him to spray the fruit trees. And he probably wasn’t saying ‘Whoooo’, he was saying ‘Who?’—meaning who are you? He talks like that; very slowly because he comes from Iceland and they have more time over there.”

But Minette was still alarmed. “Look,” she said, staring through the window. “Oh look, he’s slithering down the hill…He’s coming closer…He’s coming here!”

Aunt Myrtle came to stand beside her. “He’ll be coming to visit Daddy,” she said.

“They’re good friends,” explained Coral to the bewildered children. “They think alike about the world — you know, that the old days were better.”

Standing by the open sitting room door, they watched bravely as the stoorworm slithered into the hall, slithered up the first flight of stairs, along the landing, up the second flight…In his bedroom they could hear the Captain shouting, “Come along, my dear fellow, come on in,” and the front end of the worm went through into the Captain’s bedroom while the back end was still in the hall trying to lift its tail over the table.

Fabio had stopped feeling frightened but he was becoming very suspicious. “Is there anything we have to do to the stoorworm?” he asked. If the mermaids needed scrubbing and the seals had to be given a bottle four times a day, and the boobrie’s food had to be wheelbarrowed up a steep hill, it seemed likely that the stoorworm too would mean hard work.

And he was quite right. “It’s a question of seeing that he doesn’t get tangled up,” said Aunt Etta. “In the water he’s all right but you will see a few trees we’ve stripped of lower branches — those are stoorworm trees and when he’s on land we help him to coil himself round them neatly, otherwise he gets into knots. It’s best to think of him as a kind of rope, or the flex of a Walkman.”

Fabio didn’t say anything. He had already gathered that when Aunt Etta said “we” she meant him and Minette — and she went on to explain that the worm was a person who liked to think about important things like Where has yesterday gone? or Why hasn’t God made sardines without bones?

“The trouble is he’s so long that his thoughts don’t easily get to the other end, and that upsets him,” said Etta. “He wants to have an operation to make him shorter, but you must make it clear that we will not allow it. Plastic surgery,” said Aunt Etta, fiercely tapping her nose, “is something we could never permit on the Island.”

“If you’re bothered by his breath you can always give him a peppermint,” said Coral. “Though why everyone in the world should smell of toothpaste is something I have never understood. And now you’d better go and fetch the barrows from the hill.”