Island of the Aunts

Chapter 8

Aunt Etta woke and stretched and immediately felt very strange. Something had happened. And the something was important: perhaps the most important thing that had ever happened to her.

She got out of bed and went to the window. Her long grey pigtail hung down her back; her hairy legs and bony feet stuck out from under her flannel nightdress, but her mud-coloured eyes were as excited as a young girl’s.

Yet there was nothing unusual to be seen. A flock of gulls were out fishing; the sun was just beginning to come up behind the two islands to the east.

“All the same, there is something,” thought Aunt Etta, and the excitement grew in her. “Only what?”

Then she realized that the excitement was coming from her feet. It was being sent through her toe bones, and up her ankle bones and through her body.

For a moment she felt quite faint. Could it be…? But no…that would be a miracle; she had done nothing to deserve anything as tremendous as that.

The sound of heavy breathing made her turn. It was Coral. She too was in her nightdress, folds of it wrapped round her like a bell tent, she too was barefoot and she too was panting with excitement.

“Oh, Etta,” she gasped. “I feel so strange.”

Coral’s long hair, which she dyed an interesting gold, hung down her back; she. looked like a mad goddess. “I feel as though…only it can’t be, can it? Not after a hundred years?”

“No…it can’t.”

But they clutched each other’s hands, because it hadn’t stopped, the extraordinary, amazing…feeling.

“We must wake Myrtle. She’s musical.”

But there was no need to wake Myrtle. Myrtle did not wear a nightdress; she wore pyjamas because she often went out before dawn to talk to the seals and she thought that pyjamas were more respectable. They were made of grey flannel so that she did not show up too much in the dusk and for a moment her sisters did not see her lying on the floor with her face pressed to the threadbare carpet.

“Myrtle, do you feel—” her sisters began.

But before she could answer, Myrtle lifted her head. They had never seen their sister look like that.

“Can it be?” began Coral.

“We must go up the hill,” said Myrtle and she spoke like someone in a dream. “We must turn our faces to the north.”

“But dressed,” said Etta, coming to her senses for a moment. “Not in our nightclothes. Not even if—”

But her sisters took no notice and Etta herself only had time to put on her dressing gown before there was a thumping noise from next door. It was the Captain’s walking stick banging on the wall and it meant, “Come at once.”

The sisters looked at each other anxiously. If he had heard it too it could strain his heart. So much excitement is bad for old people.

And when they first saw the Captain they were very worried. He was lying slumped on his pillows, his eyes shut, and he was trembling so much that the whole bed shook. But when they came up to him, they were amazed. Captain Harper was a hundred and three years old, but he looked for a moment like a boy.

“I’ve heard it,” he murmured. “I’ve heard it and I’ve felt it. Even if that’s all, even if there’s no more than that, I’ll die happy now.”

“We’re going on to the hill, Father,” said Etta. “We’ll tell you as soon as—”

The door burst open and Fabio and Minette came running into the room. They had tumbled straight out of bed, bewildered and still half asleep, and followed the sound of voices.

“Something’s happened,” said Minette. She was wearing quite the silliest nightdress that even her mother could have bought, covered in patterns of dancing elephants and picnicking zebras, but with her dark hair wild about her shoulders and her bewildered eyes, she seemed to be listening to music from another land. “We were woken…”

“It’s a feeling…only it isn’t only a feeling.” Fabio shook his head, trying to understand. “It’s a sound, except it’s all through us. We’re not making it up.”

The three aunts and the old Captain looked at the children, and nodded. It was a pleased nod, and it meant that the children were all right; they were proper ones, without a touch of a Boo-Boo or a Little One. Lambert, they were sure, would have heard and felt nothing.

“You’d better come with us. Get your shoes on at least.”

Outside the feeling was stronger. Minette and Fabio, struggling for words to describe it, were lost. They followed the aunts on to the turf path which led to the hill. Minette wore Myrtle’s shawl round her shoulders — no one had taken time to dress properly.

The “feeling”, whatever it was, was growing stronger. It came through the soles of their feet, but also now from above, from everywhere. If they’d been doubtful whether it meant anything, the creatures would have put them right at once. In the dawn light the birds wheeled round the cliff in a frenzy of agitation. The seals, usually drowsing on the point at this hour, were all in the water, swimming towards the northern strand — and in the lead was Herbert. Like all selkies he slept with one eye open: he had been the first to know that something incredibly important was going to happen and at once he had put aside his everyday worries. What did it matter now whether one was a man or a seal? He moved through the waves like a torpedo — and close behind Herbert came his mother.

The sky was changing. It was filled with strange colours which belonged neither to the dawn nor to the sunset; colours that the children had never seen and afterwards could not describe.

On her great nest, the boobrie honked with all her power…honked and stirred…and flapped her wings, trying to fly off after the others, but she couldn’t, with the eggs so heavy and stuck inside her…and she pushed her muscles together, pressing and pressing as she tried to become airborne…

The stoorworm came out of the lake and slithered over the ground, following the aunts and the children. He was no longer the muddled creature who had lost control of his far end. He moved like a great serpent, controlled and lean and fast.

Down by the house the goats butted their horns against the walls of their sty, and broke free and went galloping along the shore like mad creatures.

The door of the mermaid shed opened and Loreen and her daughters slithered across the rocks and plunged into the water.

“To the north,” she shouted, holding Walter in the crook of her arm, and they set off for the wild strand beneath the hill.

“Wait for me, wait for me,” shouted Old Ursula, but they had gone and she was left beating her tail furiously against the side of the sink.

The Sybil had come out of her cave. The mucky old prophetess was not talking about the weather now. She was writhing and moaning, her face had turned blue and her hair was standing on end. “It’s going to happen,” she said. “It’s going to happen.”

But the aunts did not wait for her to tell them what. They raced panting up the hill with the children beside them, and all the time the feeling was getting stronger, was going through every cell in their bodies.

They reached the top of the hill — and then they were certain. From all sides it came now, like the breath of the universe. Below them the sea boiled against the northern shore; the mermaids, their troubles forgotten, trod water and stared towards the horizon; the seals made a semicircle, and those who were more than seals, who had been human once, could be seen bowing their heads.

And to make everything certain, from behind the largest of the tombstones with its strange carvings, there now rose a white, mysterious wraith, with rays of light coming from her face, and outstretched hands.

“It’s Ethelgonda,” breathed Aunt Etta, “Ethelgonda the Good!” And everyone fell to their knees, for this was a ghost who had not appeared for well over a hundred years.

The saintly hermit was smiling. She was totally happy; she enfolded them in her blessing.

“Yes,” she said, in a deep and beautiful voice. “You have not been mistaken. What you have heard is most truly the Great Hum.”

Minette and Fabio, who had been spellbound by the apparition, heard the sound of the most heartfelt sobbing beside them and turned their heads. All three of the aunts were crying. Tears streamed down Aunt Etta’s bony cheeks, tears made a path through Aunt Coral’s nourishing night cream, tears dropped on to Aunt Myrtle’s hands as she brought them to her face.

“It is the Hum,” repeated Aunt Etta, in a choking voice.

“It is the Hum,” nodded Aunt Coral.

And Myrtle too said, “It is the Hum.”

“What is—” began Fabio but Minette frowned him down. She felt that this was not the moment for questions.

“So does that mean…?” faltered Aunt Etta, and the children looked at her, amazed. They did not know that this fierce woman could sound so shy and uncertain and humble.

The hermit nodded. “Yes, my dears,” she said in her melodious voice. “It means that this place above all others has been chosen. You have been blessed.”

The aunts rose slowly to their feet. They could still not quite believe what they had heard, yet the Hum now was everywhere, filling the sky, coming up from the earth.

“So he is really coming? After a hundred years?”

The holy woman nodded.

The aunts did not ask when he was coming. They knew that one must not pry into mysteries, but accept them gratefully, and they were right.

“I can say no more,” said the saint. “You must hold yourself in readiness.”

And then she vanished and they were left alone with their miracle.

“You heard what Ethelgonda said. We must hold ourselves in readiness. Readiness means cleaning. Readiness means tidying. Readiness means cooking and scrubbing and fettling. It always has and it always will,” said Aunt Etta.

She was almost her old brisk bossy self as she sent the children to scour out the goat sty and swill down the floor of the mermaid shed and pick up the litter washed ashore.

Almost, but not quite. None of the aunts were quite the same. Etta still hung her navy-blue knickers on the line each morning, but sometimes she patted her bun of hair like a young girl invited to a party. Coral’s clothes got wilder and wilder; she was painting a great underwater mural on the back of the house in all the colours of the rainbow, and the tunes that Myrtle played on her cello had become very powerful and loud.

“If only Dorothy was here,” said Etta, who missed her sister badly. Hitting people on the head with their own woks was nothing to the excitement of what was to come.

The Captain insisted on clean pyjamas every day so that he would not be caught short, and the old Sybil danced about in her cave in a frenzy of excitement. She still thought it was unwise to wash her face and hands but she decided bravely to wash her feet. This took a long time (mould had grown between her toes and mould can be interesting — the blue-green colours, the unusual shapes) but once one has heard the Great Hum life is never the same.

The creatures, in their own way, were as excited, and now the aunts understood why it had been so difficult to get anyone to go away. They must have known that something special was going to happen, even if they did not know exactly what.

Even the animals that never talked; even the herrings and the haddock and the flounders…even the lugworms buried in the sand seemed to be excited.

“How can a lugworm be excited?” Minette wanted to know, but when Aunt Etta dug one up for her, she saw that it might be so.

As for Art, he baked buns — hundreds and hundreds of buns which overflowed his cake tins and had to be stored in sealed bin bags in the larder. But the buns he baked were not ordinary buns, and nor were the omelettes they had for lunch and tea and supper ordinary omelettes.

Because something very wonderful had happened out there on the hill after Ethelgonda vanished. They were turning to go home when they heard a sound from the boobrie’s nest which stopped them in their tracks.

It wasn’t the mournful honking they were used to: it was a proud and cheerful clucking — a noise full of motherhood and joy. Pressing and pressing her muscles together to try and follow the others had not made the boobrie airborne, but it had done something else. And there it was; an enormous, blue-spotted and totally egg-shaped egg!

But the most touching thing happened the next day when they went up to congratulate the bird once more. For the egg she had laid when the Great Hum went through her body and she had pressed so hard, had been followed by three more. Four gigantic spotted eggs had rolled together and were keeping warm beneath her body, but when she saw the aunts and the children the boobrie moved aside, examined each egg very carefully — and then pushed one out towards them with her great yellow foot.

“Be careful, dear,” said Myrtle. “It mustn’t get cold.”

With difficulty, for the egg was heavier than a cannonball, they rolled it back…and the boobrie pushed it out again with her enormous foot.

The same thing was repeated three times — and then they understood.

“It’s a present,” said Minette, awed. “She wants us to have it.”

Minette was right. The boobrie wanted to share. There was nothing to be done except to fetch Art and load the egg on to a barrow — and since seventy-two omelettes are an awful lot of omelettes, the great bun bake began.

It was hard for the children to be patient during those days of waiting. They knew that when the time came they would find out what the Great Hum meant and who was coming. But on a day when Fabio was sent out for the third time to make sure that not so much as half a cigarette carton or a cotton reel had been washed up on the north shore, he dug in his heels.

“I think you should tell us,” he said. “Me and Minette, I mean. We can keep secrets.”

“We will tell you when the time is ripe,” said Aunt Etta, and they had to be content with that.

But what had been happening to Lambert?

The aunts were right. Lambert had slept through the beginning of the Hum and heard nothing.

When he did wake up at last, he realized that the house was empty. Doors stood open; there was no sign of Art in the kitchen. Everyone, though Lambert did not know it, was out on the hill.

“I want my breakfast,” said Lambert crossly, but there was no one to hear him.

By the time he was dressed he did hear a kind of thrumming noise, but to Lambert the magical sound seemed to be the kind of noise a generator might make, or some underground machinery.

But he was interested in the open bedroom doors. Since he had begun to work, Lambert had been allowed to come back into the house to sleep, but Myrtle and the others kept him firmly out of their rooms. Myrtle had not forgotten how he had frightened the ducklings when he first came.

Now, though, Myrtle’s door stood open. Her bed was unmade and the ducklings had grown enough to manage out of doors.

Lambert crept in. His shifty eyes took in all Myrtle’s little treasures and he sneered. Fancy bothering to pick up bits of driftwood and veined pebbles and arranging them on the bookcase as though they were ornaments. There wasn’t a single thing in her room, as far as he could see, that was worth tuppence.

Then he stopped dead. Propped against the corner of the room was Myrtle’s cello case. The cello wasn’t inside it; he could see it leaning against another wall, half covered with a shawl, so the case would be empty.

Lambert crept closer. He knew he had been carried away in it though he could remember nothing. He had overheard Myrtle talking about it to her sisters.

And that meant that anything he had been holding when he was snatched might still be there!

Lambert’s face was flushed with excitement, his thin lips were parted. If only the case wasn’t locked!

And it wasn’t! He tried the clasp, and it opened easily. The inside of the case was lined with blue velvet, faded and torn in places because it was so old.

At first there seemed to be nothing there except a crumpled silk scarf and a spare bow. Then as Lambert groped about in the back of the case, his hand found something dark and small which had been covered by the cloth.

Lambert’s fingers closed round it with a cry. He had found it. He had found his mobile telephone!

He would get away now! He was safe. Hiding the telephone under his shirt, Lambert went back to his room and pulled the chest of drawers across the door. Then he crouched down like an animal with its prey and began to dial.

Three days after Lambert found his telephone, the children woke shortly after midnight to find Aunt Coral and Aunt Etta standing by their beds.

Fabio was so sleepy that he thought at first it was the full moon and he was expected to dance the tango with Aunt Coral, but it wasn’t that.

“Put some clothes on,” said Aunt Etta. “And clean your teeth.”

“We cleaned them before we went to bed,” said Minette.

“Well, clean them again. No one with gunge on their molars is worthy to hear what we have to tell.”

Still half asleep, the children stumbled up the hill after the two aunts. At the top they found Aunt Myrtle sitting over a fire she had made, ringed by stones, and it was by the flicker of the flames and to the sound of the sea sighing against the rocks below that the children learnt what they wanted to know.

“Mind you, what I’m going to say won’t mean much to you unless you know your history, and I doubt if you know a lot of that,” said Aunt Etta. “So let me start by asking you a question. What does the word kraken mean to you?”

Fabio was silent but Minette said shyly, “Is it a sea monster? A very big one?”

Etta nodded. “Yes. It is a sea monster, and it is bigger than anything you can imagine. But it has nothing to do with all the silly stories you hear. Nothing to do with rubbish about Giant Blobs or outsize cuttlefish or octopuses that pull people down to the ocean bed. No, the kraken is…or was…the Soul of the Sea. It is the greatest force for good the ocean has ever known.”

Fabio and Minette looked at her surprised. This wasn’t at all the way that Aunt Etta usually spoke.

So then she began to tell them the kraken’s story. It took a long time to tell and the fire had burnt down and been rekindled many times before it was finished, but the children scarcely stirred.

“There was a time when everyone in the world knew about the kraken,” Aunt Etta began. “They knew about his huge size and that when he rested, and his back was humped out of the water, he was taken for an island. They knew that when he reared up suddenly, the sea churned and boiled and no ship that was near him had the slightest hope of avoiding shipwreck.

“But they knew too that for all his size, the kraken was a gentle creature. His eyes were full of soul and when he opened his mouth one could see that instead of teeth he had rows and rows of tendrils which were the greeny-gold colour of a mermaid’s hair. Through this forest of tendrils, the sea poured in, and it was the sea which nourished him: the tiny invisible creatures which make up plankton were all that the kraken needed for food.

“They knew that the kraken came from the Far North and that the language he spoke best was Polar, though he understood other languages also. But mostly the kraken did not speak. The kraken sang. Or perhaps singing is not quite the right word. What the kraken did was to hum. It was a deep, slow sound and it was like no other sound in the world, for what the kraken hummed was the Song of the Sea. It was a healing song. If you like, it was the Breath of the Universe. Whales can hum too and Buddhist monks who spend their lives on high mountains trying to understand God…and small children when they are happy — but the sound they make is nothing compared to the sound made by the kraken.

“For many years the kraken swam quietly round the oceans of the world humming his hum and singing his song and stopping sometimes to rest. And when he stopped, people who did not know much said: goodness, surely there wasn’t an island out in that bay before, but people who were wise and in touch with the things that mattered, smiled and felt honoured and proud. Because when the kraken came, they remembered what a splendid thing the sea was: so clean and beautiful when it was calm, so mighty and exciting and awe-inspiring when it was rough. It was as though the great creature was guarding the sea for them, or even as though somehow he was showing them what a treasure house it was.

“Look! the kraken seemed to be saying. Behold…the sea!

“In those days the kraken made it his business to circle the oceans of the world each year and whenever he appeared, people started to behave themselves. Fishermen stopped catching more fish than they needed and threw the little ones back into the sea, and people who were dumping their rubbish into the water thought better of it, seeing the kraken’s large and wondrous eyes fixed on them. And when he went on again it was to leave the sea — and indeed the world — a better place.

“It was like a blessing, to have seen the kraken,” said Aunt Etta now. “It brought you luck for the rest of your life.”

“Did you ever see him?” asked Minette.

Aunt Etta shook her head. She looked very sad. “No one living now has seen him. He hasn’t been seen for a hundred years or more. He was dreadfully hurt once and he went into hiding.”

The hurt that was done to the kraken was not to his body. The skin of a kraken is a metre deep and no other animal can threaten him. No animal would want to — he travelled with a whole company of sharks and stingrays and killer whales who would have died rather than harm him.

But human beings are different. They always have been: interfering and bossy and mad for power. No one knew what kind of whaling boat had shot a harpoon into the kraken’s throat. Was it a Japanese ship or one belonging to the British or the Danes? Did the whalers mistake the kraken for a humpback whale, or were they just terrified, seeing a dark shape bigger than anything they had ever seen rear up in front of them?

Whatever the reason, they let off the biggest of their harpoons and hit the kraken with terrible force in the softest part of his throat.

The kraken probably didn’t believe it at first. No one had ever tried to harm him. Then he felt the pain and saw the dark dollops of his blood staining the sea.

When he understood what had happened, he began to thrash about, trying to rid himself of the harpoon — and the rope snapped. But the pain was still there and the kraken reared up, trying to dislodge the hooked horror in his neck. As he did so, the tidal wave made by his body tossed the whaling boat up, and drew it under the sea, and every one of the men was drowned, which was as well because the sea creatures who had travelled with the kraken would have torn them limb from limb.

And the kraken swam away to the north, the harpoon still in his throat. The pain died away and presently an old sea nymph came with her brood of children and cut the hook out of the kraken’s flesh with razor shells and soon there was only a small scar left to show where it had been.

But the scar in the kraken’s soul remained. He had travelled the world to sing the Song of the Sea and to heal the people who lived by it — and they had stabbed him in the throat. The kraken was two thousand years old, which is not old for a kraken, but now he felt tired. Let human beings look after themselves! He swam still further north, and further still to where the wildness of the sea and the large number of humped islands made him invisible, and he turned his back on the world, and slept.

And while he slept, people forgot that there had been such a creature, and the stories about him got wilder and wilder until this healing monster was jumbled up in people’s minds with Giant Blobs and vicious triffids and nonsense like that.

And the sea got muckier and muckier and more and more neglected.

But of course everyone did not forget. The sea creatures remembered — the seals and the selkies, the mermaids and the nixies, and the people who lived and worked on the islands and by the shore.

And the aunts remembered.

“Oh yes, we always remembered,” said Etta now. “Our father told us about him and our grandfather told our father. We have always known, but we never dreamt—”

She fell silent, overcome by her feelings and the children gazed into the embers of the fire and thought about what they had heard.

Why am I not frightened, Minette wondered. Once she would have been terrified at the thought of a great sea monster swimming towards them, but now she felt only wonder. And something else: a longing to help and serve this creature she had never seen. She felt she would do anything for the kraken when he came. Which was silly, because how could an ordinary girl do anything for the mightiest monster in the world? But she didn’t feel silly. She felt awed and uplifted as though some amazing task awaited her.

Fabio didn’t feel quite like that. Fabio felt that the story he had heard needed a celebration. So he did something rather noble. He turned to Coral, sitting in her cloak beside him, and said:

“Aunt Coral, the moon is full — or very nearly. Would you like to dance the tango?”