The Dragonfly Pool

CHAPTER ONE Balloons over London

I don’t think you ought to be crying at your age. People of fifty-two don’t cry,” said Aunt Hester sternly.

“I’m not crying,” said her sister, May. “Not really. And anyway, I heard you blowing your nose three times last night when you went to the bathroom.”

“Anyone can blow their nose,” said Hester.

“Not three times. And you’re older than me.”

But then they stopped arguing and clung to each other because the news their brother had given them the night before was so awful that they could only bear it if they were standing side by side.

“The house is going to be like a tomb without her,” said May. “She’s far too young to go away.”

“Of course we knew she’d go away to get married,” said Hester.

“But people don’t marry when they’re eleven years old.”

“Except in the olden days, perhaps. And in very hot countries.”

But England was not a hot country. Now, on a fine spring day in 1939, it was only pleasantly warm. The men digging trenches in the little park opposite had not removed their shirts, and a fresh breeze stirred the silver barrage balloons that floated over the houses. The government was trying them out to protect the people of London against enemy aircraft if the war, which everyone was expecting, really came.

Tally loved the barrage balloons.

“They’re like really kind great-uncles,” she said, “only a nicer color.”

All the children of Stanford Street walked home with their heads turned to the sky when the balloons went up.

The war against Hitler seemed likely to come; no one really thought now it could be prevented — the poor man could be heard raving on the wireless, his mad eyes and loathsome mustache appeared each day in the newspapers on Mr. Pepper’s paper stall. But it was not the thought of the war that was upsetting May and Hester now. They had been quite excited when they were issued a stirrup pump to put out the flames from incendiary bombs — and the air-raid shelters delivered in sections to the houses in the street were a great comfort, though nobody could quite work out how to put them up. Hitler was nasty; if there had to be a war, they would put up with it. But this was different…

“Help me to make her see what a chance this is for her,” their brother James had begged them. “Help me to keep her cheerful.”

The aunts had kept house for their younger brother since his wife had died, leaving him with a baby less than a week old. For nearly twelve years now that baby had been the center of their world.

“We’d better do something about our faces,” said Hester, looking in the mirror. “She mustn’t see we’re upset. She’ll be home from school soon and James wants to tell her himself.”

But the only powder they could find was some talc that May used on her feet in hot weather, and once they had covered their faces with it they returned to the bathroom to wash it off. It would not help Tally to stand up under the blow that awaited her to be greeted by two white-faced clowns.

It was a friendly, bustling little street, shabby but cheerful. The houses sloped a little downhill in the direction of London’s river and the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which you could see from the attic window on a clear day. There was a row of shops — a greengrocer, a butcher, a cobbler, and a baker — and at the end of the street a small park with a slightly muddy pond and ducks. On the other side of the road from the little shops was a row of terraced houses. The end one of these—14 Stanford Street — was the one everybody knew. It was a tall house with a wrought-iron balcony and built on to it on the ground floor was a red-brick surgery, where the patients waited. For number 14 was the Doctor’s House; it belonged to Dr. James Hamilton, and to see him, rather than other, more fashionable doctors, the people of East Stanford would have walked miles. But the people were poor and Dr. Hamilton charged them only what they could afford. So in the Doctor’s House the rugs were threadbare, the fires were lit as late in the day as possible, there was only a cook general to serve the house, instead of the maid and cook and handyman that other houses in the terrace kept. None of which mattered to the people who came there because, lighting up the house with her warmth and her energy and her laughter, was the doctor’s daughter.

There was unrest among the patients waiting in the afternoon surgery. The plain little room was packed because Dr. Hamilton was the doctor on duty and not his partner, but there were mutterings and murmurings of discontent.

No one knew if it was true for certain, but if it was, it was bad news indeed.

Joe Smithson sat with his sore leg stuck out in front of him, thinking about his wife. Mrs. Smithson was an invalid; she seldom left her room and Tally came to read to her — actually more to read with her. They were in the middle of The Prisoner of Zenda—both of them liked sword fights and plenty of swashbuckling and people leaping off parapets. On the afternoons that Tally came after school his wife was always cheerful. Should he ask the doctor if the rumors were true? Well, they’d know soon enough — nothing stayed secret in the street for long.

Old Mrs. Dawson, whose chest was bad again, stared at the notices pinned to the wall and thought about her dog. Tally took the dog out for her and said she didn’t want to be paid, because she liked dogs. She even liked Horace, who was a dachshund and that was not a popular breed just now. Tally had punched a boy who’d sneered at him for being a German sausage dog. There wasn’t anyone else who’d take him out for free, and Mrs. Dawson’s budget was tight. Surely the rumors couldn’t be true? Everyone knew that the doctor thought the world of his daughter. Why, it would break his heart to part with her.

“Next patient, please,” said the receptionist, Miss Hoy, and Mrs. Dawson made her way into the doctor’s room. She’d ask him whether it was true — after all, she had a right to know.

“Have you heard?” said Mr. Cooper as his son Kenny came in from the park. Kenny was the same age as Tally; they’d played together all their lives.

“Yes,” said Kenny and went past the cabbages and the sacks of Brussels sprouts and out of the back of the greengrocer’s shop into the mews. He’d be going to the stables, thought his father. When things were rough with him, Kenny often went to talk to Primrose. She was only an old Welsh cob who pulled the vegetable cart, but she was one of those horses that understood things.

Tally’s friend Maybelle, at the corner shop, was angry when she heard the news. She became angry easily, and now she picked up the trowel with which she’d been spooning lentils from a sack and threw it across the room. Tally wouldn’t fight, Maybelle knew that. She wouldn’t bite and kick and lie down on the floor till she got her own way. Not where her father was concerned. It was going to be a nuisance, doing without her friend. And she’d miss Maybelle’s debut as a powder puff in the Summer Show at the Hippodrome.

“Come on, girl,” said her grandmother. “We’ve got all those bags to tie up before tomorrow.”

“Shan’t,” said Maybelle, and she marched out of the shop and past the butcher’s and the cobbler’s till she came to the greengrocer’s. She’d see if Kenny knew.

Why can’t children be left alone? thought Maybelle angrily.

The nuns were used to children being taken away.

“But I shall be sorry to lose her,” said Mother Superior.

Sister Felicia, who produced the end-of-term plays in the convent, was feeling guilty. I should have let her be the Virgin Mary, she thought. She was always a sheep or a cow coming to the manger. I know how much she wanted the star part but she was so good at controlling the little ones.

Tally, coming down the hill like a lamb to the slaughter, was the last person to know. She was carrying a rolled-up sheet of paper with a one-side painting of St. Sebastian stuck with arrows, and a diagram of the life cycle of the liver fluke on the other. The nuns were poor, and one sheet of paper had to go a long way.

Dr. Hamilton came in from the surgery and made his way into the house. A thin, dark-haired man with a high forehead and concerned brown eyes, he was looking very tired. Friday was always a long day: the surgery stayed open till eight o’clock so that patients who came from the factories and the dockyards could come without missing work.

He was a man who told his patients exactly what to do — to eat regularly, take exercise, get plenty of fresh air, and go to bed early — and he himself did none of those things. He snatched meals between the surgery and his sessions at the hospital where he went two days a week, he went out on night calls that often turned out to be unnecessary, and stayed up till the small hours catching up with the new medical research.

The hallway was dark — his sisters, so much older than him, were good about saving electricity. Supper would be left for him in the dining room, but he wasn’t hungry. He’d come in late like this so often, looking forward to an hour with his daughter before she went to bed. He could hear her upstairs, talking to the aunts. Well, he’d better get it over.

“Ask Tally to come and see me in my study,” he said to the cook general.

Five minutes later the door opened and his daughter came in.

Oh Lord, I can’t do it, thought Dr. Hamilton. What will there be left when she is gone?

Already as she stood there in the lamplight he was memorizing her face. The pointed chin, the straight fawn hair lapping her ears, the inquiring hazel eyes. Her fringe had a nibbled look — Aunt Hester insisted on cutting it herself.

When his wife had died of puerperal fever a week after their daughter’s birth, Dr. Hamilton had been completely overwhelmed by guilt and grief. How could it be that he, a doctor, could not save the woman that he loved so much? For several weeks he scarcely noticed the baby, fussed over by his sisters and a nurse. Then one day, coming in late, he passed the nursery and heard a sound coming from his daughter’s room. It was not a cry, nor was it a whimper. It was the sound of… conversation. His five-week-old daughter was talking to the world.

He walked over to the cot. The baby’s eyes, properly focused now, were wide open. She did not smile at him; she looked.

What an idiot I’ve been, he thought. This is a person.

Things had happened to this person in the weeks he had ignored her that he might not have permitted if he’d been aware of what was going on. For example, her name… His sisters had had the child christened Talitha, after their grandmother.

“She was a saint,” they reminded their brother. “She used to wash the socks of the tramps she met on the London Underground. Wash them and dry them and give them back.”

Dr. Hamilton would have preferred to call his daughter something simpler: Ann, perhaps, or Jane. Yet as she grew, her name seemed entirely suitable, for in order to wash the socks of tramps you have to get them to take their socks off, and it was the kind of determination this would need that Tally showed from a very early age.

Tally meanwhile had crossed the room and come over to his chair to give him a hug. She could see that he’d had a bad day — he looked like that when a patient at the hospital died who should have lived, or when the pile of bills on his desk became unmanageable, or, lately, when he had been listening to Hitler raving on the wireless, and she was already thinking of ways to cheer him up. Sometimes they played chess, and sometimes she told him about something funny that had happened at school, but today she had a feeling that neither of these things would work.

“I’ve got something to tell you, Tally,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders.

“Is it important?” she said apprehensively. She had learned early in life that important things were usually not nearly as nice as unimportant ones.

“Yes… I suppose it is. At any rate, it’s good news,” said the doctor resolutely.

Tally looked at him suspiciously. She knew his face better than she knew her own, and the lines around his mouth and the furrows on his forehead did not seem to indicate good news.

“Perhaps I’d better explain. I have a patient at the hospital — I won’t tell you his name but he is someone important in education — a professor and a very nice man. He thinks I saved his life, which is rubbish, but it’s true we were able to help him. Afterward, while he was waiting to be discharged, we talked about you, and…” Dr. Hamilton paused, looking at the window, which was just a square of darkness now, “he told me about a school he knows — he’s on the governing board, and he thinks very highly of the staff and the ideals of the school. It’s in the country, in South Devon, not far from the sea.”

Tally waited. Her heart was beating fast, but surely it was all right? A school in south Devon must be a boarding school, and one of the advantages of being poor was that she could never be sent away to those places that cost the earth.

“Apparently they give scholarships from time to time. Not for schoolwork but to children who they think might benefit from being there. Complete scholarships, where everything is taken care of. He says he thinks he could get you a place there.”

“I don’t want to go away.” She tried to speak in a sensible, grown-up way, but already her voice was letting her down. “I’m all right here. I’m fine.”

Her father was silent, jabbing his pencil on to his blotter. The blotter was a present from one of his patients: four sheets of pink paper pasted on to a piece of lumpy leather. His study was full of presents his patients had made for him: knitted sausages to keep out drafts, lopsided letter racks… Among all the strange objects was a plaster head of Hippocrates, the patron saint of medicine, who, two thousand years ago, had laid down the rules for treating patients with dignity and respect.

“I don’t want you to go away, Tally, believe me… We will all miss you very, very much.”

“Well then, why do I have to go? Why? Why? ”

“The nuns are very kind but I want you to have a broader education. Science, modern languages…”

“But I’m learning French. And you could teach me science.

You’ve always said, as soon as one can read one can teach oneself anything. Please, oh please, don’t make me go away.” She looked at him. Then: “It isn’t about the teaching, is it? It’s because there’s going to be a war.”

There was a long pause. Her father reached out for comforting words, but he had never lied to his daughter. “Yes,” he said heavily. “I think there’s going to be a war. There may not be but…”

But if there was, everybody expected that London, like all big towns, would be heavily bombarded. A man who did not protect his daughter from that horror must be the greatest criminal on earth. This chance to send her to safety in one of England’s loveliest counties had been a godsend.

But Tally was angry.

“Well, what if there is going to be a war? Why can’t I share in it? Kenny’s father says we’re all getting gas masks, and they’re digging a big shelter in the park, and Aunt May has got lots of khaki wool to knit hats for the troops, and anyway we’ve got the balloons to protect us. Why should I miss everything just because I’m a child? And why should I be buried in the country and you be in danger? Everybody talks about sharing — you and the aunts and the nuns. Well, why can’t I share the war? ”

Dr. Hamilton leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. “Most of the children will be sent away. The government’s made all the plans for evacuation. You don’t want to go to strangers with a label around your neck.”

“No, I don’t. And I wouldn’t go. They tried to make Maybelle go to a rehearsal for evacuation at her school, and she just screamed and kicked and bit and now they’ve said that she can stay.”

But even as she spoke Tally knew that she wouldn’t scream and kick and bite. Not about something that concerned her father whom she loved so much.

“I think sending children away like parcels is wicked and wrong,” she said. “I could take messages and look out for nuns coming from the sky. At school they say Nazi spies are going to come down on parachutes disguised as nuns. Well, I know nuns; I wouldn’t be fooled — you can tell by their shoes. And anyway, there may not be a war in the end. You always say the German people are good, it’s only the Nazis who are wicked, so maybe they’ll rise up and overthrow Hitler and everything will be all right.”

But her father was near the end of his tether.

“Delderton is a first-class school,” he said, making a final effort. “Children come there from all over the world — and with the kind of scholarship they give, you can do all the extras: music and horse riding…”

“I don’t want to ride a horse; I’ve got Primrose. I want to stay here and be part of things and help. And anyway, who’s going to look after you? ”

But she had lost, and she knew it.

CHAPTER TWO Rich Cousins

For two nights Tally cried herself to sleep. Then she pulled herself together. What was done was done and she would have to make the best of it.

It was her father who had taught her that knowledge is power — that if one could find out about something one is afraid of, it made the fear less. So now, when she wanted to know what to expect when she went away to boarding school, she decided to consult her cousin Margaret.

James Hamilton had a brother called Thomas, who was also a doctor but a very different kind of doctor. He saw only special patients in his elegant rooms in Harley Street, and he charged them about ten times as much as James charged his patients, so that his family was as rich as his brother’s family was poor.

The house he lived in was in one of the smartest streets in the West End, with a gleaming brass plate on the door giving a list of all his degrees and qualifications — and his two children, Margaret and Roderick, went to the most expensive boarding schools in the country.

Margaret and Roderick were obedient, tidy children. Their manners were good but inside they were chilly creatures, thinking of themselves the whole time — and they looked down on Tally, who lived in a shabby street and wore old clothes and played with the children of greengrocers and butchers.

But when they heard that Tally was going to go to boarding school and wanted some advice they were ready to be helpful, and their mother, Aunt Virginia, asked Tally to tea.

So now Tally rang the bell and followed a maid in uniform up the thickly carpeted stairs to Margaret’s room, which looked like a room in a furniture catalog, with looped curtains and a kidney-shaped dressing table and fluffy white rugs.

“I was wondering about — oh, you know… well, everything really…” said Tally. “I mean, is it true you have prefects and feasts in the dorm and crushes on the head girl and all that? And… do you like being away?” asked Tally, longing to be reassured. “Do you like your school? ”

“Oh yes,” said Margaret. “I like it very much. I couldn’t bear to stay at home”—and Tally sighed, thinking how very much she could have borne just that. “It’s strict of course, but all boarding schools are strict, and St. Barbara’s has everything. We have four titled girls there and a millionaire’s daughter and the head girl is related to one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. She’s absolutely super; we all want to do things for her. And we have such fun. Last term we had a midnight feast in the dorm and one of the girls stepped on a tin of sardines, and she shrieked like mad — the tin was open — and that brought Matron rushing in. Only they couldn’t do much to us because the girl who was the ringleader had a terribly rich father who’d just given the school a new sports hall. And we are always hiding prickly things in the beds of people we don’t like and putting spiders in Matron’s slippers.”

“Yes, I see.” Tally was trying not to think of the poor spiders, squashed to death by unexpected feet. But Margaret was in full cry now, explaining the rules.

“You have to curtsy when you meet the headmistress and call her ma’am and always walk on the left side of the corridor, but you soon get the hang of it. And of course you have to have exactly the right clothes. We’ve just finished buying my uniform for next term and you wouldn’t believe how expensive it was. Mummy nearly died when she got the bill from Harrods!”

She went to her wardrobe and took out, one by one, the clothes she would need for St. Barbara’s and laid them on her bed. There were two bottle-green gym slips with pleated skirts and a matching sash to tie around the waist. There were four pale blue flannel blouses, a tie, a pudding-shaped velour hat with a hat ribbon, a straw hat for later in the term, and a blazer edged in braid. The blazer, like the tie and the hat ribbon, was striped in the St. Barbara’s colors of bottle green and blue, and the motto on the pocket said: BE THE BEST.

“The best at what? ” asked Tally.

“Oh, everything,” said Margaret airily. She picked up one of the gym slips and held it in front of her. “There’s always a big fuss about the length of the skirt. Matron makes us kneel down and if the hem is more than four inches off the ground we get detention.”

Tally tried not to panic. The whole bed was covered in clothes; there was a smell of starch and newness.

But Margaret had not finished. She went back to the wardrobe and brought out a big carrier bag full of brand-new shoes.

“The lace-ups are for out-of-doors, and indoors we have strap shoes, and on Sundays we wear these pumps. Then there are sneakers and dancing shoes… and I have skating boots…”

After the shoes came Margaret’s underclothes: woolen socks and garters and a liberty bodice that buttoned into Margaret’s bottle-green knickers. The knickers had pockets and elastic around the knees.

“Mummy thought I could wear the same knickers that I had last term, but I told her I couldn’t. They have to be new because people can see you take your handkerchief out of your knicker pocket. And here are the things we have for games…”

From another cupboard Margaret produced a pair of nailed hockey boots, a brand-new hockey stick, a woolen bathing costume with the St. Barbara’s crest on the chest, and the school scarf. Like the blazer and the tie, the scarf was striped in the school colors of bottle green and blue. It was not a joyful color scheme.

Like a bruise, thought Tally, but a very expensive one.

“And we have to have regulation nightclothes, too: some schools are sloppy — they let you wear what you like at night — but not St. Barbara’s. Even the slippers are regulation — and on Sundays we wear special dresses: green velvet with lace collars; I can’t show you everything because the maid is still sewing on name tapes. But here’s my satchel — we have to have proper leather ones with our names stamped on, and hymn books, of course, and a lunch box.”

But even Margaret, who seldom noticed other people, saw that Tally was beginning to look worried and now she said, “The school will send you a list of the things you need and your aunts will help you buy them. Only you must have absolutely the right things — a girl came last term without her Sunday shoes and she got into awful trouble. Being different is the thing you mustn’t do.”

At this point Roderick came into the room. He was nearly two years older than Margaret — a fair, good-looking boy who seldom spoke to girls if he could help it. Roderick’s school was so famous and so grand that he didn’t really need to show off about it, but since Tally wasn’t usually easy to impress he mentioned that the Prince of Transjordania was in the class above him and that this term they were expecting a boy who was related to the family of the ex-emperor of Prussia.

“But we don’t treat them any differently than the other boys at Foxingham,” he said carelessly.

The rules at Foxingham were of course even stricter than those at St. Barbara’s — there was hazing and caning — and it was a famous rugby school, which had beaten Eton at the game.

“Have you bought your uniform, too? ” asked Tally.

“Of course,” said Roderick.

For a moment he hesitated. Then he went to his room and came back with his brand-new blazer, his tie, and his cap.

All of these were striped fiercely in red and yellow. Walking out together the boys, thought Tally, must have looked like a swarm of angry wasps or ferocious postmen. The motto on Roderick’s blazer was: OUT OF MY WAY.

“I’ll lend you some books if you like,” said Margaret. “School stories. I want them back of course, but I’ve read them millions of times. They’ll give you an idea of what to expect.”

She went to her bookcase and took out Angela of the Upper Fourth and The Madcap of the Remove and gave them to Tally, who thanked her warmly.

Aunt Virginia came in then and told them to come down to the dining room because tea was ready.

“You needn’t bother to do that,” said Margaret as Tally began to gather up the clothes on the bed. “The maid will do it.”

But after tea, just as Tally was getting ready to go home and was alone with her cousins, Margaret said: “By the way, what’s the name of your school? The one you’re going to.”

“It’s called Delderton.”

Margaret and Roderick looked at each other. “Delderton? Are you sure? ”

“Yes. Why? ”

There was a pause.

Then: “Oh, nothing,” said Roderick, shrugging his shoulders. “Nothing at all.”

But as the maid opened the front door to let her out, Tally heard them titter. The titter turned into full-scale laughter — but the door was shutting, and Tally was out in the street.

CHAPTER THREE The Train

Aunt Hester and Aunt May had always done their best to share in Tally’s life. When Tally was six years old and had been cast as a sheep in the nativity play they had read books about agriculture and sheep farming and taken Tally to the zoo to watch the way the cloven-footed mammals moved their feet — and Tally’s performance on the day had been very much admired.

So now they tackled Angela of the Upper Fourth and The Madcap of the Remove and enjoyed them very much, though they were a little worried about how Tally would get on, having to say “spiffing” and “ripping” all the time, and shouting, “Well played, girls!” on the hockey field.

What they couldn’t do, however, was get Tally’s school uniform together, because no list came from Delderton.

“You mustn’t worry, dear,” said Aunt May. “The school will let us know in good time and then we’ll go and fit you up. They’ll pay — it’s a full scholarship.”

“Yes… but there are so many things… Eight pairs of shoes; I’ll get muddled. And a liberty bodice… I don’t really know what that is,” said Tally.

She was worried, too, about the rules: the curtsy to the headmistress and remembering to call her ma’am. And if the rules were going to be difficult, breaking them in the right way was going to be difficult, too. The midnight feasts in the dorm, for example… What if she stepped on an open tin of sardines and brought Matron running?

Because Aunt May’s letters in violet ink were apt to be rather emotional and Aunt Hester’s in green ink were almost impossible to read, Dr. Hamilton asked his receptionist, Miss Hoy, to write to the school asking for a list of the things Tally would need.

But before they got a reply Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and after that no one had time to worry about braided blazers and green knickers with pockets in them, let alone about feasts in the dorm.

The milkman’s son got his call-up papers for the army and Dr. Hamilton spent more and more time at the hospital, where they were arranging for the evacuation of patients to the country; posters appeared telling people to grow vegetables and DIG FOR VICTORY, and Aunt Hester said she wanted to go and entertain the troops.

“I know I’m not young,” she said, “but my voice is still good.”

Then, just a week before the beginning of term, a letter came from the school secretary at Delderton announcing the departure of the school train from Paddington Station at ten o’clock on April 13. There was still nothing about the school uniform or the rules and regulations.

“They’ll probably fit you out when you get there, like in the army,” said the aunts consolingly.

And Tally tried not to panic because she was going to an unknown place without any of the right things and without knowing how to behave at all. After all, men were joining the army or going to fight in airplanes or drown in ships, and here she was fussing about liberty bodices and stepping on sardines.

Two days later there was a phone call from Aunt Virginia. Margaret was not starting school till the day after Tally, but Roderick’s school, Foxingham, which was also in the West Country, started the same day and his train left Paddington at almost the same time.

“So we could take Tally to the station,” she said. “There’s plenty of room in the Rolls.” To her husband she had said, “It would be nice for the girl to arrive in a decent car instead of that old crock her father drives. First impressions are so important.”

Tally looked in anguish at her father. “Oh please, I want you to take me.”

“Don’t be foolish,” said Dr. Hamilton. “You don’t suppose we’d let anyone else see you off? ”

Because of course May and Hester were coming, too. Actually, rather a lot of people had wanted to come and see Tally off: Kenny and Maybelle; the receptionist, Miss Hoy; Sister Felicia from the convent… but Dr. Hamilton had persuaded them that Tally would do best with only her immediate family to say good-bye.

Paddington Station on the morning of April thirteenth was in a state of bustle and confusion. Parents towed their children to what they hoped was the right barrier; loudspeakers crackled, announcing changes of platform; porters with their trolleys tried to avoid the passengers who asked them things they didn’t know. From time to time a waiting train would hiss fiercely and a group of agitated mothers or worried children would vanish in a cloud of steam.

Tally stood with her father and the aunts next to the bookstall. Her stomach had dropped down into some place deep inside her and didn’t seem likely to rise up again for a very long time…

Into this confusion there marched the boys of Foxingham, in their red and yellow uniforms, looking like a line of soldiers or regimented bees. There was a teacher at the head of the line and another at the tail. The boys had said good-bye to their parents at the barrier — the school did not permit parents to come on to the platform — and of course no one showed signs of emotion or looked as though they might cry. Homesickness was not in the Foxingham tradition. Tally had tried to say good-bye to Roderick earlier, but he had been far too lordly to speak to her, and now she did not dare to wave. At the end of the line was a very dark, serious-looking boy and she wondered if he might be the Prince of Transjordania and, if so, how he felt so far from home.

The Foxingham school train left from Platform 2. It looked as though it might be late leaving, but the well-drilled boys stood beside their carriages waiting for the sign that they could board the train.

“It must be Platform 1 that you’re going from,” said Aunt May, looking at the departure board. She had been awake most of the night, but she was determined to be cheerful and brave. “Look, what a nice lot of girls!”

Platform 1 had no barrier; it was the end one, by the ticket office and the refreshment room, and the girls who were gathered together there did indeed look very nice. They were all identically dressed in smart navy-blue blazers and straw hats with navy ribbons, and their white knee socks gleamed with cleanliness. Beside them stood calm and elegant parents tweaking at their daughters’ clothes. Two teachers in gray coats and skirts with whistles around their necks moved among the girls. Cries of “Had a good hol, Daphne?” or “Wait till you hear what I did, Cynthia!” filled the air. They were exactly like the heroines in the books that Tally had been reading.

Tally bit her lip. How was she to join those beautifully turned-out girls, dressed as she was in her shabby tweed coat?

But at that moment the loudspeaker crackled into life.

“This is a platform change. The school train for St. Fenella’s Academy will now depart from Platform Six.”

And in an instant the beautifully turned-out girls and their parents hurried away.

“Oh dear,” said Aunt Hester, who had been much taken by the well-behaved children in their straw boaters. “I did hope they were bound for Delderton. They seemed so suitable.”

For a while Platform 1 was empty.

At least it was empty of anyone who might have been going away to school. There was a girl doing a handstand by the ticket office: her skirt swirled around her head; her knickers were white and pocketless. A boy with wild dark hair appeared, carrying a glass tank containing something bald and white. His shoelaces were undone; water from the tank slopped on to his unraveling jersey. Another boy, wearing a boiler suit, was holding a banner that read: DOWN WITH TYRANTS! Behind him came a very pretty girl with bare feet.

“Are they from a circus,” wondered Aunt Hester aloud, “or can’t they afford shoes? Her poor feet…”

More children arrived. Here and there were grown-ups: a woman dressed like an Aztec peasant with a blanket around her shoulders… a man in corduroys with huge patches on the sleeves and a rent in his trousers… a small fat man with an enormous beard.

The train steamed in.

“Excuse me…” Dr. Hamilton had waylaid a porter. “Is this the train for St. Agnes? The Delderton train? ”

“Aye,” said the porter. “Better keep out of the way, sir — they’re savages, this lot,” and he hurried off down the platform.

But now a woman in a loose cloak, with long, red-gold hair tumbling down her back, came hurrying down the platform. She carried a clipboard, and when she came up to a child she spoke to it and ticked off its name, and the child wandered off to the train and got into one of the carriages and opened the window and went on shouting to its parents.

Now she came up to Tally and said, “Are you by any chance Augusta Carrington? ”

“No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

“Oh dear. This list… I don’t know why they bother with lists, they never seem to be right. In that case who would you be? ” She peered in a worried way at her clipboard.

“She’s Talitha Hamilton,” said Dr. Hamilton, frowning.

“Ah yes, that’s all right, I’ve got you down. You can go to the train — sit anywhere you like. And if you do see Augusta Carrington send her to me,” and she moved away toward a boy with a birdcage who had just come out of the refreshment room.

“Well, at least it doesn’t seem to matter too much what you wear, dear,” said Aunt Hester, looking very pale.

Tally said nothing and her father put his arm around her shoulders. He was remembering some of the things that Professor Mayfield had said when he told him that he thought he could get Tally a scholarship to Delderton.

“It’s an unusual school and very highly regarded. All sorts of eminent people send their children there. The school believes in freedom and self-development, and not forcing the children.”

Perhaps he should have found out more before he’d agreed to send Tally — but the part he had taken notice of was the description of the beautiful Devon countryside, the healthy food… the safety it would provide in times of war. And of course he himself believed in freedom and self-development — who didn’t?

Now quickly he tried to explain to his stricken daughter that Delderton was what was known as a progressive school.

But Tally was beyond help. She would rather have gone into a lion’s den than into one of those compartments.

“I don’t know how to be progressive,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t know how one does it.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “And I don’t know about self-development. I don’t know about any of these things.”

But it was too late. As for Augusta Carrington, it was quite obvious to Tally what had happened to her. She had stayed at home with her head under her pillow and refused to leave the house.

“We’ll write to you every day,” promised Aunt May — and Dr. Hamilton, blaming himself utterly, took his daughter’s hand and led her to the train.

People don’t die from getting into school trains and Tally, as she leaned out of the window to wave, stayed incurably alive, but as she saw her father and the aunts standing very upright on the platform she felt a sense of desolation such as she had never known.

Doors slammed; the guard waved his flag and put his whistle to his lips and the train began to move. Her father lifted his arm for the last time and turned to lead his sisters to the exit, and Tally, following him with her eyes, saw some of the other parents hurrying away blindly, as if these odd people, too, might be sorry to see their extraordinary children go. For a short time the Foxingham train ran beside hers, and she could see the fierce-striped boys in a blur of red and yellow. Then their train accelerated and they were gone.

She took a deep breath and opened the door to a compartment.

There were three people inside. A thin girl with two long sandy plaits sat in one corner, turning the pages of a film magazine. She had gray eyes and a narrow face covered in freckles. People with freckles usually look cheerful, but this girl seemed listless and rather sad, hunched in her seat. Yet the smile she gave Tally was welcoming and friendly.

“You’d better sit over here,” she said. “Not under the salamander. He slops.”

“He doesn’t,” said the wild-haired boy crossly, looking up at the luggage rack. His legs were stretched out so as to leave little room, but he moved them for Tally to get past. “I got him a new tank.”

Tally peered up at the strange pale creature, like an overgrown newt, lurking in the water weeds.

“Is it an axolotl? ” she asked, remembering her father’s zoology books.

The boy nodded. “I got him for my birthday.”

“Are we allowed to keep animals then? ” asked Tally.

“Not cats or dogs, but small ones that can stay in cages,” said the girl, putting down her magazine. “There’s a pet hut where they live.” And then: “My name’s Julia.” She pointed to the boy with the axolotl. “He’s Barney. And that’s Tod.”

Tod was the boy who had carried a banner with the words DOWN WITH TYRANTS! but the banner was now rolled up and he was reading The Dandy.

“You’d better come and sit next to me,” Julia went on—“there’s a little fat boy who was sitting where you are. He’s called Kit and he’s new like you. He’s in the lavatory. They sent him in a shirt and tie and he’s very upset. I think he’s trying to flush his tie down the loo.”

“But it won’t go down, surely?” Tally was instantly concerned. “He’ll block everything.”

Julia shrugged, but Tally was not good at leaving well enough alone. “I’ll go and see,” she said.

She made her way along the corridor. The girl with bare feet was hanging on to the window bars. She wore a green shirt with a rip in it and a gathered skirt with an uneven hem and looked very confident. Obviously the rip was in exactly the right place, and the hem needed to be uneven.

The lavatory door was locked, but after she had banged several times it opened and a woebegone face appeared around it. In one plump hand the little boy held a bedraggled tie.

“It’s no good — I looked but the hole’s too small. No one’s wearing a tie. No one. And there’s a girl without any shoes, and I want to go to a proper school where they have prefects and play cricket,” he wailed.

And a tear fell from one of his large blue eyes.

“We could throw your tie out of the window,” suggested Tally. “That would be simpler. Or I’ll keep it for you till you go home.”

The idea that he might one day go home again cheered Kit up enough to stop him crying, and he followed her out into the corridor.

“Wait a minute,” said Tally. “Just let your shirt hang out over your shorts. And take off your socks. I’m going to take mine off, too; they’re a bit clean and white.”

Back in the compartment they found the teacher with the clipboard. She seemed to have forgotten about Augusta Carrington and looked relaxed and cheerful. Her amazing russet hair tumbled down her back and her amber eyes were flecked with gold.

“Oh, there you are. Good,” she said, smiling at Tally and Kit. “Is everything all right? ”

Tally nodded, and Kit, who had been about to repeat that he wanted to go to a proper school where they played cricket, decided not to.

“Well, if you want anything I’m in the next carriage,” she said. “I’d better go and see how the other new people are getting on.”

“It’s not fair to make Clemmy take the school train,” said Barney when she had gone. “She hates all those lists and things, and somebody always does get lost. They could get someone boring and bossy like Prosser.”

“Who is she? ” asked Tally.

“She’s called Clemency Short. She teaches art and she helps out in the kitchens. She’s a marvelous cook.”

“I thought I’d seen her before, but I can’t have done.”

“Actually you can,” said Barney. “She’s in the London Gallery as the Goddess of the Foam, coming out of some waves, and on a plinth outside the post office in Frith Street standing on one toe — only that’s a sculpture.”

“And on the wall of the Regent Theater as a dancing muse,” said Julia. “She looks a bit cross there because the man who painted the mural was a brute and made the girls stand about in the freezing cold dressed in bits of muslin, and Clemmy got bronchitis. That’s what made her decide to stop being an artist’s model and become a teacher.”

It was a long journey. The children brought out their sandwiches; they grew drowsy. Julia had stopped turning the pages of her magazine. Tally thought she might be asleep, but when she glanced at her she saw that she was looking intently at one particular picture: a photograph of a woman with carefully arranged curls drooping on to her forehead, a long neck, and slightly parted lips. The caption said: “Gloria Grantley: One of the loveliest stars to grace the firmament of film.”

“Isn’t she beautiful? ” said Julia, and Tally agreed that she was, though she didn’t really care for her. Gloria looked hungry, as though she needed to eat an admiring gentleman each day for breakfast.

The train stopped briefly at Exeter and Clemmy came past again, checking that everybody was all right.

“By the way, you’re in Magda’s house,” she told Tally. “And Kit, too. Julia will show you; she’s with Magda, too.”

“Oh dear, that’s bad news,” said Julia when Clemency had gone.

“Isn’t she nice? Magda, I mean.”

“Yes, she’s nice enough. Kind and all that. But she feels bad about things, and her cocoa is absolutely diabolical.”

“Cocoa can be difficult,” said Tally. “The skin… but why does she feel bad? ”

“She teaches German and she used to spend a lot of time in Germany, and every time Hitler does something awful she feels she’s to blame. She’s really a philosophy student — she’s writing a book about someone called Schopenhauer — and her room gets all cluttered up with paper and she can’t sew or sort clothes or anything like that.”

“Perhaps we could help her to make proper cocoa,” said Tally. “She probably needs a whisk.”

But Kit had gone under again.

“I don’t like cocoa with skin on it,” he began. “I want to go to a proper school where they…”

But just then the train gave an unexpected jolt and a shower of water from Barney’s axolotl descended on his head.

When they had been traveling for more than three hours Tally looked out, and there was the sea. Tally had not expected it; the sun, the blue water, the wheeling birds were like getting a sudden present.

They went through a sandstone tunnel, and another one… and presently the train turned inland again. Now they were in a lush green valley with clumps of ancient trees. The air that came in through the open window was soft and gentle; a river sparkled beside the line.

The train slowed down.

“We’re here,” said Barney.

“Really? ” said Tally. “This is Delderton? ”

Her father had spoken of the peaceful Devon countryside, but she had not expected anything like this.

“My goodness,” she said wonderingly. “It’s very beautiful!”

CHAPTER FOUR Delderton

Tally was right. There was no lovelier place in England: a West Country valley with a wide river flowing between rounded hills toward the sea. Sheltered from the north winds, everything grew at Delderton: primroses and violets in the meadows; pinks and bluebells in the woods and, later in the year, foxgloves and willow herb. A pair of otters lived in the river; kingfishers skimmed the water, and russet Devon cows, the same color as the soil, grazed the fields and wandered like cows in Paradise.

But it was children, not cows or kingfishers, that Delderton mainly grew.

Twenty years earlier a very rich couple from America came and built a school on the ruins of Delderton Hall, with its jousting ground and ancient yews, and they spared no expense, for they believed that only the best was good enough for children, and they were as idealistic as they were wealthy.

The new Delderton was built around a central courtyard; the walls were lined with cream stucco; the windows had green shutters; the archway that led into the building was crowned by a tower with a blue clock adorned by gold numbers and a brilliantly painted weather vane in the shape of a cockerel.

And the ancient cedar that had sheltered the lawns of the old hall was saved and grew in the center of the courtyard.

Inside the building, too, the American founders spared no expense. Each child had its own room: only a small one, but private. The common rooms had well-sprung sofas, the pianos in the music rooms were Steinways, and the library housed over ten thousand books.

But what was important to the founders was not the building, it was what the school would mean to the children who came to it. For Delderton was to be a progressive school — a school where the children would be free to follow their instincts and develop in a natural way. There would be no bullying or beatings, no competitive sports where one person was ranked above another, no exams — just harmony and self-development in the glorious Devon countryside. A school where the teachers would be chosen for their loving kindness and not their degrees.

And this was exactly what had happened. But now, twenty years later, the building looked… tired. The cream walls were streaked with damp from the soft West Country rain; the paint on the shutters was flaking — and the beautiful cedar in the courtyard was supported by wooden props.

And the nice American founders were tired, too. In the autumn of 1930 they sold the school to a board of trustees who appointed a new headmaster. His name was Ben Daley: a small, portly man with a bald head and a nice smile, who now, at the beginning of the summer term, was looking out of his study window at the pupils coming in through the archway from the station bus.

And at one pupil in particular — a new girl with straight fawn hair who had stopped and laid her hand on the trunk of the cedar as though she was greeting a friend.

“It’s three hundred years old,” said Julia, looking up at the tree. “The headmaster’s mad about it — if anyone climbs it or throws stuff into the branches he comes rushing out of his room. No one ever gets expelled here, but if they did it would be because of the tree. That top branch broke off because a horrible boy called Ronald Peabody climbed it, though it was already weak. He fell and broke his arm, but nobody cared.”

“I wouldn’t have cared either,” said Tally.

The rooms where the children slept were on corridors on either side of the courtyard. Inside, the building was divided into four houses separated by double doors. Each house had a room for the housemother, a common room, and a pantry. Tally was in the Blue House; her room overlooked the courtyard and the tree.

“You mean we each have our own room? ”

Julia nodded. “I don’t know for how much longer; I think the money’s running out a bit, but for now.”

Tally’s room was very small, but it had everything you could want: a divan bed, a washbasin, a bookcase, and a built-in wardrobe. The door of the wardrobe was somewhat battered and one desk leg was propped up on a wedge, but Tally was delighted. And it solved at once the problem of the feasts in the dorm. No one could have a feast in a dorm which was not there.

Julia was in the room next to hers; then came Barney, then two children she had not met yet. Kit was at the far end of the corridor.

As she was putting her things away there was a knock on the door.

“Do you need any help with unpacking? I’m Magda — your housemother.”

Magda was thin and very dark with large black eyes and wispy hair.

Tally shook her head. “No, I’m all right, thanks.”

“Good. Well, high tea’s in half an hour. You’ll hear the gong. And after that you’re to go along to the headmaster’s room.”

Tally looked stricken. She had not quite shaken off the memory of the books she had read before she came. “I can’t have done anything yet — I’ve only just got here.”

Magda smiled. “No, no. Daley likes to welcome new children individually. Julia will show you where to go.”

The headmaster’s study was large and light. One window looked out over the courtyard; another faced the terraced garden leading to the playing field and, beyond it, the rolling hills. Now, hearing a quiet knock at the door, Daley said, “Come in,” and a girl with a nibbled fringe and interested eyes came into the room.

“Ah, Talitha Hamilton, is that right? And they call you Tally.”

“Yes.”

Clearly this wasn’t a curtsying situation, though the headmaster sat behind an impressive desk, so Tally smiled instead and put out her hand.

The headmaster had a headache. He always had a headache for the first three days of term, but for a moment the throbbing grew less. For this child was actually on the list, she was expected, she looked intelligent — and she had taken notice of the cedar tree. And this was important because she was on a scholarship and he couldn’t console himself with thinking that she brought much-needed money with her. One child, however awful, provided the salary for a teacher for a term, or a year’s worth of books. He shouldn’t of course have given any more scholarships, but his friend Professor Mayfield had spoken so enthusiastically of the selfless work done by Tally’s father that he had agreed.

“Now,” he said, when he had welcomed her to Delderton, “have you any questions you wanted to ask me? ”

“Well, I do have. I mean, I thought I was coming to an ordinary school where girls lived in dorms and shouted, ‘Well played, Daphne!’—and all that… but this isn’t like that, is it? ”

“No.”

“I’m not reproaching anybody, but what is it exactly? People say it’s a progressive school and I know what progressive means — at least I think I do. It means going from somewhere to somewhere else. But where to? ”

“Ah yes.” The headmaster for a moment looked sad. “That is a good question. I suppose we want children to take responsibility for their own lives. To choose what is right rather than to have it forced on them.”

“Yes, I see. Of course, one would have to know what is right.”

“Don’t you think one does know? ”

“I suppose so. Usually. But oughtn’t… the whole school to be going from somewhere to somewhere else? To somewhere better… if it’s being progressive? I mean, the world isn’t very good, is it, with this war coming and everything.”

Daley was silent. The child was certainly right about the state of the world. For a moment he saw what she saw: a whole school marching like an avenging army on the side of The Good.

“We do what we can to help: we take a lot of children from abroad. Staff, too, and many of the people who help with domestic work come from oppressed countries. And there’s a council meeting every other Monday: if you have any ideas you could put them forward then.”

Tally nodded, screwing up her face. “I expect it’s more difficult than I realize.” And then: “Is it true we don’t have to go to lessons? ”

“You don’t have to, but I hope you will. We have some excellent teachers.”

“So it’s all right to go to lessons? We don’t have to be free if we don’t want to? ”

The headmaster smiled. “No, Tally, you don’t have to be free.”

But Tally had another question. “I was wondering about Augusta Carrington. Did anyone find her? ”

“Yes, they did,” said the headmaster, looking pleased. “She’s turned up at a school in Wales. She got on the wrong train at Paddington — it happens from time to time.”

He looked down at the note he had made on his writing pad. All the children had a tutor chosen from among the staff, whom they saw once a week and to whom they could take special problems. Next to Tally’s name he had written: “David Prosser.” There was nothing wrong with the chemistry teacher; he was a perfectly sensible and responsible man. But now he crossed it out and wrote a different name.

“Your tutor will be Matteo von Tarlenheim. He takes biology… and other things.”

Now why did I do that? he wondered when Tally had gone. He usually kept Matteo for difficult boys or for children like Julia Mecklebury who had a special problem — and Tally was in neither of these groups.

But he did not change his mind.

When she got back to her corridor Tally found that Julia had finished unpacking and arranging her room. She had tacked up two posters of landscapes — an autumn wood and a rocky beach — and plumped up an embroidered cushion on the bed. Everything looked cheerful and nice, except for the photo of Gloria Grantley, the film star with sausage curls and pouting lips, which was in a silver frame by Julia’s bed.

“Is she a friend of the family? ” asked Tally, but Julia just shook her head, and Barney came in then to say he was going to settle the axolotl in his proper tank in the pet hut and, if they came with him, Tally could see where everything was.

The pet hut was behind the gym, which was a separate building set in trees. On the wooden steps leading up to it sat a small, very pretty girl talking in French to an enormous white rabbit that drooped down on either side of her slender knees.

Inside, the hut was full of cages from which came the squeals and snuffles of various rabbits and mice and guinea pigs. In one corner, however, there was an unexpected pet: a large striped snake, which opened one gummy eye as it felt the vibration made by their footsteps. It looked unhealthy and dry.

“That’s Verity’s,” said Julia. “She’s an awful show-off. You wouldn’t catch Verity with anything as ordinary as a guinea pig.”

Verity, it turned out, was the girl who had been barefoot in Paddington Station.

They decanted the axolotl into a bigger tank and gave him some bloodworm pellets and he settled down at once and began to eat — but Barney was still worried because he hadn’t got a name for him.

“It’s so rude having pets that aren’t called anything,” he said.

But it was difficult. The axolotl’s head, with its piercing black eyes and feathery gills, could have been called something Mexican and royal-sounding, like Protaxeles, but his legs were not royal at all. They were short and bandy — and if you had been naming his legs he would have been called Cyril or Alf.

“It’ll come to you suddenly,” said Tally. “Probably in the middle of the night.”

After that they took Tally on a tour of the school buildings. As the school had grown, classrooms and workshops and studios had sprung up outside the courtyard in places that had been part of the gardens of the old hall. There were only a few gardeners and groundsmen left now, so that creepers grew up the side of the gym and there were patches of moss and wildflowers between the paving stones. In the early-evening light everything looked dreamy, like an illustration in a book of watercolors.

They went down a sloping field to look at the school farm: a huddle of sheds with three goats, a cow, a handful of sheep, and some chickens which an African boy called Borro was shutting up for the night. As they made their way back they passed the open door of the art room and saw Clemmy bent over some dishes, mixing powder paints. She looked serene and happy — and Tally saw what Barney meant when he said that she should not be in charge of trains. Last term’s paintings were still on the wall: monkeys swung through jungles, underwater creatures wreathed and coiled… and in one corner was a bloodred painting of excited workers carrying sickles and hammers toward a palace gate.

“That’s Tod’s picture,” said Julia. “He’s sure the revolution will come soon, and that will be the end of tyrants and kings.”

Julia had not been exaggerating when she said that Magda was not good at making cocoa. When they had washed and put on their pajamas, all the children in the Blue House met for cocoa and biscuits in Magda’s room. Magda had a little kitchenette adjoining her room and she disappeared into it, emerging with a huge jug and a tray of cups.

The cocoa she poured out was quite extraordinary — blackish and grainy with a thick layer of skin — but she seemed so relieved when she had made it and poured it into the cups that even the rowdiest children said nothing. Then she played a Mozart sonata on her gramophone and everybody went to bed.

“You see what I mean about the cocoa,” said Julia.

“Yes, I do. Perhaps something could be done,” said Tally.

Julia looked surprised. “How could it? She always makes it like that.”

“Maybe we could make it? ” suggested Tally.

But now, as the lights went out, the homesickness that had been lying in wait for Tally gathered itself together and pounced.

She thought of the aunts, waiting for her as she came home from school, eager for every detail of her day. She thought of her friends in the street — Maybelle and Kenny, and Primrose in her stable.

But above all she thought of her father. Coming in from the surgery asking, “Where’s Tally?” as soon as he entered the house… teasing her about something foolish she had said… walking with her along the river on a Sunday, while they talked about anything and everything on earth.

It would be months before she saw him again and they had scarcely been separated for a day.

The lump in her throat was growing bigger. She groped for a handkerchief.

And then she heard the sound of sobbing. The sobbing grew louder, was muffled, then grew louder again.

Tally had expected tears from Kit but he had gone to sleep at once, his thumb in his mouth, and anyway his room was at the other end of the corridor. She waited, but the crying went on. It was none of her business, really — but she had not been brought up to ignore distress. She got out of bed, opened her door, and listened.

The sobbing came from a door opposite. She knocked very quietly, then pushed it open.

She was in the housemother’s room. Magda was sitting at her table, which was piled high with manuscript paper. Clearly she had intended to work on her book about the philosopher with the difficult name, but she wasn’t. Her head had fallen forward and she was crying bitterly; strands of hair lay on the paper and there was ink on her face.

When she saw Tally she sat up suddenly and blew her nose. “Is anything the matter? ” she asked. “Are you homesick? ”

“No… well, not really. But are you all right? ”

Tally’s inquiring face, tilted in concern, brought on another attack of weeping.

“Yes… yes. Of course. I’m not starving or being shot at, so of course I’m all right.” Magda sniffed and dabbed at her eyes. “You must go back to bed — you’ll be so tired in the morning.”

But Tally knew what one had to do when people were in trouble; her father had told her often enough. One sat quietly beside them and waited. And indeed, almost at once, Magda began to speak.

“It’s just… when everything’s quiet, one can’t help remembering. You see, I studied in Germany, in Weimar. It’s such a beautiful city, the old squares, the gardens… so peaceful, so full of interesting people and everyone so well-behaved. Scholars, professors… the lectures were remarkable. There was a young professor there… Heribert. I was going to go back to Germany to live when I had finished my book, and I thought that we might get married. But not now. Not with the Nazis marching about in jackboots spoiling everything — and anyway, I have a Jewish grandmother. But for me,” said Magda, and her eyes filled with tears again, “Weimar will always be home.”

“Yes, I see.” Tally put out a hand and laid it on Magda’s arm. “I’m so sorry.”

She stayed for a while, and before she left Magda’s sobs had died down. She even offered to make Tally another cup of cocoa.

Back in her bed, Tally found she was too tired to go on with her own longings. She had expected anything except to go to a school where it was the teachers who were homesick — and almost at once she fell asleep.

CHAPTER FIVE Becoming a Fork

Perhaps it was a pity that the first lesson on the timetable the next morning was drama. Tally had thought that drama was about doing plays and had been looking forward to it, but it wasn’t. It was taught by a woman with gray hair called Armelle, wearing a leotard, and took place in the hall.

“Now I want you to spread yourself out on the floor,” she said. “Give yourself plenty of space because we’re going to do an improvisation that covers the whole of our lives. We’re going to start by giving birth to ourselves. We’re going to imagine that we’re an embryo waiting to be born. Waiting… waiting… Don’t hurry it… that’s right… Then we’re going to learn to walk… slowly… very slowly… crawl first… then upright. Good… good…”

Tally was between Julia and Kit. She had hoped that Kit would decide to be born near some boys on the other side of the room, but he settled himself down as close to her as he could and now she heard his anguished whisper.

“I don’t want to give birth to myself, Tally. I don’t want to. I want to go to a proper school, where they have prefects and play cricket.”

When they had finished giving birth to themselves they had to stand up and become rigid and pronged like a fork, and then curved and bountiful like a teapot, and then soft and yielding like a pillow.

“If we don’t have to go to classes, why does everyone come to drama? ” asked Tally when they were out in the courtyard again.

“It’s because Armelle’s son was killed in Spain, fighting for the Republicans,” explained Julia. “She used to be quite fat and bossy, and now she’s all skin and bones.”

After drama came handicrafts. This was taught by a cheerful plump woman called Josie, who took them out into the fields behind the school to look for sheep’s wool.

“When we’ve got a sackful we’re going to wash it and card it and dye it — using natural dyes, of course. Lichen and moss and alder bark… It’ll keep us busy most of the term,” she said cheerfully.

Tally thought that this was likely: the fields around Delderton seemed to be inhabited by cows rather than sheep and wisps of discarded wool were scarce, but as they searched the hedgerows Josie pointed out all sorts of interesting plants which they would pick later and grind up and boil in vats.

“I’ve been experimenting with woad,” she said, and rolled up her sleeves to show them her forearms, which were mottled with blue, “but I haven’t got it quite right yet. It makes you realize how clever the ancient Britons were.”

After break they had a double period of English; it was taken by a quietly spoken man in spectacles called O’Hanrahan. They were studying Greek myths and he told them the story of Persephone, who was carried away by the King of the Underworld and kept prisoner there, guarded by a dreadful three-headed dog, while her sorrowing mother, the goddess Demeter, searched and lamented, and the trees and flowers withered and died. He didn’t read the story, he told it, and the class listened to him in total silence.

“It would make a good play,” said a boy with ginger hair.

“Perhaps next term,” said O’Hanrahan. He turned to Tally. “What do you think? ”

Tally nodded. “Yes, it would. The spirits trapped in the Underworld would be interesting to do. Writhing and shrieking and begging to be let out.”

“Oh, not a play,” said Julia nervously. “Not proper acting.”

O’Hanrahan looked at her quietly for a moment before he said, “No one has to act if they don’t want to, Julia. You know that.”

When they were back in Julia’s room getting ready for lunch Tally asked, “Don’t you like acting? ”

“No. I mean, I don’t do it. Not ever.”

She had on her worried look and Tally did not ask any more. She knew already that she and Julia would be friends, but there was something puzzling about her. It was as though she would do anything not to be noticed, as though she needed to be younger and less important than she was.

Later, as Tally walked over to the dining room with Barney, he said, “She’s silly. Julia, I mean. O’Hanrahan got her to do a bit in Much Ado About Nothing. It was just in the classroom, but Julia was amazing. Only when we told her how good she was, she clammed up completely and went off in a state and she’s never done anything since. Whereas Verity always wants to be the star. You’ll see — if we do Persephone, she’ll try to be the heroine.”

“I was wondering about her feet. Verity’s, I mean. I can see it’s fine to go barefoot in the grass, but in Paddington Station… Doesn’t she get splinters? ”

Barney shrugged. “Someone told her she had beautiful feet and that was that. She’s the vainest person I know — she’ll spend an hour tearing her skirt in exactly the right place or untidying her hair.”

In the afternoon they had games and Kit’s hopes of playing cricket were finally dashed. The only team game they played at Delderton was softball, and people who didn’t want to play that went for cross-country runs, used the apparatus in the gym, or worked on the school farm.

Tally went down to help Borro clean out the goats. Borro’s father had been a chieftain in Bechuanaland before he was deposed by a rival and now had a job lecturing in the University of London, but Borro was determined to go back to Africa and reclaim his father’s land and farm it. The walls of his room were covered in pictures of cattle: Friesians and Aberdeen Angus and Longhorns, whose mild eyes gazed down at him as he slept. Not only that, but he was going to breed a new kind of cow, which would grow fat even on the parched soil of his native land.

Meanwhile, since cattle breeding was not really practical at school, he and Tod had decided to breed edible snails and sell them to restaurants. Tod wanted the money for the revolution and Borro wanted it for his fare back to Africa. Unfortunately the few snails they had managed to collect so far did not seem to be remotely interested in mating.

Tally’s friends discussed this, sitting on the steps of the pet hut after tea, watching the snails crawl over each other in a bored sort of way.

“I suppose it’s because each snail is both a male and a female,” said Tally, “so they get muddled.”

“Matteo would know what to do,” said Barney.

But Matteo was not yet back at school, and his first biology lesson had been postponed.

It was surprising how quickly one could get used to a completely new life. Some of the lessons were quite ordinary: chemistry, say, when a man called David Prosser did the experiments for them on a bench and then told them what to write up, but mostly going into a classroom was an adventure that might turn out in any sort of way.

Art, for example… Clemmy took a double period of art on Tally’s second day at school except that she didn’t “take” it — she just seemed to wander around the art room, which looked out over fields and the distant trees that lined the river. Paper and paints were laid out and Clemmy murmured something.

“Most people don’t believe in guardian angels, but what exactly is a guardian angel? ” she said. “Could it be something quite different to what people think…? ” And almost at once everyone had started working, completely absorbed. Tally found that she was painting her street: the rows of houses, her father’s surgery and above them, flying over the roofs, London’s own guardian angels, the barrage balloons — and it felt as though she was joining her life in London with her new life at Delderton.

But the lessons everyone spoke about were Matteo’s biology classes. “They’re special,” they said, and when Tally asked in what way, they said it was no use explaining; she’d see.

Making friends was the most important thing, but what Tally loved was the way Delderton grew out of the countryside. Going over to the gym she would meet a red squirrel or pass a great bank of primroses as scented and rich as if they had been planted there. And each morning, as she woke, she heard a thrush singing in the cedar tree.

Kit, though, had still not settled in and followed Tally about lamenting from morning till night. Kit did not want to be a fork or pick worts to dye his sheep’s wool — and he did not want to go ping on the triangle when they played the Toy Symphony in music lessons.

Music was taught by an elderly professor of harmony who had hoped for a quiet life by returning to teach in the country. New children were usually persuaded to learn whatever instrument was needed for the orchestra, but when he met Kit the professor knew he was beaten.

“Oh Kit, surely you can just go ping,” said Tally wearily. “It doesn’t take a minute.”

But she was really very sorry for the little boy, who had just started at a small prep school down the road from his house and made friends with a boy called Horlicks Major and been picked for the cricket team, when a rich friend of his mother’s had come to stay with the family and said that Kit was repressed and should be sent to Delderton, and had offered to pay the fees.

“But I don’t mind being repressed,” Kit had told his new friends. “I don’t like it when people tell me I can do what I like. I want them to tell me what to do.”

Magda had stopped crying after lights-out and did her best to be a good housemother. Nothing could be done about her cocoa, and she got very confused about checking the laundry — it was a question of luck whose clean washing landed on one’s bed — but her German lessons were good, and she was particularly kind to Julia on the morning when the first letters came.

The post at Delderton came just after breakfast so that there was time before lessons began for the children to go to the pigeonholes outside the school office to see if there was any mail.

The aunts had kept their promise. There were three letters in Tally’s pigeonhole: one in green ink from Aunt Hester, one in violet ink from Aunt May, and one in ordinary ink from her father, which she pounced on and read first.

There was a letter for Barney and one for Tod and for Borro and for Kit.

Only Julia had no mail.

On Tally’s third day at Delderton the headmaster gathered the school together in the hall. He said that it was easy to forget, in the peace of the countryside, that Britain and France and so many of the free people of the world were in danger. Here in Devon we were unlikely to be bombed, he said, but we must be ready to do everything to help the war effort if the worst happened.

At this point the older children looked at each other hopefully, ready to man a nest of machine guns if one was set up in the courtyard, but what the headmaster said was different.

“Already two of the domestic staff have had their call-up papers. So I think it would be fair if every child did half an hour of housework before the start of lessons.”

Everyone agreed with this — except Verity, who said that she didn’t think her parents had sent her to school to scrub floors — but of course it was a disappointment. When one has hoped to man the barricades, it is difficult to get excited about doing the dusting or polishing the furniture.

Actually, it was not easy to forget that there might be a war, even at Delderton. Most of the staff had their own wirelesses and at six o’clock the children would make their way to the housemothers’ rooms and listen to the news.

Not only was Hitler braying and strutting and threatening, growing madder and wilder in his demands by the day, but Mussolini, the Italian dictator who copied him in everything he did, had invaded Albania, a defenseless country which had done him no harm whatsoever, and the Albanian ruler, King Zog, had fled his country and gone into exile.

On the following day as Tally was walking across the courtyard she saw a girl standing alone by the archway with a suitcase and a violin case beside her. She was tall and thin with frizzy black hair, and for some reason Tally knew at once who she was. She had the look of someone who had come far, like a camel across the desert.

“You’re Augusta Carrington,” she said.

Augusta nodded and said, “Yeth, I am.”

She had a ferocious metallic brace on her teeth, which made her lisp.

Clemmy now came out of the school office, holding a list and looking shaken.

“Are you sure, Augusta? ” she asked. “It says here that you can’t eat cheese or strawberries or wheat or eggs or nuts or rhubarb. You’re allergic to all of those.”

Augusta nodded.

“And fur and feathers,” she said, spitting a little through her brace.

Although Tally and her friends all took to Augusta, the allergy to fur and feathers made it difficult when they brought her to the pet hut, where they had their meetings. If she sat on the top step she sneezed all the time, and on the second step she sneezed often, but on the bottom step she was all right, and able to be sympathetic about their problems.

“You could call the axolotl Zog,” she suggested.

Actually she said “Thog” because of her brace, but they understood her.

“You shouldn’t call anything after a king,” said Tod. “Kings are evil.”

But Barney said it wasn’t Zog’s fault he had been born a king, and when they had looked carefully at the creature’s bandy legs and round black eyes he really did look quite like a Zog.

So that was one problem solved. The snails on the other hand were still lying about on other snails as though they were old sofas.

“I wish Matteo would come back,” said Borro restlessly.

But Matteo was still away, and biology had been postponed again.

Tally had heard a lot about Matteo as a biologist — but it was what he was like as a tutor that she wanted to know.

“He’s your tutor, too, isn’t he?” she asked Julia as they were getting ready for bed. “What’s he like? ”

Julia had been replaiting her hair. She put down her hairbrush and didn’t answer straightaway.

“He’s not like anybody else,” she said.

“But do you like him? ”

“Yes, I like him very much, but that isn’t what it’s about. You’ll see…”

CHAPTER SIX London Interlude

After they watched the Delderton train steam out of Paddington Station, the aunts felt completely wretched, and Tally’s father vowed that he would take her away at the end of the first term.

Then came Tally’s letters and everything changed.

“This is a very interesting school,” she wrote on her second day. “The first night I thought I would be homesick, but it was my housemother who was homesick… Being a fork is a bit odd but it can be quite peaceful because you can think your own thoughts…” and she described the cedar tree the headmaster loved so much, and the art classes, and Clemmy. By the time her second letter came it was clear that Tally was enjoying herself — and as it was a sunny morning the aunts, who always took such an interest in Tally’s life, set off for the Thameside Municipal Baths.

They were not going swimming. It was a long time since they had cared to plunge into chlorinated water in their bathing costumes, which no longer looked quite right. They were going to look at Tally’s art teacher.

“She’s in a mural in the Thameside baths,” Tally had written. “Barney says it’s easy to see her there because you can get quite close. She’s coming out of the water holding up a garland of sea-shells.”

So now the aunts paid their admission fee for Freestyle Swimming and took their rolled-up towels (which had no costumes inside them) into the entrance hall and there, sure enough, was a large mural of some girls coming out of a very blue pool surrounded by flowers.

“That’s her,” said Aunt Hester straightaway. “I remember her hair.”

Now that she wasn’t looking for Augusta Carrington, the woman who had been in charge of the school train was smiling very happily as she held up her necklace of shells. After that the aunts went on a proper Clemmy trail, searching her out in the London Gallery and the Battersea Arts Museum as instructed by their niece, but not tracking her down as she stood on one toe outside the post office in Frith Street where, as Tally had explained, she was cast in concrete and couldn’t really be seen.

In her second letter Tally also mentioned the problem of Gloria Grantley, with whom her friend Julia was so besotted.

“Could you ask Maybelle if she knows anything about her? ”

So the aunts went to the corner shop, where Maybelle was weighing caster sugar into blue bags, and she was very helpful and came around after the shop closed with a pile of film magazines in which she had marked a great many photographs of Gloria Grantley.

“She’s a big star all right,” said Maybelle. “She usually plays in those gloomy films where she’s on trial for murder or her lover tries to kill her and all that kind of thing. You know, melodrama.”

Maybelle herself preferred musicals — she was taking tap- and stage-dancing classes and definitely intended to break into films.

“She must earn millions,” said Maybelle. “And she’s beautiful all right, but…” She shrugged.

The aunts dutifully studied all the copies of The Picturegoer Maybelle had left.

There were photos of Gloria on a tiger-skin rug and in a hammock and coming down a flight of stairs.

“I think her throat is a little… excessive, don’t you? I mean… almost too swanlike? ” said May.

Hester agreed: “But it says here that she’s only twenty-five years old, so maybe she’ll settle down. People of twenty-five don’t always know how to behave sensibly.”

As Tally’s letters continued to come, the aunts became more and more involved with her life and that of her friends. They searched the hardware stores for a whisk that could be used to froth up Magda’s cocoa, and they went to the library to look up the philosophy of Schopenhauer and agreed that someone who was doing research on him could not be expected also to be good at housework. And when Tally added an excited postscript to her fourth letter to say that Augusta Carrington had turned up, they shared the relief of the staff, even though poor Augusta had serious problems.

“She’s allergic to absolutely everything,” wrote Tally. “Magda says she is used to allergies because Heribert, the professor she loved in Germany, was allergic to cheese and strawberries — they brought him out in lumps — but Augusta mostly lives on rice and bananas, though she can eat weird things like tripe and dark chocolates with gooey centers. It’s no wonder she got on the wrong train.”

And the aunts in their turn wrote almost daily to Tally to tell her what had happened in the street: about the new air-raid shelter at number 4, in which the dog across the road had had her puppies, and about old Mrs. Henderson, who had attacked the gardener in the park with his own shovel for digging up the wallflowers and planting cabbages, which would help us to win the war if it came, but did not smell nice.

When Tally had been at Delderton for a week, Dr. Hamilton’s brother, Thomas, came to see him to consult with him about a patient. Thomas was the richer and more fashionable doctor, but James had a special instinct for what was wrong with people. And with Thomas came his wife, Tally’s aunt Virginia, the mother of Roderick and Margaret. She said she had come to sympathize with Tally’s family, but actually she came to gloat.

“My dear, we were so horrified by what we saw at the station. Those dreadful children and everything so out of control and no uniforms! I suppose you’re going to take her away? ”

Tally’s father looked at her. “I don’t think so, Virginia. Not yet, at all events. We have had some very interesting letters from Tally.”

“Letters! But she hasn’t been away for a week. At Foxingham they’re not allowed to write at all the first week while they settle back into school.”

“Well, at Delderton they write when they like, and Tally has been very good. Her letters amuse us very much.”

Actually, thought Dr. Hamilton, Tally’s letters had done more than amuse him. They had interested him and consoled him and touched on some things that he cared about deeply.

“Really?” This was not at all what Aunt Virginia wanted to hear. “Margaret never has time for more than a few lines.”

“Of course, the letters at Foxingham are censored by the teachers,” said her husband. “Just as well, really. One doesn’t want to get oneself upset by any nonsense the boys can come up with.”

“We saw something about Foxingham in the newspaper, didn’t we, May? ” said Hester. “A boy who tried to run away because he was afraid of being punished.”

“Well, that’s the kind of nonsense I mean,” said Thomas. “There have to be punishments — they have pupils there from the royal houses of Europe, so the strictest discipline must be maintained. The Archduke of Hohenlohe has just sent his nephew there, and of course the Prince of Transjordania has been there for over a year. The boy who ran away was obviously a coward. He was supposed to go to the head for a caning and he just bolted like a scared rabbit. They found him the next day, hiding in some wood about twenty miles away. If Roderick did that I’d be ashamed, and I certainly wouldn’t want to hear about it in a letter.”

“Roderick would never get into that kind of trouble, dear,” said Aunt Virginia. She turned to her brother-in-law. “Well, I suppose you know what you’re doing, James, but I’d take Tally away at once if I were you.” She lowered her voice. “Mrs. Trent-Watson, who was at the train seeing Bernard off, says she’s seen that woman who was in charge of the children before. She says she’s an artists’ model — and you know what that might mean. Life classes and all sorts of dreadful things! Of course it may not be true…”

Hester and May smiled. “Ah, but it is true, Virginia. We’ve seen her on the walls of the swimming bath. Such a lovely girl. And Tally says she’s a wonderful cook!”

Aunt Virginia sniffed. “Well, all I can say is I wouldn’t let Margaret associate with anyone like that, not in a million years.”

After they had left and Dr. Hamilton was alone in his study, he took out his daughter’s last letter again. Tally had described a strange, slightly mad but very beautiful world, a world in which the trees and the river and the hills at Delderton seemed to be as much a part of her life as the teachers and her friends.

And she wrote that she was waiting for her first biology lesson.

“The man who takes it is my tutor and he’s supposed to be terribly good. He’s been all over the world and done some important scientific work. I’m really looking forward to it.”

Dr. Hamilton missed his daughter more than he would ever admit, but he was very pleased about that last sentence. Biology, the science of life, how it had begun and where it was going… this was what had started him off on his studies as a doctor.

That his daughter should take the same journey made him very happy.

CHAPTER SEVEN Matteo’s Moan

As it happened, Tally was late for the first biology class. She had cut her knee, tripping on a paving stone, and gone back for a bandage, and everyone was already settled when she slipped into a desk near the back.

The man standing at the blackboard wore a gray flannel suit. He had sparse ginger hair and a pointed ginger beard and he wore rimless spectacles.

“Today we are going to study the life cycle of the liver fluke,” he said in a high, slightly squeaky voice. “Look at page seventy-six of your textbook and keep it open.”

Tally fought down a wave of disappointment. The life cycle of the liver fluke might be necessary. It might be important. But it does not make the heart beat faster. The nuns had taught it also.

“The history of this organism begins in vegetation in slow-moving streams, where it exists in the form of slime-encrusted eggs. You can see a picture of these in your textbook, labeled diagram A. Please copy it carefully into a blank page of your exercise books.”

He waited, the chalk in his hand, till everyone had finished.

“The eggs are then eaten by a sheep and make their way through the animal’s bile duct into the liver, where they become adult flukes.”

He drew a liver (but not a sheep) and put in the adult flukes, explaining their effect on the animal, which was bad. “I will allow five minutes for you to copy from the blackboard,” he said.

Tally, filling her liver with the flattened parasites, felt increasingly miserable, and angry, too. Why did everyone tell her how wonderful biology was? The nuns had taught it better.

“There now follows hermaphrodite fertilization, and the resulting eggs pass out through the alimentary canal and on to the grass, where they turn into conical organisms which are known as miracidia,” he droned. “You will find these on the next page, page seventy-seven…”

When the lesson was over Tally hurried out past Julia and her friends. She wanted to be on her own, for it seemed clear that they had been playing a joke on her, pretending that the biology teacher was special. She didn’t mind being teased usually, but she had written to her father about him because she knew how much he wanted her to enjoy science.

But they caught her up.

“I’m sorry — that was a shame,” said Julia. “We should have warned you — but everyone was sure that Matteo would be back today.”

“What do you mean? Wasn’t that Matteo? ”

Julia stopped dead and glared at her friend. “Well, really, Tally! I may not be a genius, but I would hardly tell you that Smithy gives brilliant biology lessons.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Smithy stands in when teachers are ill or away. He lives in the village; he used to teach at the high school in St. Agnes, but he had to retire early. He’s the most boring teacher in the world, but Daley keeps him on because he’s good at getting people through external exams when we have to take them.”

But two nights later, as Tally drifted into sleep, Julia knocked at her door.

“Wake up! Open your window and listen.”

The courtyard was deserted; the cedar tree stood silvered in the moonlight. And floating toward them, very faintly, came the sound of a long, drawn-out, and very melancholy noise.

“What is it? ” asked Tally.

“It’s Matteo’s Moan,” said Julia. “He likes to play it on the sackbut last thing at night. He says it’s a folk song from the mountains — but we think he’s made it up, it’s so weird.”

The headmaster, sitting in his study, was frowning over documents and decisions. The founders of Delderton, who were still very much concerned with the school, had written from New York suggesting that if war came, Daley should evacuate the school to America. They offered the use of a large farmhouse in Maine, which could be the basis of a school while the war lasted.

Daley had read this letter a dozen times and pondered it, but he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to leave Delderton and he knew that many children — especially those on scholarships — would not be able to go; the fare to the States would be far too expensive. But did he have the right to turn down such an offer?

This was a big issue, but there were other annoyances. The parents of Phillip Anderson wanted him to learn the accordion so that he could mix with the “common people.” And the Ministry of Culture had written asking Daley to send a folk-dance group to a festival in an obscure country in central Europe.

This last letter annoyed him particularly. Delderton did not go in for folk dancing — the mere mention of Morris dancers with bells and funny hats would have the children up in arms, and it was not exactly a time when schools wanted to send their pupils gallivanting all over Europe. The man from the ministry had written very earnestly: there was nothing, he said, so likely to increase goodwill among nations as an exchange of cultural activity, especially if it involved children or young people — but the whole idea was ridiculous. All the same, Daley would bring it up at the council meeting at the end of the month — it would take everybody’s minds off the free period the children had decided they needed on Wednesday afternoons, not to mention the matter of the trash cans which came up at every meeting.

And at least Matteo was back.

It was through the founders — Mr. and Mrs. Ford-Ellington — that Matteo had come to Delderton, arriving two years earlier with nothing but a leather suitcase and his sackbut in a battered case.

No one knew much about his early life. He was a European who spoke five languages and had a Nansen passport — the document given to those who no longer have a country of their own — but he had spent most of his adult life traveling and working in the wild places of the world: the Galápagos Islands, the Mato Grosso, the high peaks of the Andes.

The founders had come across him on the Amazon, where he was doing research on the harpy eagle. They were with a party of tourists in the charge of a tour guide who turned out to be incompetent and lazy, and when they met Matteo they left the party and persuaded him to take them into the jungle for a week.

It was a week that they never forgot. Matteo took them through a maze of secret rivers to a valley where the morpho butterflies, in a shimmer of ultramarine and turquoise, came down to the water’s edge to drink, and the trees were brilliant with humming-birds and parakeets. He told them nothing about himself, but one night as they lay sleepless under their mosquito nets, watching the stars moving like fireflies between the waving branches, he admitted that his mind was once again turning to Europe. He foresaw great trouble over there, but at a time when so many people were planning to flee from the dangers they foresaw, Matteo wanted to return.

The founders offered him the cottage they had kept in Delderton village when they sold the school, and he had accepted. He had meant to stay for a few months at the most but now, nearly two years later, he was still in Devon and living in a room in the school. Yet Daley, as he greeted him and ordered coffee for them both, knew that at any moment he might move on. Like so many people during this uncertain time, Matteo was waiting.

“I’ve given you another girl to tutor,” Daley said when they had talked for a while. “She’s new. Her name’s Tally.”

“Oh? And what particular problems does she have? ” said Matteo suspiciously, for he knew that the headmaster liked to send him the most difficult and troubled children.

Daley smiled. “It is rather you who will have the difficulties, I’m afraid. She is a girl who wants to make the world a better place.”

A few days after Matteo’s return, Julia called Tally into her room and asked her if she would come to the cinema in St. Agnes.

“Daley says I can go but I have to take someone with me. The bus times don’t fit, so we have to walk, but it’s only an hour and there’s a matinee.”

They were sitting on Julia’s bed, and from the way she spoke Tally realized that this was no ordinary visit to the cinema. She looked at the photograph on Julia’s bedside table and her heart sank.

“Is it a film with Gloria Grantley in it? ” she asked.

“Yes, it is. It’s called I’ll Always Be Yours. It’s got an ‘A’ certificate but one of the maids will go with us and then go and sit with her boyfriend.” As Tally hesitated Julia went on. “Please, I’d rather it was you. The others tease me.”

“Yes, of course I’ll come. Is she a good actress? I mean, I can see she’s beautiful, but can she act? ”

Julia flushed. “She’s an absolutely marvelous actress.”

Later Tally thought how different her life would have been if she had refused to accompany her friend — so much happened as a result of that visit to the cinema. But she did not go back on her word, and the following Saturday they set off to walk to St. Agnes. The cinema was in the market square and already there was a queue of people waiting for the doors to open at two thirty.

“Her films are always terribly popular,” said Julia.

They decided to go for the good seats, which cost six pence, and settled down to enjoy themselves.

The newsreel came first. The queen had launched a big aircraft carrier, releasing a champagne bottle to swing on to the hull, only it didn’t smash the first time and had to be swung back again. The little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, looked worried, but the second time the bottle smashed properly and the ship slid safely into the water.

After that came some pictures of Hitler and his followers yelling, “Sieg Heil!” and goose-stepping in jackboots. Hitler said Germany needed more room for the German nation and he wanted Danzig, which really belonged to him and not to the Poles, and if they didn’t give it to him he would take it by force. And an American had invented a new kind of bath plug.

Tally had hoped that there would be a cartoon: The Three Little Pigs perhaps… but what came next was a travelogue about a country called Bergania.

Bergania was in the news because the king of Bergania had just refused to allow Hitler’s troops to march through his country if there was a war, and this was brave because it was a tiny kingdom, one of the smallest in Europe, and everybody feared the worst.

Though she was disappointed about the cartoon, Tally enjoyed the travelogue very much indeed. Bergania might be small, but it seemed to have everything one could want. A ridge of high mountains with everlasting snow, wide valleys planted with orchards and vineyards, and meadows where children herded goats like in Heidi. The capital of the country, which was also called Bergania, was a pretty town on the banks of a river, and overlooking it on a hill was the royal palace, guarded by soldiers in splendid uniforms.

The last part of the film showed the king on horseback at the head of a procession making its way toward the cathedral, where they were celebrating the birthday of Bergania’s patron saint, a brave woman called Aurelia who had been beheaded by the Romans because she wouldn’t renounce her faith.

Obviously St. Aurelia was important to the Berganians. They had draped their balconies with flags and decorated the streets with flowers and the procession was very grand. Behind the king rode courtiers and soldiers in splendid uniforms — and beside him, on a spirited pony, rode the crown prince, who was only a boy.

Tally was staring at him, wondering how it felt to be a prince so young, when the ancient projector gave a hiccup and the image on the screen stayed frozen. But though she saw the boy’s arm held up to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd, she couldn’t catch even a glimpse of his face. It was completely hidden by the gigantic feathery plumes on the helmet that he wore.

The film ended with a close-up of the king looking stern and resolute but rather tired, while the voice of the commentator said: “To the brave ruler who defied Hitler’s bullying, we, the people of Great Britain, send our greetings. Well done, Bergania!”

Then came the film they had come to see.

I’ll Always Be Yours was not a good film. In fact, it was a perfectly awful film.

Gloria Grantley played a poor girl who went to work in a department store where she caught the eye of a handsome millionaire. She fell in love with the millionaire and he promised to marry her but it turned out he was married already, so Gloria jumped off a bridge and everyone thought she had drowned and the millionaire felt terribly guilty. But it turned out that she hadn’t, and she became a nun and looked after little children in a convent and taught them to sing. It ended with her on her deathbed looking up to heaven and saying the millionaire’s name (which was Lionel) in a throbbing voice before she closed her eyes forever.

Tally was glad it was over; she couldn’t wait to get into the fresh air, but although people were streaming out of the cinema, Julia hadn’t moved. She was sitting with her shoulders hunched and her hands over her face.

“What is it, Julia? What’s the matter? It ended all right — she’s perfectly happy with God. It’s what she wanted.”

Julia shook her head. She was crying — not at all in the way that Gloria Grantley had cried, with glycerine tears rolling down her perfectly made-up cheeks, but hopelessly, her face scrunched up, her shoulders heaving. She had no handkerchief and Tally didn’t have one to give her; the children in Magda’s house did not come easily by handkerchiefs.

“Come on,” Tally urged her friend. “Let’s go outside.”

She took Julia’s arm and led her across the square and down some stone steps to the towpath along the river. There was a bench looking over the water and they sat down on it side by side.

“If you feel like telling me what’s the matter, I wouldn’t tell anyone. It isn’t because she didn’t get Lionel, is it? It’s something else.”

Julia went on sniffing and gulping. Then she lifted her head and said, “I miss her so much!”

Tally stared at her. “Who? Who do you miss so much?” And then: “What is it about Gloria Grantley that you—”

“She’s my mother.” Julia’s voice was flat and exhausted. She sat bent up like an old woman.

“Your mother? ” It seemed incredible, but now that Tally looked out for it she could see a likeness… something about the set of Julia’s mouth and her eyes.

“No one knows except Daley and Matteo, so you mustn’t tell.”

“I won’t say anything. But if she’s your mother… you mean you miss her during term time? I miss my father but—”

“No. I miss her all the time; I don’t see her even on the holidays. Well, hardly ever — just in secret places for a very short time. I’m too old, you see. I’m nearly thirteen, and it wouldn’t do for her to have a daughter my age. She’s supposed to be twenty-five, so I have to be kept out of the way, but I just want to be able to be with her. I love her so much.”

Tally knew what she should have done next — sat quietly beside Julia and let her talk — but she couldn’t. She got to her feet and collected the largest stones she could find and hurled them one by one into the river. Except that in her mind it wasn’t stones she was throwing, it was Gloria Grantley she was sending into the swirling, icy water. Gloria with her pout and her bosom and her fluttering eyelashes, who was too busy being famous to acknowledge her daughter.

It was a while before she could come back to comfort her friend.

“I expect it’s just as hard for her. She must long to be with you, but I expect it’s her manager who told her she has to be careful.”

Julia looked at her with gratitude. “Yes — he says it’s only while her contract lasts. Then when she’s saved lots of money she can retire and we can be together.” She looked wistfully at Tally. “There’s another performance at five o’clock. I’m going to stay for it — even if I get into trouble. Will you tell Magda? ”

Tally sighed. “I’ll stay with you,” she said. “You shouldn’t go home by yourself in the dark.”

The thought of another two hours of the swan-necked Gloria was appalling. But at least she’d get another look at the brave king of Bergania, not to mention the prince-under-plumes.

CHAPTER EIGHT Biology at Dawn

Dr. Hamilton was reading the latest letter from his daughter:

When he had read Tally’s letter through twice and taken it upstairs to the aunts, Dr. Hamilton made his way to the surgery. He walked with a light step, ready for the question his patients always asked about his daughter.

“Tally is well,” he would tell them. “Tally is very well indeed.”

CHAPTER NINE Trash Cans and a Festival

The term, which had begun slowly, suddenly seemed to gather speed. Armelle stopped asking the children to be forks and told them to become victims of the bubonic plague. Josie sent them out to collect bunches of motherwort, which they had to boil up in a vat.

Clemmy gave an art class in which she told them about a Spanish painter called Goya, who fell ill and became deaf and rather mad and shut himself up in a gloomy house away from everybody and people thought the poor old man was finished — but afterward they found that he had covered all the walls of his house with strange, dark pictures. Then she drew the blinds in the art room and told the children to select their paints without turning on the light, and they grumbled and fussed — and found that they had made paintings in colors they hardly knew existed. The next day she retired to the kitchen and made pancakes for the whole school.

Magda allowed Tally to froth up her cocoa with the whisk sent by the aunts, but she lost page thirty-two of her book on Schopenhauer and became troubled again. As spring turned to early summer and some of the other children began to go barefoot, Verity took to wearing shoes.

And Matteo solved the problem of Borro’s snails in two minutes.

“They’re the wrong kind. Edible snails are Helix pomatia—these are Cepaea hortensis.”

And he suggested that Borro should tip them out and let them go, which Borro did.

Tally’s first tutorial with Matteo took place in his room, which was not in the main building but above the row of workshops behind the gym. It was reached by an outside staircase and had the look of a mountain hut: very plain, with wooden walls, a scrubbed table, a narrow bed, and a case full of books in various languages. The sackbut lay on a chair; it looked like a battered trombone and far too harmless to make such a howling and melancholy sound.

“Come and sit down,” he said.

He had come straight from taking a fencing class; his foils and mask were propped up in a corner and Tally looked at them wistfully.

“Could anyone take fencing?” she asked. “Could I?”

“Next year would be better,” said Matteo. “You’re still rather young.”

Tally nodded, accepting this. “I really liked your biology lesson. I liked it so much. I always thought science would be different — sort of cold and impersonal — but it isn’t, is it? It’s all part of the same thing. My father tried to make me see that, but I didn’t listen properly.”

“Listening is one of the most difficult things.”

He talked to her for a while about the river and what else might be seen in it later that year. Then he said, “But what about you personally? Your problems.” He smiled. “Tutors are for problems, you know.”

“Yes. Well, I do have problems. There’s Magda, you see. I found her crying on the first day about Germany and Heribert and I can’t do anything about that, but now she’s worrying again and it’s about the blackout curtains and Magda can’t sew. Of course, there may not be a war, but if there is we’re going to need an awful lot of them. So I think we should find some way of helping her so that she can get on with her book and stop the pages flying about so much, but I haven’t been here very long and I’m not sure how to do it. Could it be part of the domestic work we do before school?”

“I don’t see why not. That would be a way of doing it which would not upset her, and I’m sure you could manage it.”

“And there’s Kit,” Tally went on. “Of course, he can be very annoying, but he does so very much want to play cricket. I don’t know anything about it — we didn’t play it at my convent — but I thought… there’s the high school at St. Agnes and they do play cricket — I asked Daisy who I do housework with, and she says they do; her brother goes there. So couldn’t Kit go there one afternoon a week, maybe?”

“One could certainly ask,” said Matteo. “It seems a perfectly sensible suggestion to me. Any other problems?”

“Well, there’s Verity’s snake. It looks really ill and I can’t say anything because—”

Matteo’s face darkened. “You can forget the snake. It’s being collected this afternoon and returned to the shop.”

“Oh, good.”

Matteo waited. “Anything else?” he asked, for he had the feeling that Tally’s biggest worry was still to come.

“Well, yes. It’s about Julia. When I got on the train to come here I was so homesick you can’t imagine — I just wanted to cry and cry — but Julia was so welcoming and so kind, and I like her so much, but I could see she was worried about something. It was as though she had a great weight on her mind, and she was so odd sometimes — Barney says she’s a marvelous actress, but whenever O’Hanrahan tries to get her to do anything she just curls up… and no one could be kinder than him. And then last week she asked me to go to the cinema with her and it was Gloria Grantley, and Julia broke down completely and told me she was her mother. I promised not to tell the others, and of course I haven’t, but really I can’t bear it.”

“What is it that you can’t bear?”

“That ghastly woman — how can she think it’s more important to be famous and earn lots of money? Julia’s so sad, having to be kept secret, and she won’t do anything that makes her stand out, and she can’t get ordinary letters like the rest of us — her mother just sends awful boxes of chocolate with liqueur centers that nobody can eat except Augusta Carringon — but Julia doesn’t want chocolates; she wants a letter. And I think there has to be something one could do. I thought maybe I’d write to her and tell her how miserable she’s making Julia. She may just be stupid and not realize.”

Matteo looked at her gravely.

“I’m afraid you’d only make trouble for Julia. I know it’s hard, but sometimes there are situations where one can help only indirectly. And you do help Julia enormously just by being her friend.”

“Yes… but I do so hate not being able to make things better.

And she’s so awful — Gloria Grantley, I mean. The way she looked up to heaven and said, ‘Lionel!’ and fluttered her eyelashes. You wouldn’t believe what a bad actress she is!”

“I would actually,” said Matteo. “I saw the film.”

Tally looked at him in amazement. “You went to the cinema in St. Agnes? To see I’ll Always Be Yours? Did you really?”

Matteo was looking past her at the open window, and he did not speak at once.

“I had my reasons,” he said.

Tally waited, but whatever his reasons were he obviously did not want to share them.

She thought it was time to go, but as she was getting up Matteo turned to her.

“But what about you, Tally? Don’t you have any problems of your own?”

Tally thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. I do miss my father very much, but that’s not a problem, is it? It’s just part of life.”

“Yes, you’re right.” Matteo’s face was somber. “Missing people is definitely part of life.”

An unusual child, he thought when she had gone. I wonder where that comes from in someone so young — that concern for other people.

But almost at once he forgot her, lost again in a vision of his own.

In O’Hanrahan’s English classes the discussions about doing the legend of Persephone as a play became serious. The story seemed to have everything: all kinds of devils and demons and monsters, not to mention the three-headed dog, Cerberus, whom everybody liked; a beautiful and innocent heroine carried off by the King of Darkness and forced to live as his wife in the Underworld; a distraught mother, the goddess Demeter, who mourned her daughter so dreadfully that she could not attend to her duties and so let the corn wither and die. And it was a story about the earth being renewed in the spring, when Persephone returns from Hades, which seemed to be a good idea at a time when the world appeared to be doing anything rather than renewing itself.

In one lesson Barney, who had helped to produce the play they had done the previous year, attacked Julia directly.

“You ought to be the heroine — you’d be good. You know you would.”

But Julia only shook her head. “I wouldn’t mind being one of the heads of Cerberus if they wear masks,” she said, “but that’s all.”

When they were alone, Tally tackled her friend.

“Julia, why won’t you do any acting? Everyone says you’re good, and we don’t want beastly Verity being the heroine and tossing her hair about. Perhaps you’ve inherited your talent from your mother,” said Tally, trying to forget Gloria Grantley raising her eyes to heaven and saying, “Lionel!”

“No, I haven’t. I haven’t!” Julia, who was usually so gentle, was getting angry. “It’s my mother who acts. If she thought I was trying to compete she’d be terribly upset. Once when I was small she was making a film in Spain and I was able to be with her and I started to make up a funny dance — well, it wasn’t really funny but I thought it was — and the people who were watching laughed, and she told me not to be silly, and that I was embarrassing her. She said it would be very wrong if I thought I had any talent — I would only be miserable. She was thinking of me, she said — and she must know because it’s her profession.”

“Unless she’s jealous,” said Tally.

“Jealous!” Julia rounded on her. “Jealous of a freckled beanpole like me? You must be mad!”

So that was the end of that conversation.

The school-council meeting on the following Monday took place in the hall. It was open to staff and pupils alike, and Daley usually swallowed a couple of aspirins before it began because the meetings were apt to go on for a long time. The agenda lay in front of him. It read:

• Vegetables • Cricket • Visit of Spanish Children •

• Complaint from Great Western Railway • Domestic Work • Letter from Ministry of Culture •

Daley was declaring the meeting open when, to his surprise, the door opened and Matteo slipped into the hall. Matteo never came to meetings if he could help it, and even now he took a chair at the very back and leaned back as though he might be about to drop off to sleep.

The first item did not take long. The waste ground behind the gym had been dug up and plant covers were going to be put down for vegetables. Children could submit a list to Clemmy of plants they would like to see growing, and she would discuss it with the gardeners.

“Why is that with the vegetables we will win the war?” asked the small French girl with the large white rabbit, and Daley explained that by growing vegetables instead of importing them, Great Britain would save space on ships, which could bring over ammunition and armaments instead.

Then came cricket, which Tally had put on the agenda, and now she stepped forward and launched bravely into her speech.

“I know we don’t play team games at Delderton, but there are people here — well, there’s Kit, and there may be others — who would like to play cricket. And I thought… there’s the high school in St. Agnes, and they do play cricket. So might Kit go there one afternoon a week, maybe? Could one ask?”

“Who would do the asking?” said Daley. The headmaster of St. Agnes did not approve of Delderton.

“Well, Kit could…” and as the little boy squeaked agitatedly, “and I could go with him. If you’d give me a letter?”

No one saw anything wrong with this, and the visit of the Spanish schoolchildren to give a concert came next. Everyone wanted to hear the children sing; they had been made homeless when their country was split by civil war and they were going to spend the night camping on the playing field.

“Couldn’t they stay longer?” suggested Tally. “One day isn’t very long. Maybe we could have one child each in our rooms.”

Everyone agreed with this, and Daley said he would suggest it to the person who was in charge of the Spanish children, but Tally realized that she must now be quiet and not have any more ideas, so she put a peppermint in her mouth, the kind with a hole in it, and put her tongue through it so as to stop herself from speaking.

Daley now read out the complaint from the manager of Great Western Railway, who said that passengers on the 11:15 from Paddington had been shocked to see Delderton pupils bathing in the river with nothing on when they went past. This happened every year, like hearing the first cuckoo in spring, and the older children sighed.

“That’s just silly,” said Ronald Peabody, the boy who had broken the topmost branch of the cedar tree. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of in the human body.” And he flexed his skinny biceps as though he was a weightlifter.

“Perhaps not,” said O’Hanrahan in his quiet voice. “But it seems a good idea to live in harmony with our neighbors.”

“Well, I think we’re being bullied. It’s like the trash cans,” said Ronald — and the children were off!

The trash cans at Delderton had large metal lids which made excellent shields, and the kitchen staff had taken to locking them up in a compound so that the children couldn’t get at them.

“Locking things up isn’t in the Delderton tradition,” said a boy with large spectacles. “We’re supposed to be a free school.”

“Freedom doesn’t mean causing distress and inconvenience to others,” said Magda, and told them what Schopenhauer had said about this, which was a lot.

Arguments about the trash cans took nearly a quarter of an hour and after that Verity said she had thought they were going to discuss the free period on Wednesday afternoons. She had tried to bring it up last time and Daley had promised to put it on the agenda, she said, and why wasn’t it there? They had a free period in her cousin’s school, and Wednesday was early-closing day in the village, so they had a right to have one here. A proper one, not the kind you got by cutting classes.

After this came “Domestic Work,” which seemed to be getting on all right on the whole, and Daley then decided to bring the meeting to an end with something that would unite everybody because it was so obvious that it couldn’t be done. He picked up the letter about the Folk Dance Festival.

“I have had a request from the Ministry of Culture. It’s rather a strange request and I shall of course turn it down, but I thought you might like to know that we have been invited.”

And he read out the letter from the ministry in London, which ran as follows:

Daley folded up the letter and looked around at the meeting.

“It’s quite an honor to be asked. As I say, I shall of course turn it down but—”

“Why?”

The clear voice carried to all parts of the hall. Julia grasped her friend’s arm, trying to quiet her but without success. The peppermint disappeared down Tally’s throat.

“Why?” she said again. “Why would you refuse?”

She had forgotten that she was not going to speak again. One word had leaped out at her from the letter that Daley read.

“Bergania”—it was more than two weeks since she had seen the travelogue, yet she found she could remember the film in detail. She could see the snowy mountain range with the central jagged peak, and the fir trees running up the slope toward them. She could see the river and the spire of the church where St. Aurelia was buried, and the palace. She could see the proud king on his horse and, as clearly as if she was there, the young prince in his troublesome helmet trying to blow the plumes out of his eyes.

“Why can’t we send anybody?” said Tally yet again. “The King of Bergania is very brave; he said no to Hitler.”

“Because,” said the headmaster patiently, “we have never done folk dancing here at Delderton and it is less than a month till the festival. And there are other reasons.”

“Just because we’ve never done it doesn’t mean we can’t do it. There’s probably a book about it; there’s a book about everything. It must be very difficult to stand up to Hitler. It wasn’t just that he said no about letting the troops go through his country, but he also won’t let Hitler dig up minerals in his mountains to use for armaments. And I know people like Tod think there shouldn’t be kings, but if there are and they’re brave and resolute then surely we should show them that we’re on their side.”

“I don’t see how it would help the Berganians if we went and did folk dancing all over them,” said one of the senior girls, “especially when we haven’t any idea how to do it.”

“It’s to do with just being there,” said Tally. “They invited us so they must want us to come, and refusing would be a snub.”

She looked around the room for support but no one seemed ready to back her up. Even her own friends were silent.

“Folk dancing’s silly,” said a boy with huge spectacles. “People wind ribbons around a pole and get tangled up.”

“Or they wear idiotic clothes — trousers with bells on them and bobbles on their hats,” said Ronald Peabody.

“Only sissies do folk dancing,” came Verity’s disdainful voice.

“Really?” The deep voice came from the back of the hall. Matteo had appeared to be asleep. “You surprise me.” He uncoiled himself and moved forward to the center of the room, and the children made way for him. “You surprise me very much.”

Everybody fell silent, watching him as he turned and faced the meeting.

“You might of course call the Falanian Indians sissy. Certainly they do a folk dance before they dismember their enemies and nail them to trees. There are even bells — or rather gongs — involved, though not, if I recall, ribbons. It takes an Indian child five years to learn the steps, and they are not allowed to take part in it till they can crunch up the skull of a jaguar with their bare hands.

“And there are the leopard hunters of Nepal. They do a folk dance to prepare themselves for the chase, which includes leaping over pits of burning cinders with a firebrand in their mouth. The steps go something like this.”

And without any warning Matteo leaped high into the air, seemed almost to hang there, and came down with a bloodcurdling howl about a foot away from David Prosser, who stepped back with an agitated squeak.

“I could give you more examples,” said Matteo, “but I just wanted to make the point that whatever folk dancing is, it’s not sissy.”

Daley shook his head. That Tally wanted the school to march to the help of the Berganians was to be expected — but he had not thought that Matteo would stab him in the back.

“I suggest you set up a working party to see if it can be done. You have one week to prepare a suitable dance.”

Nothing would happen in so short a time; Daley was sure of that.

CHAPTER TEN The Flurry Dance

Tally was right. There was a book about folk dancing, several books in fact, but they were not very helpful.

“There’s Scottish dancing and maypole dancing and morris dancing,” she said.

But Scotland was a long way from Devon and they did not feel they had a right to pretend to be Scottish, and anyway the steps were difficult.

“Maypole dancing looks nice,” said Julia. “All those ribbons.”

But Barney said that disasters happened very easily with maypole dancing. In his village the vicar at the garden fête had been completely trussed up when one of the children had taken her ribbon in the wrong direction.

“He had to be cut out in the end,” Barney said.

So that left morris dancing, which was derived from the ancient sword dances of medieval England, only instead of swords the dancers had wooden sticks — and it was danced by men.

“Well, we can’t have only boys,” said Julia. “We’d never get enough.”

They had of course consulted Armelle, but she was so horrified at the idea of a dance that did not come spontaneously from inside the soul that she was not helpful at all.

“It says here that they hit each other with the sticks — they’re called staves — at least they bang them together and they flap at each other with handkerchiefs,” said Tally, looking at the book. “And they have bells on their ankles, rows and rows of bells, and more bells tied around their knees so that their trousers look baggy.”

“And they wear hats with flowers sewn onto them. There’s one dance called the Helston Flurry Dance, which is danced in Cornwall. Flurry means flowers,” said Tod. “It’s not exactly a morris dance, but it’s that kind of thing.”

He had at first wanted to have nothing to do with the trip to Bergania. The king who had said no to Hitler might be brave but he was still a king, and all kings belonged in dungeons — preferably with their heads chopped off. But when his friends all became involved he had joined in and put in some very useful work in the library.

“I don’t want to flap with my handkerchief,” said Kit, looking even more woebegone than usual.

“There’s one person who rides a sort of hobbyhorse through the dancers,” said Barney. “The Devil, they think. Or maybe the Fool. It’s a very old dance. ‘Full of antiquity,’ it says here.”

It certainly looked old from the few pictures they could find. Not only old but exceedingly odd.

“What about the music? ” asked Borro.

They went to consult the old professor who taught music and he said it would probably have been danced to pipes and tambours but perhaps a violin would do.

“Augusta’s got a violin,” said Tally. “I remember when she came.”

So they went to find Augusta, who was eating a banana and reading a detective story, and she said she could play the violin, but she couldn’t play it well.

“I don’t really like the noithe it maketh,” she said.

But she fetched it and played a slow tune full of double stops and they thought it would do if she could play it faster and maybe learn a more jigging sort of piece as well. Taking Augusta to Bergania would be complicated because of her only being able to eat so very few things.

“But if we stock up with bananas you’ll be all right, won’t you?” said Julia, and Augusta agreed that she probably would. She was really a very good-natured girl and they were glad she had come back from Wales.

“Of course, the other groups will probably have all sorts of instruments — an orchestra even — all those Swiss and Bavarian people in lederhosen slapping their thighs will be terribly good — but we can’t compete with them. All we want is to be there,” said Tally.

“I don’t,” said Kit. “I don’t want to be there.”

“We could always alter it a bit and make a Devon version,” Tally went on. “ ‘The Delderton Flurry Dance.’ ”

Getting a team together was the next problem. Tally’s immediate friends all rallied around, and Verity, after watching snootily for a while, said she would come, which was a pity but they couldn’t afford to be fussy. Kit of course was really too small, but they couldn’t get people who were matched in size; they would just have to make do with what they had.

The next day the rehearsals began, and they did not go well.

“Form a circle,” said Barney with the book in his hand. “Now pick up your sticks… Then bow to each other. Now lift the right foot…”

Augusta took up her violin, and the dancers lifted the staves they had begged from the gardeners, who used them for staking peas.

“Move toward the center… hold the sticks up high… now flap your handkerchiefs. One, two, three, and hop…”

None of the children in Magda’s house had handkerchiefs; they flapped their headscarves or borrowed tea towels. Borro flapped his shirt.

“Ow!” said Borro, as Tod’s stick went into his cheek.

Kit said he couldn’t do it — it was too difficult. Augusta snapped a string on her violin.

“We have to be able to do it,” said Tally. “We have to.”

At night the Delderton Flurry Dance ran through their dreams. They thought of it as a kind of sick animal that had to be nursed into health.

“It’s like those runts you get in a litter of piglets,” said Borro. “You know, the one that can’t feed itself.”

They ran into each other’s rooms at all hours, suggesting changes — making the steps simpler. Nobody now would have recognized it as a known morris dance or anything else, but it didn’t matter.

Gradually, very gradually, the children who had scoffed wandered away. The snooty Verity turned out to be the best at dancing, which was a pity but the kind of thing that happens in life.

Matteo came past once when they had got into a hopeless coil. He gave some orders that freed them, but if they had hoped that he would stay and help, they were disappointed.

Next came the clothes. White trousers or white skirts… bells… and flowers for their hats.

“Real ones will wither,” said Julia.

“We could buy artificial ones from Woolworth,” someone suggested. They were surprisingly expensive, but everyone gave up their pocket money.

The girls looked very weird in their hats, so Clemmy suggested they make wreaths and wear the flowers in their hair, which gave Verity the chance to nab all the forget-me-nots because she said they matched her eyes.

By the end of the week they were ready to show what they had done to the headmaster.

They took him down to the playing field. Augusta struck up on her violin. Borro, who was the hobbyhorse rider, galloped around the circle. The dancers began.

The Delderton Flurry Dance was bad. It was very bad indeed. But it was there.

“All right,” said Daley wearily. “You’ll have to work on it solidly till you leave — but, yes, you can go.”

It should have been a day of triumph and then suddenly everything went wrong. It was Verity of course who gave Tally the news that devastated her, but it was not really Verity’s fault; Tally would have found out anyway soon enough. But now she walked blindly away from the school and down the sloping, tangly path that led toward the river and sat down with her arms around her knees, trying to fight down the misery and wretchedness that engulfed her.

She must fix her eyes on the things that were outside herself. The new beech leaves, with the sun on them… the bluebells shimmering like a lake through the trees… A thrush flew by with his beak full of twigs, and a water vole ran along the bank of the little stream.

These were the things that mattered — not her own wishes and hopes and needs.

But it didn’t work. Tears welled up under her eyelids and she felt completely desolate.

From the moment she had seen those images of Bergania, she had felt as though the country somehow spoke to her. And now though her friends would go, she would stay behind.

“You realize that all the parents have to pay thirty pounds for our fares,” Verity had said. “The school can’t afford them. Daley’s going to write a letter to everyone and explain.”

Verity always knew things before other people.

Thirty pounds. It was nothing to Verity’s parents, with their estate in Rutland, and most of the others came from well-to-do families. But Tally would never ask her father for so much money. His patients were poor; he had both the aunts to support. He mustn’t be asked in case he felt he had to make the sacrifice and, whatever Tally wanted from her father, it was not a sacrifice.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told herself.

But it was no good. Perhaps it didn’t matter compared to people dying in famines and earthquakes and wars, but it mattered to her.

After a while she got up and brushed the grass off her skirt and made her way back up the hill to school.

She would see if Matteo was free.

She found him in his room, looking down a microscope on the windowsill, but when he saw her tearstained face he pulled out a chair for her at the wooden table.

“I see you have a problem,” he said. “A proper one, for yourself.”

“Yes, I do.” She felt better now that she was taking some action. “It’s… I want you to tell the headmaster not to write to my father about the fare to Bergania. Verity says it’s thirty pounds — that’s right, isn’t it?”

“It sounds about right. Why?”

“Well, I know my father can’t afford it, and I don’t want Daley to ask him in case he… I don’t want him to be asked. I don’t have to go. I can show one of the others how to take my place.”

“I see. But you want to go, don’t you?”

Tally wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Yes, I do. I wanted to go from the minute I saw the travelogue about Bergania. But—”

“Why?”

Matteo had spoken sharply. Tally blinked at him. “I don’t know really. It’s very beautiful… the mountains and the river… And the procession. Usually processions are boring, but the king…”

“Yes?” Matteo prompted her. “What about the king?”

“He looked so strong and… brave — except I know you can’t really look brave just for a moment in a film. Only he did. But tired, too. And there was the prince… he was hidden by plumes… feathers all over his helmet. I was sorry for him.” She shook her head. “I don’t know… there was a big bird flying above the cathedral.”

“A black kite, probably,” said Matteo. “They’re common in that part of the world.” But he seemed to be thinking about something else. Then: “I’ll speak to the headmaster.”

“You’ll tell him not to write to my father about the money?”

“Yes, I’ll tell him that.”

As Matteo knocked on the door of Daley’s study, four children came out — Julia and Barney and Borro and Tod.

“You’ve had a deputation, I see,” said Matteo. “Not connected with the trip to Bergania?”

“Yes,” said the headmaster. “They want the school to pay for Tally’s fare to Bergania — they don’t think her father could afford it. I must say that girl has made some very good friends in the short time she has been with us.”

“And will the school pay it?”

Daley looked worried. “The trouble is if you do that kind of thing once you have to do it again, and we simply don’t have funds for that.”

“So it would have to come out of the Travel Fund. The fund that exists for worthy cultural exchanges to broaden the minds of the young and all that.”

Daley looked at him blankly. “There isn’t such a fund.”

“There is now,” said Matteo. “I shall pay in thirty pounds this afternoon.” And as the headmaster continued to stare at him he said, “Don’t worry, I have the money — after all, I got paid last month. Who are you sending with them?”

“I thought Magda should go — her German is fluent, of course, and she also speaks Italian and French. But one will need somebody who can actually cook because they’ll be camping some of the time, and I can’t send Clemmy — I shall need her here to look after the children left behind in Magda’s house. And I’ll want a man as well. O’Hanrahan is rehearsing a play for the younger ones and the professor is too old. I thought maybe David Prosser.” The headmaster sighed. “It has to be someone who can be spared.”

Matteo nodded. Prosser could certainly be spared. He was famous for being the most boring man in the school, and for being in love with Clemency — but for not much else. There was a pause. Then: “I can cook,” said Matteo.

“Good God!” said Daley, staring at him. “Don’t tell me you meant to go yourself all along?”

“Only if the children had been serious. Only if they really meant to work. Not just Tally, all of them.”

“And if they hadn’t been?”

Matteo shrugged. “Who knows?” he said.