“WHAT A MEMORY YOU’VE GOT.” Dad found the place in the Jungle Book.
“‘“It is half a night’s journey—at full speed,” said Bagheera, and Baloo looked very serious. “I will go as fast as I can,” he said, anxiously’”
“Baloo’s so fat, he can’t run fast,” I explained to Milly.
Bagheera and Kaa left Baloo behind. And when they came to a stream, Bagheera left Kaa behind.
Inside the Lost City, Mowgli was sore, sleepy, and hungry, but the monkeys were too busy chattering to give him anything to eat.
“‘“We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true!”’”
Outside, Bagheera and Kaa waited for a cloud to cover the moon.
“‘“Good hunting!” said Kaa, grimly…’”
“Good hunting,” I whispered to Milly, and shivered. “Don’t stop, Dad. Milly wants to hear the rest.”
“It’s pretty scary.”
“I’ll put my hands over Milly’s eyes.”
Dad nodded.
“As long as the goodies win,” I told him.
“The goodies always win.” Dad laughed and read on. “‘The cloud hid the moon, and as Mowgli wondered what would come next he heard Bagheera’s light feet on the terrace.’”
The fighting began, and the Bandar-log shoved Mowgli into the summer-house, but it was full of cobras. Mowgli gave the Snake’s Call: “We be of one blood, ye and I!” so they didn’t bite him.
“We be of one blood, ye and I,” I whispered into Milly’s ear, which flicked. I blew, and it flicked again. Twice.
Kaa saved both Bagheera and Baloo, let Mowgli out of the summer-house, and then told them, “Go and sleep, for the moon sets, and what follows it is not well that thou shouldst see.”
“Milly wants to see,” I told Dad. And he read: “The Dance of the Hunger of Kaa.” I was so busy covering Milly’s eyes and putting my fingers in her ears at what Kaa did to the Bandar-log, I saw and heard it all myself.
When Baloo and Bagheera took one stiff step forward with the monkeys towards Kaa, and Mowgli laid his hands on their shoulders to wake them, I felt dizzy and laid my own hands on Milly. “I’m stopping you from walking down Kaa’s throat,” I told her. Then she was purring at the last bit about Bagheera giving Mowgli a hiding for playing with the Bandar-log, and carrying him home on his back.
“‘Now,’ said a strange voice, ‘jump up on my back, Little Brother, and we will go home.’” And Milly and I were carried to bed on the back of the Black Panther.
“I think we could let Milly have a look outside the back door,” Dad said in the morning.
“What if she runs away?”
“Let her out on to the back porch, and she’ll follow you into the wash-house, while you clean your teeth.”
Milly explored the wash-house and followed me back inside.
“Whew!” I said.
At lunchtime, Colleen Porter came home with me to see Milly, and we let her out on the back porch again, and Colleen loved Milly and told Dad she was just like her cat at home. We went back to school in plenty of time, because it took Colleen a while.
“The doctor said my leg’s getting better,” she told me. “I can skip a bit now. At first I couldn’t even hop.”
“What was it like in the hospital?”
“It’s away over in Hamilton. I wanted to go home; I wanted my mother; and I was scared I was going to die, but one of the nurses told me that was nonsense.
“She said, ‘Thank your lucky stars you haven’t got the infantile badly, and remember to say your prayers.’ She was nice, that nurse. Most of them were. There was a funny nurse who used to make us laugh because she was forever doing things round the wrong way. She always dried my face with the towel before she’d wiped it with the face cloth. I couldn’t laugh, but I remember trying to smile, just to show her.
“She hid under my bed and pretended to be scared of the other nurses; but they were all really scared of the matron. Even the doctors were. The matron’s uniform was starched so stiff it creaked. We listened for it, so we knew when she was coming. One day, she told me she went to Waharoa school, too, when she was a little girl, but I didn’t think she was ever little.”
“I don’t think I’d like to go to hospital.”
“It’s not bad. There were lots of other kids.”
“Any Maoris?”
“A few. One of them died.”
“Dad said some Maori kids didn’t go to hospital. He said too many of their parents don’t have the money to go to the doctor, and they don’t trust them anyway. They’d rather go to the tohunga.”
“What’s the tohunga?”
“The Maori doctor.”
“I didn’t know they had a doctor. I thought they weren’t supposed to be there in the hospital, till I saw them in bed. And one of the other kids’ mothers said they had no right.”
“Have you ever seen any Maoris at the doctor’s in Matamata?”
“Hardly ever.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it?”
“I never thought of it before,” said Colleen. “Some of the other kids died, too.”
“Did you see them?”
“You could tell the ones who were going to die: they had screens round their beds. You’d wake up at night, there’d be voices, lights, and shadows moving around, and in the morning they’d be gone. Like a bad dream.”
Colleen pushed back her brown hair. “One morning, they took a boy away on a trolley, and we never saw him again. I asked the funny nurse, and she said, ‘You don’t want to go bothering yourself about the poor creature now.’
“We were all scared they’d come and put the screens around us, and put us on a trolley, and take us away. One of the big kids said that’s what they do to you when you’re dying: shove you into a room and leave you to die there on your own. It’s called the mortuary.”
“All alone?”
“That’s what he reckoned. The little kids cried, but I asked the nice nurse, and she said, ‘Why would we even dream of doing that to a child?’ And she gave the big boy a telling-off.
“Some of the very sick ones got better, ‘cause I saw them again. Lying there all the time, you see lots of things in hospital. One night, I woke up and there were screens around a little girl’s bed, next to mine, and somebody was crying in the shadows. I heard her sniff, blow her nose, and go back in behind the screens. I couldn’t see properly, but it was the matron.”
“How—?”
“Her uniform crackled. I told the funny nurse next morning, and she said, ‘She’s the same as everyone else, but she’s not supposed to show it, or we’d all be boo-hooing our eyes out instead of getting on with our jobs.’”
Colleen did the nurse’s voice so well, I laughed.
“What happened to the little girl behind the screens?”
“They’d taken her away next morning.”
“Did you ever see the mortuary?”
“That boy said you only see it when you’re going to die.”
“Oh. How did you go to the lavatory?”
“They put you on a sort of pot.”
“In bed?”
“They lifted you up and slid it under. It’s called a bedpan.”
“Eugh!”
“You got used to it. The nurses helped you and wiped you. It was like when you’re sick at home, and your mother holds you on the chamber.”
“I remember my mother holding me,” I told Colleen, “because I was scared of falling in.” We both shrieked.
“We had to do exercises to help us walk again. Holding yourself up between two rails. I was lucky, so I can walk without callipers.”
“I wouldn’t like to wear them.”
“One of the boys in hospital,” Colleen said, “I saw him in Matamata last Friday night, having trouble getting along Arawa Street, and he has crutches as well as callipers.
“My mother says the infantile’s something to do with the sun. It comes in hot summers, like 1925, and again now. And it goes away once the weather gets cold.”
“Mrs Dainty said it’s a punishment God sends because we’re sinful.”
Colleen grabbed my arm. “Why’s Freddy Jones walking like that?”
“He kept saying I’ve got no mother, so I fixed him. I told him there’s a tiger called Shere Khan under the lawsonianas; that’s why he’s tiptoeing down the other side of the road. Have you read The Jungle Book?”
“I got it for a Sunday school prize. What was the snake’s name?”
“Kaa!” I hissed and huffed.
Colleen hissed and huffed, too, and we went after Freddy Jones, hissing, huffing, and flickering our tongues in and out, but he tore through the school gate and hid down in the boys’ dunnies where we couldn’t go.