Mary sorrowfully left the gay court of France and came back to troubled times in her own kingdom. She was one of the most beautiful women of her time. She married her cousin Darnley, and their little son became James the Sixth of Scotland.
Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia
Two fact, two fiction. To begin with, the distinction between fact and fantasy was immaterial. The sloth slung from his branch sprouting his own personal jungle was as real as the little house in its orchard of apple blossom, and as unlikely. In play, reality ran together with fantasy like currents in a single river in which Kate swam without a sensation of having crossed any boundary.
She lies under the house, which has become a rabbit’s burrow. And she is the resident rabbit, with furry paws and long, long ears. But she is also Kate, hidden down here where the earth is grey and possesses that smell distinctive of all secret places: the scent that wells up from the drain outside the front gate or from closed cupboards or from the tiny private crevices of the body, the smell of tummybutton fluff, ear wax and the flaky skin between the toes. Above her head she can hear the beat of shoes: her mother’s staccato tap across the kitchen lino, Maura’s skip hop run down the hall, her father’s heavier tread toward the front door. There is treasure here in the dark: bottles with marbles in their necks, a rusted dog chain, and above all, the secret pleasure of listening to others undetected. Her long ears waggle. Her pink nose twitches. She is rabbit and child.
As Kate grew, the gap widened.
There was a fact.
There was what was imagined.
Some things belonged on one side, catalogued with numbers on their spines. Some belonged on the other side, in a more random arrangement. Kate knew now that when she knelt over the woodblock with her tender neck exposed to the axe her friend Marilyn Rasmussen held in her hands, that Marilyn was just pretending to be Elizabeth and she, Kate, was just pretending to be Mary Queen of Scots. So her mother did not have to scream, finding them there when she came out to chop some kindling. She screamed; she grabbed the axe as if it were real, as if Marilyn really would have chopped off Kate’s head. They knew about Mary Queen of Scots from the Children’s Encyclopaedia, ten red cloth volumes Kate had received for Christmas, which were largely dedicated to what was real: The Interesting World of the Protozoa, The Land of Egypt and its Long Long History. From the encyclopaedia they had learned that Mary was beautiful and Elizabeth wasn’t, but Marilyn would not have cut off Kate’s head. They were pretending. Kate felt embarrassed at her mother’s panic. (Though it had to be admitted that Marilyn had not wanted to be Elizabeth, any more than she wanted to be the mean teacher when Kate was the naughty schoolgirl, or the servant when Kate was Cleopatra and lay on a curtained mattress in the playhouse reading while Marilyn swept the floor. So it was just conceivable that Marilyn could have brought down the axe and that Kate’s mother could have found her daughter lolloping woozily and headless toward the hydrangeas.)
Reality possessed a special terror. Storybooks tried to terrify with one-eyed giants and witches. Cinderella’s sisters cut off heel and toe to fit the shoe, the Happy Prince tried to make the little swallow fly south for the winter. But none of these horrors could equal the terror of fact. No one-eyed giant could equal the Professor at Millerhill church with the hole in his forehead. No witchy wood could equal the train in the year when all the shops in town suddenly sprouted boxes on their fronts filled with carnations, gladioli and gypsophila because the Queen was coming and everything had to be perfect.
Except that the train fell into the river.
There were photos of it in the Weekly News: an ordinary train like the ones she saw passing over Thames Street carrying their passengers in illuminated carriages to some unimaginable other place. A flooded river. The lights extinguished, the water rushing through broken windows, the people drowned, the Christmas presents torn from the racks.
And no ogre could compete with the boy Kate read about on a scrap of paper torn from the two-minute silence, the boy from New Plymouth who had filled a bath with petrol, then climbed in and set fire to himself. His story was contained on a six-inch by six-inch square of newsprint from the little wooden box by the lavatory. Kate had been sitting on the warm wooden ring reading the stories first: a ripped-up picture of the Blossom Festival Queen, a scrap of an advertisement for cigarettes. Albanys! Hillary’s Choice for the Everest Exped … The story of the bath was complete. Kate held the scrap of paper and saw the bath, an ordinary bath such as anyone might fill with warm water, where you might soak or make soapy gloves from the foam. She thought of this bath filled with flame. She imagined the boy lying in the flames, burning. She screwed the story up, dropped it into the bowl and flushed it away. It swirled and disappeared beyond the S-bend but when she shut her eyes for nights after there was the fire and the boy in New Plymouth crying and an ordinary bath transformed in an instant of unimaginable despair to a flaming pyre.
Now and again an arquebus popped and flashed, and a bullet sang.
‘Got him!’ said Angela in a tone of deep satisfaction.
Alan looked around at her. She was laboriously winding back her crossbow for a second shot.
The Hills of Varna by Geoffrey Trease
She chose a middle path: not the fantasy of giants and dragons that growled and raged only for effect, while the outcome of the tale remained inevitable. (The hero would overcome the giant, the princess would live happily ever after, the pretty poor girl would win the prince.) Nor the factual world of the newspaper, which between advertisements and the Blossom Festival could spring such horrors. She chose, as her two fiction, books in which realistic-looking children spent summers exploring or winning prizes at gymkhanas or thwarting smugglers. She read about children who attended boarding schools with dorms and tuckboxes and children not very much older than herself who escaped from German soldiers or marched north to fight the Picts, or girls who dressed as boys and roamed about rescuing valuable manuscripts from perilous places. She chose a world that was utterly unlike her own, but which acquired its own coherence and reality.
She began to live in two separate places. It required a special kind of thinking, like the thinking required to make the two candles in Coles Funny Picture Book transform into a witch’s face.
She rides her pony — a pony called Nugget borrowed from the herd at Miss McQuaid’s Riding School — along the gravel road that leads to the beach. The road cuts, white, clean, across the fertile black soil of the market gardens with their rows of cabbages and lettuces. The rows break around outcrops of limestone that burst from the soil in curious formations. In one part of her mind the landscape is just that: the Chinese market gardens, hillocks of vegetable crates around bare houses dedicated to toil, cabbages, lettuces. But in the other part of her mind, the part that has been colonised by books, the limestone outcrops are villages and castles, the kinds of places where knights might joust or precious manuscripts might be concealed. Nugget tosses his shaggy head at a plastic bag tangled in overgrown mallow. He can smell the sea already in the wild gallop along the beach, leaping driftwood, the sea grabbing for his hooves. And he too will pretend. He will pretend the sea is alive, though he sees it every Saturday. He pretends that it is something to be treated with the deepest suspicion, snorting and pawing. He snatches at the bit and dances a little with excitement as the students of Miss McQuaid’s Riding School trot, posting properly as they have been taught, past the Hills of Varna.
George was surprised. Why did a spook-train run about with boxes in it? She shone her torch on to one — and then quickly switched it out!
She had heard a noise in the tunnel. She crouched down in the truck, put her hand on Timmy’s collar, and listened.
Five Go Off to Camp by Enid Blyton
Kate and Maura rode their ponies and their bikes around Oamaru, desperate for adventure. They formed clubs with friends dedicated to this purpose.
The Adventure Club met on Saturday mornings at the top of Tamar Street, where the road climbed toward the cape with its cap of pines, crewcut and sinister. From up here, the town was a toytown of little streets arranged in neat squares over the coastal plain and the terrace that had once formed the cliff face to a primitive sea. There was the post office with its frilly tower, there were the railway yards and the clang and bang of mechanical coupling and shunting. A sign at the centre of the Lookout carpark directed visitors away from here to London, Antarctica, Sydney. The sign was a little woozy and in a puddle at its cracked concrete base floated one of those rubber tubes Wayne Norris at school called a frenchie. He had flicked one they found in the gutter one afternoon on their way back from softball at Awamoa Park, so that it had landed flat on Caro Williams’s foot.
‘Yuck!’ she had said, and kicked it off. They had all squealed and scattered then, not certain what it was exactly but knowing that they did not under any circumstances want to feel the frenchie’s clammy touch.
Kate poked at the frenchie with a stick. It floated like a pale jellyfish in a puddle of petroleum rainbows. There was a puffing and a wheezing behind her and there at last was Marilyn, eyes popping with the effort of biking all the way up Tamar Street, just to see if she could. Marilyn, Kate, Maura and Virginia Craddock. The Adventure Club was assembled. They concealed their bikes behind a gorse hedge and entered the pines.
The trees sighed overhead, making that strange sad sound pines made that was the next thing to silence. The trees were planted in rows like some army that had taken the high ground and stood to, alert and watchful. Beneath them lay a thick bed of rusty brown pine needles that deadened the sound of the Adventure Club’s feet as they scrambled through over dead branches. There was no birdsong. They were entering the place where the funny men lurked. The funny men haunted such dark corners: the overgrown edges of parks, streets after dark, empty houses. They drove silent, sinister cars and offered children lollies to climb in beside them. They had no faces. They were shadows beneath the brim of a hat. They cruised the edges of the little town like the grey sharks who lurked beyond the safe waters of Friendly Bay, creatures of some nameless, unexplained menace.
‘But what do they do?’ Kate had asked her mother, and her mother said they interfered with little girls and sometimes, though less often, with little boys. Kate did not have to enquire further. ‘Interfered with’ was some awful rude thing like having holes in your pants. The words bore a sticky, queasy quality, like ‘brassiere’ or ‘number twos’.
The Adventure Club entered the realm of the funny men carefully, mindful of every snapping twig, every shadow. Given a choice, Kate would not have chosen this as the morning’s adventure, but they took turns in strict rotation to choose, and today was Virginia’s turn. She wanted to find the volcano.
Each Saturday the Adventure Club did something that frightened them. They climbed the rocks at Bushy Beach, right to the top where the rock turned to slippery rubble and they had to hang on to treacherous iceplant and roots and not on any account look down to where the surf surged below. They climbed the slate quarry too, where the rock shattered into perfect rectangles and slid away to smash with a musical ding on the debris behind the little square blocks that were the quarry offices. They walked along the sea-wall, daring the sea to rise up, as it so easily could, and sweep them over into the forests of kelp. They explored the wild reaches beyond the Botanic Gardens where the little kids slid down the high slide, thinking themselves daring for doing so. The Adventure Club disdained such childish bravado, pushing its way through to the shrubs that grew longer and more dishevelled the further they were from the grand trees that stood about the lawns sporting their silver medals: Sequoia gigantea, Fagus sylvatica, Quercus robur. The Adventure Club sought the source of a creek that might easily have been filled with blood-sucking fish amid jungles of suckering elm and feathery groves of fennel.
Today they were looking for the volcano.
A branch had left a long scratch down Kate’s leg and another was caught in her plait, dragging out hanks of hair. ‘Are you sure it’s this way?’ she said to Virginia. Virginia crawled under a fallen trunk. Her shorts were irritating: yellow check, with little folded cuffs.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’ll be right at the top.’
She knew all about volcanoes. She had done a project, painstakingly constructing a papier-mâché cone with crinkly red cellophane at the top and a torch in the middle to make the fire. It had taken pride of place on the Display Table, next to the frog tank and the pa with its palisade of burnt matches. She knew where the vent must be — somewhere beneath these pines — from which the lava had flowed to form the bubbly rocks at Bushy Beach. She marched ahead down a long dark aisle of pines, seeking it there, braving the funny men.
‘There!’ she said. ‘That’s it!’
The Adventure Club surveyed the vent. It was a hollow in the earth ringed by boulders. There was no sign of fire or molten rock, simply a soft dimpling covered in thick moss. Virginia jumped down to stand at its centre and Marilyn joined her. Kate held back, nervous that their combined weight might be sufficient to plunge them all into the molten centre that surged beneath their feet, maybe only a torch length away.
Now that they were there, they were uncertain what to do next. Their adventures usually ended like that. In books there would have been a rumbling beneath their feet, or failing that, they might have found a trapdoor barely concealed by the moss, or they would have come upon a gypsy encampment among the trees, where swarthy individuals made devious plans they could have overheard. Reality was such a disappointment. The Adventure Club stood around the volcano and the pines sighed overhead, and now the sigh was not of sadness but of the most profound boredom.
Then, somewhere to their right, they hear the cracking of a twig. There is some movement over there, where the trees are thickest. There is a sensation that creeps the length of the spine that someone, behind them, is watching them, someone is approaching on stealthy feet, there is that cold draught at the nape of the neck that could be the breathing of a funny man — he has tracked them through the trees, he is coming closer, he is prepared to interfere with them, all of them, he is reaching out and suddenly Kate finds herself running, and Marilyn too, and Maura and Virginia. They are all crashing back through the trees, dodging the gnarled hands that reach out to grab and trip and the trees are lined up on all sides like a crowd so that right and left look exactly the same.
‘Over here!’ Over here!’ yells Virginia. And they can see where she is pointing, and there is light there, a flickering of emptiness beyond the ranks of terrible pines with their scars oozing resin and their dead arms and suddenly they are through, they are out in the open. And there is the Lookout, pointing the way to the whole world. And there is the town doing all the usual Saturday things. Going to the dump. Playing tennis. Clipping hedges. The Adventure Club stand gulping in sunlight and safety. Their breathing slows. Their hearts steady. They find their bikes where they left them behind the gorse and they ride off down Tamar Street to the dump, where they spend the rest of this free and beautiful morning hunting among squabbling seagulls for old telephones to be pulled to bits to find the bell, discarded account books with useable pages, some bedsprings that might be tied to the feet for an experiment in jumping over the fence into the Nelsons’ garden. They ride home laden with booty and giddy with triumph. They are reckless and brave. They have found the volcano and they have escaped the funny men.
‘We must leave Warsaw for good and go and find Father,’ she said.
‘Find Mother too?
‘Yes, Mother too. We must go to Switzerland.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Millions of miles away,’ said Jan. ‘And you’ll have to walk, without shoes.
The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier
It was Kate who decided to get out of the car. They were driving home from Weston: just Kate and Maura and their father. Their mother did not visit Weston any more than their father visited Millerhill. Weston was His Family. Millerhill was Her Family. The afternoon had been muggy and endless. Kate and Maura had argued with Bernard over Ludo while the grown-ups played cards and laughed a lot as it was New Year’s and everyone had to stay up until midnight to see the Old Year out. At last their father lurched toward the car.
‘Nigh’,’ he called to Auntie Mary and Uncle Frank. ‘HabbyNewYear!’
Kate and Maura sat in the back seat and the Standard moved unsteadily off down the hill and out onto the main road. Revving mightily, it ground toward town, swooping from verge to verge, a groggy boat on a dark stream. A short distance down the road, it slowed. Their father was going to visit Walker, his old mate from the battalion.
‘Juss’a minute,’ he said. ‘Won’ be long.’
The door to Walker’s little crib opened and closed.
He’d be gone for ages. They could have waited inside but they did not like Walker. He had bleary eyes and his crib stank of mutton fat and tobacco and the shaggy sheepdog that lounged about the place gnawing at its bottom with fierce enthusiasm.
They waited outside. The car grew cold. When they had driven out that afternoon it had been sunny, a brilliant blue day, but the wind had risen, driving the wisps of cloud over the moon. From inside the crib came the shout of laughter, the clink of glasses.
Kate opened the car door.
‘Come on,’ she said.
‘Where?’ said Maura. ‘I’m not going in there. I don’t like it in there.’
‘Home,’ said Kate. ‘We’ll walk.’
‘But it’s miles,’ said Maura.
‘It’s not that far,’ said Kate. ‘And there’s a moon. You can sit there or you can come with me.’
Maura sat there, so Kate set off. Before she had gone twenty yards, there was the sound of the car door closing softly and the tap of summer sandals on the tarmac.
‘Wait for me,’ called Maura.
They walked together in the moonlight along the road home. The way ahead was lit fitfully in luminous indigo and white. There were hawthorn hedges on either side and onion flower in brilliant white flower in the deep ditches that edged the road. There was little traffic but when they heard a car coming they bobbed down in the ditch, which was dry and lined with crackling leaf. The headlights swept overhead.
After a while they heard a car approaching slowly, revving in second gear. They hid and saw the Standard pass, their father’s face peering intently ahead in the reflected glow from the lights. They watched him pass in one direction, and about a quarter of an hour later they saw him return, driving back towards Weston.
‘Do you think we should wave?’ said Maura. ‘Won’t he worry?’
‘No,’ said Kate. ‘We’re walking the whole way.’
They were caught, however, half an hour later, trapped in the headlight beam of Uncle Frank’s Vauxhall as they were crossing bare ground around the sale yards on the edge of town.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he said, dragging them from behind the saleyard fence with a grip so fierce it left blue bruises on their arms. He flung them into the back seat.
Kate said nothing. A dumb resistance had swept over her. Maura was crying but Kate said nothing to either Uncle Frank, or, when they got back to Weston, to Auntie Mary. She watched their mouths opening and closing with a curious detachment, and the way their skin had gone a peculiar purple and the way their eyes blazed with a pale blue fury. Her father, too, was silent. He stood a little to one side while his sister and her husband asked Kate why? Why had she done such a thing? Why had she put her little sister in such danger? Anything could have happened to them. They could have been picked up by anyone. Didn’t she think of her father? Didn’t she realise he would be worried sick? She deserved a good clip around the ear.
Kate said nothing. She looked at her father and he was looking straight back at her. Eye to eye. It was strange. She had expected anger, but he wasn’t angry. He was dead white.
He was frightened.
They climbed once more into the Standard and he drove them home, still drunk, but more careful now, judging the corners with silent attention. When they got home he went to bed. He said nothing to their mother, and nor did Kate.
The moonlight edged the blind, the wind blew in the ribbon-wood outside the window. Kate lay awake in the early hours of this new year, feeling a muddle of sensations. One part was akin to that feeling when she stood at the top of the cliff at Bushy Beach after scrambling up. It was that feeling that made her want to spread her arms wide — the feeling that she could, if she wanted, fly. It was the simple feeling of triumph George must have felt when she outwitted the smugglers.
But mingled with that was a new sensation she could not quite identify. It was pity, perhaps. For the man in the car.