The Witches

SUMMER HOLIDAYS

The Easter holidays came and went, and the Summer Term began at school. My grandmother and I had already planned to take our summer holiday in Norway and we talked about almost nothing else every evening. She had booked a cabin for each of us on the boat from Newcastle to Oslo at the earliest possible moment after my school broke up, and from Oslo she was going to take me to a place she knew down on the south coast near Arendal where she had spent her own summer holidays as a child nearly eighty years ago.

‘All day long,’ she said, ‘my brother and I were out in the rowing boat. The whole coast is dotted with tiny islands and there’s nobody on them. We used to explore them and dive into the sea off the lovely smooth granite rocks, and sometimes on the way out we would drop the anchor and fish for cod and whiting, and if we caught anything we would build a fire on an island and fry the fish in a pan for our lunch. There is no finer fish in the world than absolutely fresh cod.’

‘What did you use for bait, Grandmamma, when you went fishing?’

‘Mussels,’ she said. ‘Everyone uses mussels for bait in Norway. And if we didn’t catch any fish, we would boil the mussels in a saucepan and eat those.’

‘Were they good?’

‘Delicious,’ she said. ‘Cook them in seawater and they are tender and salty.’

‘What else did you do, Grandmamma?’

‘We used to row out and wave to the shrimp boats on their way home, and they would stop and give us a handful of shrimps each. The shrimps were still warm from having been just cooked, and we would sit in the rowing boat peeling them and gobbling them up. The head was the best part.’

‘The head?’ I said.

‘You squeeze the head between your teeth and suck out the inside. It’s marvellous. You and I will do all those things this summer, my darling,’ she said.

‘Grandmamma,’ I said, ‘I can’t wait. I simply can’t wait to go.’

‘Nor can I,’ she said.

When there were only three weeks of the Summer Term left, an awful thing happened. My grandmother got pneumonia. She became very ill, and a trained nurse moved into the house to look after her. The doctor explained to me that pneumonia is not normally a dangerous illness nowadays because of penicillin, but when a person is more than eighty years old, as my grandmother was, then it is very dangerous indeed. He said he didn’t even dare to move her to hospital in her condition, so she stayed in her bedroom and I hung about outside the door while oxygen cylinders and all sorts of other frightening things were taken in to her.

‘Can I go in and see her?’ I asked.

‘No, dear,’ the nurse said. ‘Not at the moment.’

A fat and jolly lady called Mrs Spring, who used to come and clean our house every day, also moved in and slept in the house. Mrs Spring looked after me and cooked my meals. I liked her very much, but she wasn’t a patch on my grandmother for telling stories.

One evening, about ten days later, the doctor came downstairs and said to me, ‘You can go in and see her now, but only for a short time. She’s been asking for you.’

I flew up the stairs and burst into my grandmother’s room and threw myself into her arms.

‘Hey there,’ the nurse said. ‘Be careful with her.’

‘Will you be all right now, Grandmamma?’ I asked.

‘The worst is over,’ she said. ‘I’ll soon be up again.’

‘Will she?’ I said to the nurse.

‘Oh yes,’ the nurse answered, smiling. ‘She told us she simply had to get better because she had to look after you.’

I gave her another hug.

‘They won’t let me have a cigar,’ she said. ‘But you wait till they’re gone.’

‘She’s a tough old bird,’ the nurse said. ‘We’ll have her up in another week.’

The nurse was right. Within a week, my grandmother was around the house with her gold-topped cane and interfering with Mrs Spring’s cooking. ‘I thank you for all your help, Mrs Spring,’ she said, ‘but you can go home now.’

‘Oh no, I can’t,’ Mrs Spring said. ‘Doctor told me to see that you take it very easy for the next few days.’

The doctor said more than that. He dropped a bombshell on my grandmother and me by telling us that on no account were we to risk the journey to Norway this summer.

‘Rubbish!’ my grandmother cried. ‘I’ve promised him we’ll go!’

‘It’s too far,’ the doctor said. ‘It would be very dangerous. But I’ll tell you what you can do. You can take your grandson to a nice hotel on the south coast of England instead. The sea air is just what you need.’

‘OH NO!’ I said.

‘Do you want your grandmother to die?’ the doctor asked me.

‘NEVER!’ I said.

‘Then don’t let her go on a long journey this summer. She’s not yet strong enough. And stop her smoking those vile black cigars.’

In the end, the doctor had his way about the holiday, but not about the cigars. Rooms were booked for us in a place called the Hotel Magnificent in the famous seaside town of Bournemouth. Bournemouth, my grandmother told me, was full of old people like herself. They retired there by the thousand because the air was so bracing and healthy it kept them, so they believed, alive for a few extra years.

‘Does it?’ I asked.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘It’s tommyrot. But just for once I think we’ve got to obey the doctor.’

Soon after that, my grandmother and I took the train to Bournemouth and settled into the Hotel Magnificent. It was an enormous white building on the seafront and it looked to me like a pretty boring place to spend a summer holiday in. I had my own separate bedroom, but there was a door connecting my room with my grandmother’s room so that we could visit each other without going into the corridor.

Just before we left for Bournemouth, my grandmother had given me, as consolation, a present of two white mice in a little cage and of course I took them with me. They were terrific fun, those mice. I called them William and Mary, and in the hotel I set out right away teaching them to do tricks. The first trick I taught them was to creep up the sleeve of my jacket and come out by my neck.

Then I taught them to climb up the back of my neck on to the top of my head. I did this by putting cake crumbs in my hair.

On the very first morning after our arrival, the chambermaid was making my bed when one of my mice poked its head out from under the sheets. The maid let out a shriek that brought a dozen people running to see who was being murdered. I was reported to the Manager. There followed an unpleasant scene in the Manager’s office with the Manager, my grandmother and me.

The Manager, whose name was Mr Stringer, was a bristly man in a black tailcoat. ‘I cannot permit mice in my hotel, madam,’ he said to my grandmother.

‘How dare you say that when your rotten hotel is full of rats anyway!’ my grandmother cried.

‘RATS!’ cried Mr Stringer, going mauve in the face. ‘There are no rats in this hotel!’

‘I saw one this very morning,’ my grandmother said. ‘It was running down the corridor into the kitchen!’

‘THAT IS NOT TRUE!’ cried Mr Stringer.

‘You had better get the rat-catcher in at once,’ my grandmother said, ‘before I report you to the Public Health Authorities. I expect there’s rats scuttling all over the kitchen floor and stealing the food off the shelves and jumping in and out of the soup!’

‘NEVER!’ cried Mr Stringer.

‘No wonder my breakfast toast was all nibbled round the edges this morning,’ my grandmother went on relentlessly. ‘No wonder it had a nasty ratty taste. If you’re not careful, the Health people will be ordering the entire hotel to be closed before everyone gets typhoid fever.’

‘You are not being serious, madam,’ Mr Stringer said.

‘I was never more serious in my life,’ my grandmother said. ‘Are you or are you not going to allow my grandson to keep his white mice in his room?’

The Manager knew when he was beaten. ‘May I suggest a compromise, madam?’ he said. ‘I will permit him to keep them in his room as long as they are never allowed out of the cage. How’s that?’

‘That will suit us very well,’ my grandmother said, and she stood up and marched out of the room with me behind her.

There is no way you can train mice inside a cage. Yet I dared not let them out because the chambermaid was spying on me all the time. She had a key to my door and she kept bursting in at all hours, trying to catch me with the mice out of the cage. She told me that the first mouse to break the rules would be drowned in a bucket of water by the hall porter.

I decided to seek a safer place where I could carry on with the training. There must surely be an empty room in this enormous hotel. I put one mouse into each trouser pocket and wandered downstairs in search of a secret spot.

The ground floor of the hotel was a maze of public rooms, all of them named in gold letters on the doors. I wandered through ‘The Lounge’ and ‘The Smoking Room’ and ‘The Card Room’ and ‘The Reading Room’ and ‘The Drawing Room’. None of them was empty. I went down a long wide corridor and at the end of it I came to ‘The Ballroom’. There were double doors leading into it, and in front of the doors there was a large notice-board on a stand. The notice on the board said,

RSPCC MEETING
STRICTLY PRIVATE
THIS ROOM IS RESERVED
FOR THE
ANNUAL MEETING
OF
THE ROYAL SOCIETY
FOR THE PREVENTION
OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN

The double doors into the room were open. I peeped in. It was a colossal room. There were rows and rows of chairs, all facing a platform. The chairs were painted gold and they had little red cushions on the seats. But there was not a soul in sight.

I sidled cautiously into the room. What a lovely secret silent place it was. The meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children must have taken place earlier in the day, and now they had all gone home. Even if they hadn’t, even if they did suddenly come pouring in, they would be wonderful kind people who would look with favour upon a young mouse-trainer going about his business.

At the back of the room there was a large folding screen with Chinese dragons painted on it. I decided, just to be on the safe side, to go behind this screen and do my training there. I wasn’t a bit frightened of the Prevention of Cruelty to Children people, but there was always a chance that Mr Stringer the Manager might pop his head round the door. If he did and if he saw the mice, the poor things would be in the hall porter’s bucket of water before I could shout stop.

I to the back of the room and settled myself on the thick green carpet behind the big screen. What a splendid place this was! Ideal for mouse training! I took William and Mary out of my trouser pockets. They sat beside me on the carpet, quiet and well behaved.

The trick I was going to teach them today was tightrope walking. It is not all that difficult to train an intelligent mouse to be an expert tightrope walker provided you know exactly how to go about it. First, you must have a piece of string. I had that. Then you must have some good cake. A fine currant cake is the favourite food of white mice. They are dotty about it. I had brought with me a rock cake that I had pocketed while having tea with Grandmamma the day before.

Now here’s what you do. You stretch the string tight between your two hands, but you start by keeping it very short, only about three inches. You put the mouse on your right hand and a little piece of cake on your left hand. The mouse is therefore only three inches away from the cake. He can see it and he can smell it. His whiskers twitch with excitement. He can almost reach the cake by leaning forward, but not quite. He only has to take two steps along the string to reach this tasty morsel. He ventures forward, one paw on the string, then the other. If the mouse has a good sense of balance, and most of them have, he will get across easily. I started with William. He walked the string without a moment’s hesitation. I let him have a quick nibble of the cake just to whet his appetite. Then I put him back on my right hand.

This time I lengthened the string. I made it about six inches long. William knew what to do now. With superb balance, he walked step by step along the string until he reached the cake. He was rewarded with another nibble.

Quite soon, William was walking a twenty-four-inch tightrope (or rather tightstring) from one hand to the other to reach the cake. It was wonderful to watch him. He was enjoying himself tremendously. I was careful to hold the string near the carpet so that if he did lose his balance, he wouldn’t have far to fall. But he never fell. William was obviously a natural acrobat,

Now it was Mary’s turn. I put William on the carpet beside me and rewarded him with some extra crumbs and a currant. Then I started going through the same routine all over again with Mary. My blinding ambition, you see, my dream of dreams, was to become one day the owner of a White Mouse Circus. I would have a small stage with red curtains in front of it, and when the curtains were drawn apart, the audience would see my world-famous performing mice walking on tightropes, swinging from trapezes, turning somersaults in the air, bouncing on trampolines and all the rest of it. I would have white mice riding on white rats, and the rats would gallop furiously round and round the stage. I was beginning to picture myself travelling first class all over the globe with my Famous White Mouse Circus, and performing before all the crowned heads of Europe.

I was about halfway through Mary’s training when suddenly I heard voices outside the Ballroom door. The sound grew louder. It swelled into a great babble of speech from many throats. I recognized the voice of the awful Hotel Manager, Mr Stringer.

Help, I thought.

But thank heavens for the huge screen.

I crouched behind it and peered through the crack between two of the folding sections. I could see the entire length and width of the Ballroom without anyone seeing me.

‘Well, ladies, I am sure you will be quite comfortable in here,’ Mr Stringer’s voice was saying. Then in through the double doors he marched, black tailcoat and all, spreading his arms wide as he ushered in a great flock of ladies. ‘If there is anything we can do for you, do not hesitate to let me know,’ he went on. ‘Tea will be served for all of you on the Sunshine Terrace after you have concluded your meeting.’ With that, he bowed and scraped himself out of the room as a vast herd of ladies from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children came streaming in. They wore pretty clothes and all of them had hats on their heads.