Bogwoppit Read online

  Out of the drain emerged a bogwoppit, shuffling and crying, splashed with disinfectant and wailing loudly. It paused to be sick, and then with its last feeble strength, rose desperately into the air, and flew, damp, sodden and wretched, straight into Samantha’s arms.

  Although there was little to distinguish it from any of the newly hatched bogwoppits that had recently invaded the house, Samantha knew without a shadow of doubt that this one must be, had to be, in fact was … the Only-Bogwoppit-in-the-World, come back to visit her.

  The bogwoppit shivered violently, vibrating like a small engine. It pecked at its sodden feathers, and shook its disinfected feet. Finally it flopped out of her arms and led the way up the stairs to the bathroom still shivering and sobbing.

  There was no hot water, but the little creature did not seem to notice. Only when it was standing in the water flapping its ridiculous little wings with pleasure did Samantha notice something white sticking out of its feathers.

  Whatever it was fell suddenly into the water, and the bogwoppit trod on it. By the time Samantha had rescued it and found that it was a square-shaped piece of paper with writing on it, the ink had run, and it was extremely difficult to decipher what it was all about.

  When Samantha did manage to read the note her face turned very pale indeed, and her hands began to tremble.

  The Prices, arriving in the hall below, shouted her name and pounded up the stairs to the second floor landing. They found Samantha still holding the piece of paper and staring at it, while the bogwoppit stood on its head on the plughole.

  ‘They’ve got her!’ Samantha said hoarsely. ‘The bogwoppits have got my aunt, Lady Clandorris, down the drain. And they are keeping her a prisoner.’

  ‘NO!’ exclaimed all three Prices.

  ‘Look at this!’ said Samantha. The Prices looked.

  The message was very faint, having been in the bath with the bogwoppit.

  It said:

  TELL SAMANTHA THE BOGWOPPITS HAVE GOT ME DOWN THE DRAIN.

  Daisy Clandorris.

  Even in her horror and dismay Samantha’s heart throbbed for a moment as she realized that at last her aunt had recognized her existence, and had even voiced a kind of plea for her help. Samantha was ready to offer that help to the utmost of her ability.

  She led the way at a gallop down the stairs, followed by the three Prices, also the bogwoppit, who was dragging a towel and uttering shrieks of pleasure at the thought of finding some cobwebs to roll in.

  The drain was dark and damp. Nobody had a torch. When they tried to enter the drain the bogwoppit gibbered and flapped at them. It could only be pacified in Samantha’s arms, wrapped up like a baby in the wet towel. She told Jeff where to find a small hand torch that was in a drawer in the kitchen, and with this most inadequate light and fiercely beating hearts they stepped into the drain.

  Samantha’s chief fear was of being rushed again by bogwoppits in the dark, but it was Deborah who was the most anxious of the four of them. She hung back, while Samantha with great courage took the lead, carrying the torch. The bogwoppit struggled in her arms, longing to get down and rub itself against the dirty walls of the drain. It only enjoyed a bath for the pleasure of getting filthy again.

  Samantha did not want to let it escape because it still seemed to love her, and she hoped it would persuade the other bogwoppits to be friends with her. So she petted it and soothed it, holding it very firmly in the towel, which it began to rip to pieces.

  Sooner than they had expected the faint light of the torch showed up the bars of the grid that Mr Price had made, and sure enough, the gate in it stood open. It looked as if Lady Clandorris might have penetrated the drain as far as the grid, unlocked the door and been captured in the passage. The feeble light lit up a shoe lying on the far side of the grid, while beads were scattered so widely about the floor that one or the other of them was constantly treading them underfoot.

  As they stood uncertain beside the open gate, the drain, like a long and evil snake, stretched ahead of them, and suddenly there came the unmistakable sound of action at the farther end, moans, twitters, chattering bogwoppit noises to which none of them were strangers. There came the damp slapping of feet on wet earth, the rustling of many moist feathery wings, and the unmistakable threat in the darkness of something unknown, and possibly unfriendly, that brought them to a halt as they wondered how to proceed.

  At the same time the One-and-Only-Bogwoppit, having torn the towel to pieces, made one tremendous leap out of Samantha’s arms into the drain, and galloped out of sight without so much as a backward glance.

  The advancing noise grew louder and more menacing. Suddenly the shrieks became piercing as the One-and-Only joined forces with its friends and poured no one knew what exaggerated stories into their ears.

  ‘Shut the gate!’ shrieked Deborah, for Samantha seemed paralysed. She was stunned by the bogwoppit’s desertion. It had seemed so devoted and so glad to be with her again.

  The boys rushed at the grill and dragged at the gate till it closed. Mechanically Samantha turned and pocketed the key. The next moment a score of black and furry bodies hurled themselves against the bars, screeching, chattering and thrusting forward their small black wings as their beaks attacked the grill. But Mr Price’s handiwork was too much for them and they drew back, staring inquisitively at the children out of the darkness with their round blue eyes, that gleamed in the beam of Samantha’s light. She tried in vain to distinguish the beloved features of the One-and-Only, but not a single bogwoppit responded to her advances. From each pair of eyes came the same distrustful stare, and when she approached the grid they got frightened and snapped at her.

  ‘Oh do bring the torch! It’s so dark!’ Deborah pleaded, already halfway up the tunnel to the house.

  Samantha turned and followed.

  ‘Hang on to the key!’ Jeff warned her.

  It was good to see the daylight again. They faced one another in the cellar and recognized the same tenseness in each face.

  ‘Do you think Lady Clandorris is still alive down there?’ Tim said. ‘They might have killed her! Or she might have starved to death!’

  ‘She wrote the message herself,’ said Samantha. ‘And the bogwoppits took all that food down the drain – masses and masses of it. Enough to keep her for years, I should think. They don’t eat such things themselves, so they must have meant to feed her with them. But I haven’t an idea how we are going to get her out or rescue her.’

  ‘Easy!’ said Jeff. ‘Just slosh down a lot of disinfectant, like my dad did last time. That’ll settle the bogwoppits, and if your auntie gets a bit wet she won’t mind if it means her getting free.’

  ‘I don’t want the bogwoppits killed,’ said Samantha slowly. She was still thinking of the One-and-Only, and strangely enough, of the black, furry, dirty, strangely lovable little bogwoppits themselves.

  ‘Don’t you want to save your auntie?’ said the Prices, astonished.

  ‘Not that way!’ said Samantha. ‘I’d much rather rescue her and have the bogwoppits, and have the Project, and go on telly. We might be able to pay a ransom for her.’

  ‘How could we find out what kind of ransom they would want?’ said Deborah.

  ‘We’ll ask,’ said Samantha.

  She wrote a message on a piece of paper, put it in a polythene bag, and marched down the passage to the grill quite by herself. She thrust it through the bars and sluiced it on its way with a pailful of perfectly ordinary tap water. The message was simply: ‘DO THEY WANT A RANSOM? HOW MUCH?’

  ‘You are brave!’ shuddered Deborah when she returned. ‘I wouldn’t go down that drain again for a thousand pounds!’

  ‘I think we ought to tell my father,’ said Tim.

  Samantha knew that if any grown-ups were brought into it the bogwoppits chances of survival were very slim. And another thought was emerging. It was one thing to be the heroine of Aunt Daisy’s rescue, and quite another to have her reinstated as mistress of the Park. How long w
ould her gratitude last? Would she now accept Samantha into her house as her rightful niece and heiress, or would she send her packing again, and merely seal off the drain for ever with cement? And if so, was it really worth all the trouble of pacifying the bogwoppits just to have things exactly the same as they had been before?

  With Aunt Daisy a prisoner a whole vista of opportunities opened out before Samantha’s eyes. There was the Project. There was the freedom of the Park. There was the distinction of being at last, if only temporarily, the sole mistress in charge of the house and property, to which she felt so strong a claim.

  ‘How can she send back an answer if the gate is locked?’ asked Deborah.

  ‘They can push it through the bars. I shall go down and look every hour,’ said Samantha. The Prices looked at her with respect. None of them fancied a return journey into the depths of the drain.

  ‘I think we ought to tell my dad,’ said Timothy.

  ‘Not till we get an answer from my aunt,’ said Samantha firmly. ‘You know what will happen if the grown-ups rescue her. We’ll never be allowed in this house again, nor in the Park, and none of us will ever get on telly. But if we rescue her ourselves we can do the Project and keep the bogwoppits too. We’ll make it a condition.’

  ‘But bogwoppits are awful!’ Deborah shivered.

  ‘Not the One-and-Only isn’t,’ said Samantha. ‘And we might tame the others in time. They are all right in their own place. Just think! We may be able to come up to the house and play the pianola when we want to! My aunt will have to be grateful to us if we rescue her.’

  At the end of an hour, and again at the end of a second, she went down the old drain to the grid, Jeff following to keep her company, but nobody came to push a message through the bars, and not a sound could be heard down the long, dark tunnel ahead. It curved away out of sight much farther than the beam of Samantha’s torch could follow.

  Meanwhile the Prices played the pianola to their hearts’ content.

  Finally it was time to go home to dinner.

  ‘Don’t say a word to anybody!’ Samantha urged them as the four took a short cut across the once-forbidden Park.

  ‘I do think we ought to tell my dad,’ said Timothy.

  ‘I thought you liked playing the pianola!’ said Samantha severely. ‘You can play it quite a lot more before we rescue her if you leave things to me, but if you tell your dad you’ll never play it again, most likely.’

  As they skirted the marsh pools, something white floating on the water caught their attention. It was a small sheet of paper, such as might be torn from a person’s shopping list. It looked wet, but not sodden, in fact it did not seem to have been in the water for any length of time.

  Jeff waded in over his ankles to get it, and distinctly saw the pale blue eyes of a bogwoppit sinking out of sight below the surface.

  Samantha saw it too, and snatched the paper out of Jeff’s hands. There were words running across the paper, and this time they were written in pencil, so had not been washed away by the water.

  TRY TWO THOUSAND BLACK BEETLES, the words ran.

  ‘Whatever does it mean?’ asked Deborah.

  ‘The ransom!’ said Samantha. ‘They want two thousand black beetles as a ransom for her. Poor Aunt Daisy!’

  ‘That’s a lot of black beetles!’ said Tim anxiously.

  ‘It will give us time!’ said Samantha, thinking: she can’t possibly expect us to produce those overnight. I never thought of beetles, but I do remember that the One-and-Only used to eat them when he found any. ‘Now don’t say a thing to anybody!’ she repeated. ‘We’ll find out if she needs anything while we are collecting the ransom, and in the meantime – well! Just think of all the things we can do while we’ve got the Park to ourselves!’

  After dinner they put a message into an old bottle and dropped it into the marsh pool. The message said: RANSOM UNDER WAY. DO YOU WANT ANYTHING? Almost immediately a head rose to the surface. A beak or a wing seized the bottle and bore it down to the murky depths under the duckweed.

  Tim and Deborah watched the marsh pools for an answer while Samantha and Jeff visited the grid at regular intervals. The answer came back in the same bottle. It popped up in the middle of the pool while Deborah and Tim were watching aeroplanes. They ran up to the Park to give it to Samantha.

  The message read:

  I WANT TO BE FREE. TRY TWO THOUSAND BLACK BEETLES.

  ‘We are trying two thousand black beetles!’ Samantha grumbled. She had caught three inside the drain, but having nothing to contain them in had lost them almost as fast.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon looking in the cupboards and dark and dusty places, but it was evident that two thousand black beetles were going to take a long time to find.

  16. Two Thousand Black Beetles

  Mrs Price was quite upset when the children began to search the house for black beetles.

  ‘You won’t find those dirty things in our house!’ she exclaimed, and demanded what they wanted them for.

  Deborah and Jeff were speechless, and looked at Samantha.

  ‘For a Project,’ said Samantha promptly. ‘For a project for Miss Mellor!’

  ‘The things they teach children nowadays!’ Mrs Price said helplessly to Mr Price. ‘Now what kind of an education can you get out of nasty dirty old black beetles?’

  ‘Used to see plenty when I was a lad!’ said Mr Price, ‘but they seem to have died out. Have you noticed how, whenever something seems to die out nice and decent, the whole country starts up a project to get it going again? Black beetles! Let ’em show a leg in my drains and they’ll get what’s coming to ’em!’

  But quite undaunted Samantha told Miss Mellor that the Park was open to the study of bogwoppits, and to help the Project on, it might be necessary to capture and collect a very large quantity of black beetles.

  ‘I always thought they must eat some kind of protein besides aruncus wopitus leaves!’ she said to the Prices.

  ‘And cornflakes!’ said Timothy.

  ‘Oh cornflakes!’ said Samantha, dismissing the cornflakes.

  ‘You hear what Samantha says?’ Miss Mellor addressed the class. ‘Let’s see who can bring the largest number of black beetles to school in the morning, shall we? And meanwhile, since Samantha’s auntie has given us permission to go into the Park, we will start our Project straight away this afternoon.’

  The class cheered. They were all anxious to see the bogwoppit again, and thought Samantha had been very secretive about it.

  They set off after dinner with Miss Mellor, a number of notebooks, pencils, and actually four black beetles that somebody had found under the carpentry shop. Samantha took charge of these. She did not want them cast into the marsh pool and wasted. It was most unlikely that the bogwoppits could count. Therefore it was most important to present a large number of black beetles all together.

  The marsh pools, as might have been expected, were absolutely deserted. The class spent some time looking for footprints in the mud, but there was nothing that could not have been made by moorhens or coots. Duckweed was settling on the patches of water. Nothing seemed to have disturbed the surface of the pools for a long time. Yet not so long ago the water had been rippled by a bogwoppit claw, or wing, and all the Prices as well as Samantha had seen the pale blue eyes beneath the duckweed, and watched the bottle with its message snatched from view.

  The class were confident at first, but then lost faith. They grew tired of sitting around and watching the quiet pools. The camera owner dropped his camera in the wet. Miss Mellor chatted to Samantha and the Prices about the bogwoppit and read aloud the very short account of it in her natural history book.

  ‘It says,’ she reminded them, ‘that it is believed to be extinct, and as it is four o’clock and time to go home, I’m afraid that extinct it will have to remain for us this afternoon!’

  At that moment, quite suddenly, the surface of the water was violently disturbed. A round, black furry head shot out of the middle
of a patch of duckweed. Two round blue eyes focused for a moment on the class, and then turned towards Samantha. With a bound and a great splashing of black mud and green duckweed the One-and-Only-Bogwoppit emerged from the pond, shot straight through the middle of Miss Mellor’s legs, causing her to sit down very suddenly on the grass, and leapt at Samantha. For a moment its wet black feet and whirring wings clambered up her dress as up a ladder. Then its head was rootling under her chin, seeking her ear, as with piteous and loving cries it plastered her with its dirty feathers and a variety of kisses, known only to bogwoppits and their kind.

  Rubbing its beak finally over her cheeks it slid backwards down her dress, ripping it at the hem, and floundered away into the pond. There it sank like a stone without even a backward glance.

  ‘It loves me!’ sang Samantha’s heart.

  The class was utterly dumbfounded.

  Miss Mellor was primarily concerned with wiping the mud off Samantha’s school dress with her handkerchief, and assuring herself that nobody had been hurt. She could imagine Lady Clandorris suing the school for allowing her niece Samantha to be savagely attacked by a bogwoppit.

  But Samantha was not hurt at all. The marks on her face were not bites but dirty kisses, and she was beaming for joy.

  ‘Well there! You all saw it for yourselves!’ said Miss Mellor, greatly relieved. ‘And we can’t stop any longer this afternoon, though it looks exactly like the description that is written in my book. First thing in the morning I am going to ask you all to write a description of what it looked like to you. And next time we had better all come in wellies and macintoshes!’

  She offered to come up to the Park with Samantha and explain to Lady Clandorris about the state of Samantha’s dress, but Samantha said it was quite all right and her aunt would not be at all angry. Deborah Price giggled, and then turned scarlet as everyone looked at her. Miss Mellor pretended not to notice. She was actually extremely excited by the events of the afternoon, and was anxious to get home to write a letter to the secretary of the S.P.R.R.L. (The Society for the Preservation of Rare and Rural Life) of which she was a member. People who were not members called them the Sprawlies.