Bogwoppit Read online

  The bedroom door was ajar. Open, almost. As Samantha came abreast of it she could see the whole of the room inside.

  It was much bigger than any of the rooms upstairs. Long windows overlooked the Park and far away beyond the Park, where the small pink houses of the estate were half hidden behind a belt of trees. In the middle of the Park lay the various puddles of the marsh pools, twinkling in the morning sun.

  Vast monuments of bedroom furniture lined the room like tombs of ancestors. Against the wall was pushed an enormous bed, and inside the bed someone lay asleep. Asleep and snoring.

  Samantha had seen her Aunt Daisy Clandorris very occasionally in the distance, usually driving a car in the opposite direction. It had been difficult to think of her as a relation – more as a possession, too exclusive to use.

  Furtively sliding through the doorway, Samantha stood nearer than she had ever stood before to her mother’s and Aunt Lily’s rich sister who had married Sir Ernest Clandorris, and what had happened to him no one ever knew. He had gone off exploring to South America, people vaguely told her, and nobody had ever heard of him again. Anyway, all the Park and the house and the grounds were Lady Clandorris’s, and she had become so grand and snobbish that she didn’t want to know anybody at Filley Green, least of all her sister Lily.

  When the Church Council asked her if they could have the Annual Church Bazaar in the Park she said they couldn’t, and when it was suggested that she should open the grounds on a Sunday in aid of the Nursing Association she said she would think it over, but put it right out of her mind and never mentioned it again.

  ‘Thinks herself the Grand Lady all right!’ said Filley Green. Lady Clandorris did not even use the village shop, but drove herself ten miles to the nearest town, or did without.

  And here she lay on her back in her bedroom, making a noise like a combine harvester, quite unaware that her only niece, her dead sister Gertie’s daughter, was standing and looking at her, halfway in and halfway out of the room.

  Samantha stood for some while, looking at her aunt with great curiosity, and wondering how and when to introduce herself.

  Since the snoring went on and on, showing no signs of abating or turning into any kind of awareness, she turned away, deciding that what she was most in need of was a cup of tea.

  She walked deliberately down the stairs into the hall, thinking about the rat, but this morning the whole house felt quite different, as if some of the joy and beauty of May had seeped in through the cracks of the windows (the door was closed and bolted now) and had spread itself in sheets across the furniture and the faded rugs on the floor.

  Arriving in the hall Samantha found her way to the kitchen. There was no electric stove – there was no electricity at all – she saw that at a glance. But under the window, beside a stone sink, stood a paraffin stove with a single wick, and Samantha was not long in discovering a match and setting the wick alight. While the battered tin kettle boiled she explored the kitchen and scullery, opening every door till she knew just where the larder was, and the coalhouse and the pantry, and a dark, damp, flight of stairs that could only lead down to a damp, dark and distant cellar.

  Opening cupboards, Samantha found cups and saucers, some very beautiful and foreign, some much more modern and ugly from the outdoor stall in the town market. As she put tea into the teapot from a very old tea caddy, she thought she heard a sound at the cellar door. The kettle was boiling, so she rushed to take it off the stove before looking behind her, and when she did nobody seemed to be there. But instinct made her cross the room to shut the door to the cellar and when she did so she noticed a peculiar impression on the top of the cellar steps. A damp, rather smudgy footprint … a pair of footprints, like the front, or back, paws of a small animal.

  Not a very small animal either, nor a big animal. Just an animal.

  Or was it an animal? Only two paws – and the paws were sprawled outwards. Could they be webbed? Not that rat again, shuddered Samantha, but the footprints were not in the least like a rat’s paws.

  A sudden draught blew the door to. When Samantha opened it again the teapot in her hand slopped splashes of tea on to the footprints, blotting them out. She shut the door firmly and filled her cup. No sound came from upstairs or below.

  Samantha drank a second cup of tea with plenty of sugar in it, and climbed the stairs with a tray, very neatly laid. She made no effort to tread quietly, but walked with a firm and confident tread into Lady Clandorris’s bedroom, barely pausing to knock on the door.

  ‘Good morning, Aunt Daisy!’ said Samantha standing at the bedside, tray in hand. ‘I am your sister Gertie’s girl, Samantha, and my Aunt Lily sent me to live with you. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  4. Bogwoppits

  To see Samantha and her Aunt Daisy Clandorris drinking a cup of tea together on the same bed, one would have imagined they had been the best of friends all their lives. Instead of which they were arguing hotly about whether they were going to live the rest of their days together or apart.

  ‘I can’t have you. You must go,’ said Lady Clandorris, sipping her tea.

  ‘I have nowhere to go to,’ said Samantha stubbornly, sipping hers.

  ‘Back to your house,’ said Lady Clandorris.

  ‘The house is sold.’

  ‘Back to your Aunt Lily.’

  ‘She’s flying to America.’

  ‘Go and catch up with her!’

  Their voices grew louder and louder. ‘I can’t! She’s on the plane by now,’ said Samantha. ‘And her husband is. He won’t have me either,’ she explained.

  ‘You’ll have to work if you stay here!’ snapped Lady Clandorris after a long and angry pause.

  Samantha’s eyes gleamed. She pictured herself as Sara Crewe and Cinderella all rolled into one.

  ‘I have to work!’ said Lady Clandorris, spoiling the effect, ‘and I can’t possibly work for both of us.’

  ‘I will work!’ said Samantha meekly.

  ‘And live in the kitchen!’ said Lady Clandorris.

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Samantha gladly.

  ‘I live in the kitchen!’ cried Lady Clandorris, ‘and I cannot bear to have anyone at my heels all day long! You can only live in the kitchen when I am not living in the kitchen, and that’s for certain!’

  ‘I can stay in my bedroom, in between,’ Samantha offered agreeably.

  ‘What bedroom? I haven’t got a bedroom for you!’ shouted Lady Clandorris. ‘I don’t want you next to my bedroom! You probably snore!’

  ‘Could I have an attic, or something?’ Samantha asked cheerfully.

  ‘You can have any room you please as long as you keep it tidy and stay away from me!’ Lady Clandorris conceded. ‘Can you cook?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Samantha, ‘I can cook.’

  ‘Then you can look after yourself!’ said her Aunt Daisy with relief. ‘I eat very little myself – mostly spinach and herbs and things out of tins.’

  ‘Ugh!’ said Samantha unguardedly. She added hastily: ‘I’m afraid there is a rat in your kitchen.’

  ‘There is not!’ yelled Lady Clandorris. ‘No rat at all! Never has been. You don’t know what you are talking about! It is probably a bogwoppit.’

  ‘A what?’ exclaimed Samantha.

  ‘You’ll see soon enough!’ her aunt returned, ‘and the very first thing you can do for your keep is take it down to the marshes and put it back into the pool. I do it twenty times a day. I can’t think how it got here. And after that,’ her aunt added, ‘you can make some plans for your future. I can’t bear the sight of you, and shan’t keep you here a moment longer than the weekend.’

  Samantha did not reply. She collected both teacups and saucers, put them on to her tray, and carried them downstairs to the kitchen, leaving Lady Clandorris to get on with her dressing.

  So far so good, Samantha thought. It was very much the kind of welcome she had imagined, and everything was working out according to all the stories she had ever read. Lady Clandorris was pe
rhaps a little bit more excitable than the aunts of fiction, but no worse than Aunt Lily in a temper, and not half so noisy as the lodger, when he answered her back. She was used to being shouted at and ordered about. She had not the slightest intention of doing all the things Lady Clandorris told her to do. But she decided to begin by appearing to be obedient, and as for moving on after the weekend, she took that for one of the empty threats grownups held over children’s heads, like Aunt Lily, when she said she would give her away to a home for wicked girls at the North Pole.

  ‘They wouldn’t have me!’ Samantha invariably retorted.

  She washed up the teacups, hung them on hooks, and looked about for some breakfast that she could eat before her aunt came downstairs. To her surprise the cupboards were well stocked. She ate two bowls of cornflakes and a slice of ham, and was pouring out a mug of milk when she heard a kitten mewing at the cellar door.

  Samantha opened the door, and something hopped and shuffled into the room, something round and black and furry, with large, round, blue appealing eyes and a long furry tail. It had only two legs. These ended in wet rubbery feet with webbed toes, that seemed to join its furry legs like boots at some upper joint. Instead of forepaws it wore feathered wings, like a pair of short sleeves, and a fringe of fur or feathers fell over its eyes, giving it a fierce and furtive look. Its tail, of which it seemed supremely conscious since it never stopped swishing it to and fro, was thin like a rat’s, but capable of fluffing out and stiffening like a bristle when the creature became startled or surprised.

  When Samantha turned the handle of the door it had just opened its mouth (or was it a beak?) for a second mew, and she saw that the mouth was pink inside.

  ‘Hull … oo … oo!’ said Samantha, surprised.

  The bogwoppit, if this is what it was, came flopping and shuffling into the room, leaving a damp trail of webbed footprints which Samantha instantly recognized, because she had seen them that morning on the top of the cellar stairs.

  ‘So you’re a bogwoppit!’ Samantha said, rather attracted by the strange little object. ‘I don’t believe you are allowed to come into the kitchen, you know!’

  The small creature began to hunt around the room in some anxiety, while a subdued whimpering shook its tiny frame. It searched round the table legs, bent down and frantically gobbled up some morsels of cereal Samantha had dropped. It then stood on tiptoe beside the sink, gazing upwards, and after rising and falling two or three times on the tips of its webbed feet, it rose like a small helicopter into the air, landed noisily in the porcelain sink, and began to rummage in the sink basket. Its head emerged with a frond of carrot sticking out of the side of its bill. This it chewed and spat out, looking beseechingly at Samantha.

  ‘You’re hungry!’ she cried in astonishment, but from its perch on the sink the bogwoppit had already seen her breakfast plates on the table. Scattering the sink basket with a kick of its webbed feet, it flew into the air to land with a wallop beside the milk jug. Within seconds the milk jug was dry, and it was homing in on the box of cereals.

  ‘Oh no you don’t!’ said Samantha, snatching the box away. She locked up the cereals in the cupboard and removed the milk jug.

  The bogwoppit screamed with frustration, stamping round and round the table top, leaving angry, milky footmarks wherever it went, and flapping its short wings.

  ‘Back to the cellar you go!’ Samantha ordered, but when she tried to pick it up and stuff it through the door the bogwoppit bit her. Not a hard or vicious bite, but a firm, sharp, mind-your-own-business nip that made Samantha suck her fingers and eye it with indignation.

  ‘You horrible, horrible little object!’ she cried angrily, looking round for a duster to throw over the top of its head. ‘You wait till I get hold of you! I’ll take you straight back to the marshes where you belong!’

  To her surprise the bogwoppit began to cry. It bowed its furry head almost as low as its webbed feet and sobbed aloud. When at last it raised its face large tears were running out of its eyes and its fur was sticky with them.

  Samantha put out a hand to stroke and comfort it, risking a further bite, but the bogwoppit crept closer and closer till it was leaning against her knees. It licked her fingers with a warm, wet repentant tongue, and she felt the glow of its feathers against her palm.

  ‘Poor!’ she murmured kindly. ‘Poor! Poor! Was it hungry then?’

  The creature uttered a sobbing shriek of suffering. It raised its head in the air like a dog howling, making a small O of the end of its beak, and wailed aloud.

  Samantha rushed for the cupboard. She filled a bowl with raisins, cereals, nuts and anything she could find. She placed the bowl on the floor, and while the bogwoppit, still choking with sobs, ate its fill, she scrubbed the dirty footmarks off the kitchen floor.

  ‘It’s rather sweet!’ Samantha thought as she scrubbed. ‘But I daresay Aunt Daisy has had enough of it. All the same, I’m not going to be ordered around just like that. I’ll take it down to the marshes when I feel like it.’ And she called out to the bogwoppit: ‘Finished? Right then! Back to the cellar with you. Back!’

  Opening the cellar door she pointed very firmly down the cellar stairs.

  The bogwoppit began to whimper and growl. It would not go near the cellar door, though Samantha chased it all round the kitchen. Instead, it rushed at the door that led into the garden, and begged to be let out. Samantha refused to take any notice, so the creature was sick on the floor.

  Furiously she turned the door handle and almost pushed the bogwoppit outside. The last she saw of it was its capering and swaggering gait as it bounced out into Lady Clandorris’s herb garden.

  ‘I hope it never comes back!’ said Samantha.

  When her aunt, Lady Clandorris, came downstairs some time later she had washed the kitchen floor as well as the table, and had a rasher of bacon sizzling in an appetizing manner on the paraffin stove, suppressing the damp and marshy odour the bogwoppit had brought in with it from the cellar.

  As Lady Clandorris came into the kitchen Samantha went out. She did not even greet her aunt, but skipped up the stairs to the top floor, where she arranged her bedroom as sumptuously as possible with bits and pieces from all the other bedrooms on the landing.

  There was plenty of choice. Everything was neglected, moth-eaten, or riddled with woodworm. But by sheer determination Samantha dragged and pushed an enormous empty wardrobe, lined with mirrors, into the bedroom of her choice, snatched a silk eiderdown from one bed, an Indian counterpane from another, selected various rugs, vases, cushions, stools and padded chairs, until there was hardly room to turn round, and added a row of books to the top of the inlaid chest of drawers, also a set of ivory chessmen, a brass Buddha, and some candlesticks, so that she would not have to go to bed in the dark.

  By the time she had finished she realized that most of the morning had gone by and she ought to have been at school. Excuses came glibly into her head. I was moving to my new home. My Aunt Lily was leaving the country for America, by aeroplane. My new aunt, Lady Clandorris of the Park, needed my assistance. All the same she had better go after dinner. Even for dinner if nothing seemed to be forthcoming downstairs, and there was no sign coming from the kitchen that smelled in the least like dinner.

  Although there was no sign of food a terrible racket was going on in the kitchen. Lady Clandorris and the bogwoppit were chasing each other round and round the table, she armed with a broom, and the bogwoppit with its wits and a remarkable turn of speed that kept it slithering, twisting and turning just out of Lady Clandorris’s reach, while it screamed at the top of its voice in what seemed to Samantha like the very extreme of terror.

  ‘Don’t! Don’t!’ she cried, rushing into the kitchen and placing herself between the two contestants. ‘It’s cruel! Oh how can you be so unkind?’

  Lady Clandorris paused for breath, panting heavily. ‘I told you to take it away!’ she said in quite a level tone. ‘To the marshes. I said so. It has been at my herb garden. Eati
ng my herbs. You had no business to allow it to go into my herb garden.’

  The bogwoppit crept close to Samantha and clung to her leg, uttering terrified little whimpering cries. When she stooped to pick it up in her arms it closed its eyes tightly and hid its face in her neck.

  ‘Take it NOW!’ said Lady Clandorris severely. ‘I shall get the dinner.’

  ‘What shall I do if I meet the keeper or his dogs?’ Samantha very sensibly inquired.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lady Clandorris.

  ‘But if he shouts at me?’

  ‘Shout back!’

  ‘But if his dogs chase me?’

  ‘Oddly enough,’ said Lady Clandorris, ‘his fools of dogs run the other way when they even smell a bogwoppit.’

  ‘Oh good!’ said Samantha, glad after all that the bogwoppit was so smelly. She left the house by the front door with the bogwoppit clinging to her neck.

  ‘I shall cook the dinner now!’ her aunt called after her. ‘You can cook yours for yourself when you come back.’

  There was nothing to be seen of the keeper, who lived in a lodge beside the locked gates of the other Park entrance, far away across the grounds. It seemed strange to be walking through the woods in one’s own right, and to emerge on the edge of the marshes, looking across towards the pink and red roofs of the estate. Usually it was the other way round, she looked across at the woods and Lady Clandorris’s chimneys sticking out above the trees. Being sent by her aunt on a mission gave Samantha a sense of belonging to the place, even though she was making up her mind at the same time not to carry the mission out.

  Instead of walking across the marshes to the pools she skirted round the edge of the fields, dodged along the gardens bordering the building estate, climbed under the fence on to the service road, and made her way to the school, where the children were roaring round the playground waiting for the lunch bell to ring.

  Samantha just walked in through the gates and found her friends, the Prices.

  ‘Samantha! Where have you been? What happened to you this morning? And what have you got there?’ Deborah, Jeff and Timothy Price ran up to greet her, saw the bogwoppit’s head sticking out under Samantha’s arm. They were incredulous: