Aunt Effie's Ark (7 page)

“At least,” said Marie, as we ate our lunch, “we know she's all right.”

“A fair bit of that Lane's Emulsion went down,” said Peter. “And all the Parrish's Food. It should start working pretty soon.”

As he spoke, Daisy's doors slid back. Eyes bulging, she bounded out the kitchen door, down the hall, past the bathroom, and into the dunny.

“Remember when you poured castor oil down the Tattooed Wolf's throat?” asked Lizzie. “Is Lane's
Emulsion
like that?”

“Something like it,” said Peter. “But it doesn't taste as bad. In fact, some people quite like Lane's Emulsion.”

Daisy came back white-faced and heard Peter's last words. “Well you can drink the rest of it yourself,” she hissed.

She climbed into her bunk, but a few minutes later, she had to run for the dunny again.

“Has Daisy got the trots?” asked Jessie.

“Something like that.” Peter put his finger to his lips. “But I think we'd better not say anything about it in front of her. She wouldn't like it.”

Daisy locked herself in the dunny for hours. When we shook the doorknob she groaned and snarled, “Go away!” and we had to use Aunt Effie's dunny upstairs. After several days she started squabbling with Alwyn, nagging the little ones, and telling the rest of us what to do.

Marie said, “Daisy's her old self again, but she's a lot thinner.”

“That's all the trotting,” Jazz told her.

Unfortunately Daisy heard Jazz and took to her bed again. Next morning when Marie tried to get her up with a nice cup of tea, she turned her face to the wall.

“I'm the oldest, and nobody shows me any respect.”

“You'll feel better if you get up.”

“Get up – so you can all laugh behind my back? So Alwyn can repeat everything I say, and the rest of you can giggle and sneer at me?”

We all found something to do at the other end of the kitchen. We didn't feel like laughing, and we didn't meet each other's eyes. We knew we were unkind to
Daisy.

As if her crying wasn't bad enough, she started
singing
hymns. After several hours of “Rock of Ages, cleft for me…” and “Lead kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom…” and all four hundred verses of “Abide With Me”, we slipped up to Aunt Effie's room, one by one. Alwyn pulled faces till the rest of giggled – except for Marie who said, “Don't be mean!”

Peter unlocked the doors and took us upstairs to the next floor, where we could laugh aloud, but it didn't seem so funny up there. Marie gave us a telling off.

“You should feel sorry for Daisy,” she said. “One day you'll all be old and crabby, too.”

“Old and crabby, too.”

“And you're the worst!” Marie told Alwyn. “
Repeating
everything she says. No wonder she feels
miserable
.”

“Feels miserable.”

“Here's another door,” said Peter. “Let's have a look!” and he murmured to Marie, “Something to keep them busy.” We held up our lanterns and followed him into a dusty room filled with old-fashioned dolls, tennis rackets, cricket bats, a rocking horse, and a football that had gone flat. Lizzie picked up a hockey stick.

“There's a name on the handle.” Lizzie couldn't read, but she knew most of the letters. “
E-U-P-H-E-M
–” she said.

“Shhh! It's The Name We Dare Not Say!” Peter cocked his head and listened, as if Aunt Effie might be shouting angrily up the stairs.

“The hermit of Mangrove Island called her that name,” Alwyn said. “And the well-spoken old gentleman
we met at Kennedy Bay. And the captain of the pirate schooner that attacked us as we crossed the Hauraki Gulf. They all said it.”

“Yes, and look what Aunt Effie did to them.”

“The Prime Minister said it over the wireless,” said Jessie who was too young to understand. “She said ‘Aunt Euphemia' twice. And the Tattooed Wolf said it through the keyhole. He said, ‘Euphemia!'”

Thump! As Jessie spoke, the house shook so hard we all sat down, and some planks propped against the wall went over with a crash. Peter looked at Jessie. “I'd better see if Aunt Effie's all right.” We listened to his footsteps going downstairs.

“Was that an earthquake?” asked Casey.

“You just said The Name We Dare Not Say,” Marie told Jessie. “Aunt Effie doesn't like it.”

Jessie cried, “But the Prime Minister said it!”

“She's the Prime Minister. She can call people what she likes.”

Peter came back and said it was just Aunt Effie's stone hot water bottle broken. “She must have kicked it out of bed.” He grinned at Jessie. “You were lucky this time. Come on down to the kitchen.”

Downstairs Peter filled another stone hot water bottle from the kettle hanging over the fire, wrapped it in an old pullover, and told Jessie to take it up and put it under Aunt Effie's feet.

“What if the Bugaboo eats me?”

“I told you the Bugaboo's hibernating, too,” said Marie.

“But what if Aunt Effie eats me for calling her The Name We Dare Not Say?”

“Here, I'll go upstairs with you.” Ann took the stone hot water bottle, and Jessie followed, holding on to her skirt.

When they came down, Jessie said, “Aunt Effie's got long yellow toenails. They keep growing while you're hibernating. We cut them with the scissors. You've got to keep your feet warm when you're hibernating,” she told Lizzie. “Ann said so.”

“What about the Bugaboo?” asked Lizzie. “How does he keep his feet warm?”

“Bugaboos don't have feet,” Alwyn told her. “They run on their hands.” Lizzie looked upset at that. After a while she began to cry.

“Oh, Alwyn!” said Marie.

Being in the kitchen with Daisy made us all feel bad again. She looked so thin and white! She had stopped singing hymns while we were upstairs, but now she sang the Prime Minster's favourite song over and over: “How great thou art! How great thou art!” When Alwyn started answering her back, Peter took us up to the roomful of Aunt Effie's old toys again.

Marie showed Peter the hockey stick.

“Look! Somebody's crossed out The Name We Dare Not Say, and they've written ‘Effie' instead.”

“It's the same on this rocking horse,” said Ann: “‘
Effie
'!”

“And on this tennis racket,” said Jazz. “See: ‘Effie!'”

There were old-fashioned ice skates on a shelf, and snowshoes hanging along one wall, all with “Effie” on them. Jazz blew the dust off the planks that had fallen down earlier. “Skis! They've got ‘Effie' on them, too.”

“Hooray!” said Peter. “Something to keep us busy!”

We dusted and waxed the skis. There were enough for all of us but, when Peter offered her a pair, Daisy sniffed and sang, “How great thou art!” even louder.

“There's been no sign of the Tattooed Wolf for several weeks now,” Peter said. He looked out the peephole, and opened the steel shutters over Aunt Effie's window. The snow was level with the sill. We strapped on the skis and slid around the house, falling over, running into each other, and throwing snowballs. The little ones were soon faster than the rest of us, and Lizzie was the fastest of them.

We did ski-jumps and flips off the roof and built a snowman up there. Peter gave him a top-hat he'd found upstairs, Colleen stuck a pipe in his mouth, and Bryce tattooed his face with soot.

As we got better, we skied further. One day we saw a hole in the snow with smoke coming up and realised we were standing a couple of hundred feet above the school. Alwyn put his mouth to the hole and howled down it.

“Ooowhooooo! This is the Prime Minister speaking. Let me in or I'll eat you!”

We listened and heard snores. Mr Jones was still hibernating. Alwyn was disappointed, and had soot all round his mouth.

Only Daisy was unhappy. “She's missing school and doing homework,” said Marie.

That evening, when we skied in through Aunt
Effie's
window and landed on the floor, Daisy was waiting beside the bed, her hand upon Aunt Effie's shoulder. She had a satisfied look on her face. “Remember Aunt Effie said one winter the snow was so deep, her
great-grandmother
had to do all her lessons through the
Underground Correspondence School?” It was the first time she had spoken to us for ages.

“What Underground Correspondence School?”
Alwyn
asked. We never liked admitting anything to Daisy.

“It teaches through the Underground Letterbox – when there's too much snow to go to school.”

“To go to school,” Alwyn repeated, and we laughed. Daisy stuck her nose in the air and flounced downstairs singing “How Great Thou Art!”

Straight after doing our jobs in the morning, we went skiing again. Marie had cut sandwiches, and we stuffed them down the front of our swannies and escaped Daisy's voice. The snow was level all the way from Aunt Effie's windowsill to the top of the Kaimais. We skied along the top of the range where the road used to go over to Tauranga. Further north we looked down where Katikati used to be – and the huge
gooseberry
orchards run by the Chinese farmers – all hidden under snow.

“I love Chinese gooseberries,” said Marie, but the rest of us couldn't remember what they tasted like. We ate our sandwiches and chewed snow for something to drink.

An hour or two before dark, we stood on top of Mount Te Aroha, and saw a brown haze. “It's in the right direction for Auckland,” said Peter. He pointed west at some smoke: “And that'll be Hamilton.”

We tipped over the edge of the mountain and skied downhill all the way home. At the last moment, “
Ooowhooooo
!” The Tattooed Wolf jumped from behind a snowdrift. He grabbed for the little ones but, luckily, he was only on snowshoes. Piggybacking Casey, Lizzie,
Jared, and Jessie, we whizzed past, shot through Aunt Effie's window, slammed the steel shutters closed, and locked them.

As we panted and took off our skis, the peep-hole went dark. The Tattooed Wolf must have put his mouth to it because we heard a gentle whisper say, “I know where there's a house made of gingerbread with cakes stuck all over the roof. The windows are made of boiled lollies. The doorstep's a huge slab of chocolate; the door's made of toffee, and the whole house is sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.”

“Ooh!” said the little ones.

“The kitchen's filled to the ceiling with chews, chocolate bars, and Eskimo Pies, and you can eat the wallpaper, too.”

“Ooh!” said the little ones and drifted towards the window.

“I've got a big bag of chews for you,” the gentle voice whispered again. “Liquorice allsorts, boiled lollies, bullseyes, chutty–”

“I love chutty!” said Jared, but Ann and Jane took the little ones downstairs.

“I've got a big box of Queen Anne chocolates!” the Tattooed Wolf whispered through the peep-hole.

Marie was shepherding everyone else downstairs, but Alwyn stumbled across to the window, his hands out in front as if sleepwalking. He loved Queen Anne chocolates. Marie had to drag him – fighting – down to the kitchen. Peter ran back upstairs.

“How would you like another dose of castor oil?” we heard him say.

“Ooowhooooo! Ooowhooooo!” The howls faded into
the distance.

Alwyn cried bitterly about the Queen Anne
chocolates
. Jared munched on a bit of cheese as if it was chutty but, when he tried, it wouldn't stretch between his fingers.

“Did he really have a big bag of chews?” we asked. “Was the gingerbread house true?”

“He was just making it all up,” said Marie. “Now what's Daisy doing?”

Daisy stood beside a table in the kitchen, wearing her school uniform: panama hat with the enamel badge, starched white blouse, tie, gym frock and sash, gloves, black stockings and polished shoes with the laces doubled in a bowknot so they wouldn't come undone. She had her schoolbag over one shoulder and a strap in her hand.

“Sit down!” She gave the table a whack – just like Mr Jones. We jumped into the rows of double-desks that had appeared in front of a table, and banged down the seats.

“Quietly,” said Daisy, “or you'll spend your
playtime
practising sitting down without any noise. Now, answer your names as I call the roll: Mabel-
Johnny-Flossie
-Lynda-Stan-Howard-Marge-Stuart-Peter-
Marie-Colleen
-Alwyn-Bryce-Jack-Ann-Jazz-Beck-Jane-
Isaac-David
-Victor-Casey-Lizzie-Jared-Jess!”

“Please, miss,” said Jessie, “Mabel, Johnny, Flossie, Lynda, Stan, Howard, Marge, and Stuart are
hibernating
. Please, miss.”

Daisy wrote their names on a blackboard and gave it such a whack with the strap, the chalk dust came off in a cloud. “Peter-Marie-Colleen-Alwyn-Bryce-
Jack-
Ann
-Jazz-Beck-Jane-Isaac-David-Victor-Casey-Lizzie-Jared-Jess!”

We answered, “Present!” all but Alwyn who shouted, “Absent!”

“Here, what's going on?” Peter asked Daisy.

“This morning I lifted a mat and found the
Underground
Letterbox. By the powers entrusted in me by the Minister of Education,” said Daisy, “I have been appointed your teacher for the Underground
Correspondence
School.” She whacked the table twice: Whack! Whack!

“Who's the Minister of Education?”

“The Prime Minister,” said Daisy.

“And who's the headmaster of the Underground Correspondence School?”

“The Prime Minister!”

“But the Prime Minister's hibernating!”

“She left instructions!” said Daisy. “Sit down!” she told Peter. “You all have three months' lessons to catch up. Anyone who misbehaves or doesn't do his
homework
or has dirty nails or hasn't cleaned his teeth or his shoes, or who gets his sums or his spelling wrong, or who answers back, anyone like that will get the cuts!” Daisy struck the table: Whack! Whack! Whack!

“And anyone who wets the floor with Number Ones will get a double dose!” Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! At once all the little ones cried and piddled their pants till it dripped on to the floor.

“Where did the desks and the table come from?” asked Peter so Daisy wouldn't notice.

“From the Underground Correspondence School!” said Daisy. “And the strap, and the blackboard, and
the chalk, and the ink powder, and a new set of School Journals.”

We all cheered. We loved reading the School Journal.

“Don't think I'm going to go giving out new School Journals to anyone who can't do his sums and can't spell and can't behave himself.” Daisy whacked the table and looked at Alwyn.