The Dragonfly Pool (7 page)

“Now I want you to spread yourself out on the floor,” she said. “Give yourself plenty of space because we're going to do an improvisation that covers the whole of our lives. We're going to start by giving birth to ourselves. We're going to imagine that we're an embryo waiting to be born. Waiting . . . waiting . . . Don't hurry it . . . that's right . . . Then we're going to learn to walk . . . slowly . . . very slowly . . . crawl first . . . then upright. Good . . . good . . .”

Tally was between Julia and Kit. She had hoped that Kit would decide to be born near some boys on the other side of the room, but he settled himself down as close to her as he could and now she heard his anguished whisper.

“I don't want to give birth to myself, Tally. I don't want to. I want to go to a proper school, where they have prefects and play cricket.”

When they had finished giving birth to themselves they had to stand up and become rigid and pronged like a fork, and then curved and bountiful like a teapot, and then soft and yielding like a pillow.

“If we don't have to go to classes, why does everyone come to drama? ” asked Tally when they were out in the courtyard again.

“It's because Armelle's son was killed in Spain, fighting for the Republicans,” explained Julia. “She used to be quite fat and bossy, and now she's all skin and bones.”

After drama came handicrafts. This was taught by a cheerful plump woman called Josie, who took them out into the fields behind the school to look for sheep's wool.

“When we've got a sackful we're going to wash it and card it and dye it—using natural dyes, of course. Lichen and moss and alder bark . . . It'll keep us busy most of the term,” she said cheerfully.

Tally thought that this was likely: the fields around Delderton seemed to be inhabited by cows rather than sheep and wisps of discarded wool were scarce, but as they searched the hedgerows Josie pointed out all sorts of interesting plants which they would pick later and grind up and boil in vats.

“I've been experimenting with woad,” she said, and rolled up her sleeves to show them her forearms, which were mottled with blue, “but I haven't got it quite right yet. It makes you realize how clever the ancient Britons were.”

After break they had a double period of English; it was taken by a quietly spoken man in spectacles called O'Hanrahan. They were studying Greek myths and he told them the story of Persephone, who was carried away by the King of the Underworld and kept prisoner there, guarded by a dreadful three-headed dog, while her sorrowing mother, the goddess Demeter, searched and lamented, and the trees and flowers withered and died. He didn't read the story, he told it, and the class listened to him in total silence.

“It would make a good play,” said a boy with ginger hair.

“Perhaps next term,” said O'Hanrahan. He turned to Tally. “What do you think? ”

Tally nodded. “Yes, it would. The spirits trapped in the Underworld would be interesting to do. Writhing and shrieking and begging to be let out.”

“Oh, not a play,” said Julia nervously. “Not proper acting.”

O'Hanrahan looked at her quietly for a moment before he said, “No one has to act if they don't want to, Julia. You know that.”

When they were back in Julia's room getting ready for lunch Tally asked, “Don't you like acting? ”

“No. I mean, I don't do it. Not ever.”

She had on her worried look and Tally did not ask any more. She knew already that she and Julia would be friends, but there was something puzzling about her. It was as though she would do anything not to be noticed, as though she needed to be younger and less important than she was.

Later, as Tally walked over to the dining room with Barney, he said, “She's silly. Julia, I mean. O'Hanrahan got her to do a bit in
Much Ado About Nothing
. It was just in the classroom, but Julia was amazing. Only when we told her how good she was, she clammed up completely and went off in a state and she's never done anything since. Whereas Verity always wants to be the star. You'll see—if we do
Persephone
, she'll try to be the heroine.”

“I was wondering about her feet. Verity's, I mean. I can see it's fine to go barefoot in the grass, but in Paddington Station . . . Doesn't she get splinters? ”

Barney shrugged. “Someone told her she had beautiful feet and that was that. She's the vainest person I know—she'll spend an hour tearing her skirt in exactly the right place or untidying her hair.”

In the afternoon they had games and Kit's hopes of playing cricket were finally dashed. The only team game they played at Delderton was softball, and people who didn't want to play that went for cross-country runs, used the apparatus in the gym, or worked on the school farm.

Tally went down to help Borro clean out the goats. Borro's father had been a chieftain in Bechuanaland before he was deposed by a rival and now had a job lecturing in the University of London, but Borro was determined to go back to Africa and reclaim his father's land and farm it. The walls of his room were covered in pictures of cattle: Friesians and Aberdeen Angus and Longhorns, whose mild eyes gazed down at him as he slept. Not only that, but he was going to breed a new kind of cow, which would grow fat even on the parched soil of his native land.

Meanwhile, since cattle breeding was not really practical at school, he and Tod had decided to breed edible snails and sell them to restaurants. Tod wanted the money for the revolution and Borro wanted it for his fare back to Africa. Unfortunately the few snails they had managed to collect so far did not seem to be remotely interested in mating.

Tally's friends discussed this, sitting on the steps of the pet hut after tea, watching the snails crawl over each other in a bored sort of way.

“I suppose it's because each snail is both a male and a female,” said Tally, “so they get muddled.”

“Matteo would know what to do,” said Barney.

But Matteo was not yet back at school, and his first biology lesson had been postponed.

It was surprising how quickly one could get used to a completely new life. Some of the lessons were quite ordinary: chemistry, say, when a man called David Prosser did the experiments for them on a bench and then told them what to write up, but mostly going into a classroom was an adventure that might turn out in any sort of way.

Art, for example . . . Clemmy took a double period of art on Tally's second day at school except that she didn't “take” it—she just seemed to wander around the art room, which looked out over fields and the distant trees that lined the river. Paper and paints were laid out and Clemmy murmured something.

“Most people don't believe in guardian angels, but what exactly is a guardian angel? ” she said. “Could it be something quite different to what people think . . .? ” And almost at once everyone had started working, completely absorbed. Tally found that she was painting her street: the rows of houses, her father's surgery and above them, flying over the roofs, London's own guardian angels, the barrage balloons—and it felt as though she was joining her life in London with her new life at Delderton.

But the lessons everyone spoke about were Matteo's biology classes. “They're special,” they said, and when Tally asked in what way, they said it was no use explaining; she'd see.

Making friends was the most important thing, but what Tally loved was the way Delderton grew out of the countryside. Going over to the gym she would meet a red squirrel or pass a great bank of primroses as scented and rich as if they had been planted there. And each morning, as she woke, she heard a thrush singing in the cedar tree.

Kit, though, had still not settled in and followed Tally about lamenting from morning till night. Kit did not want to be a fork or pick worts to dye his sheep's wool—and he did not want to go
ping
on the triangle when they played the Toy Symphony in music lessons.

Music was taught by an elderly professor of harmony who had hoped for a quiet life by returning to teach in the country. New children were usually persuaded to learn whatever instrument was needed for the orchestra, but when he met Kit the professor knew he was beaten.

“Oh Kit, surely you can just go
ping
,” said Tally wearily. “It doesn't take a minute.”

But she was really very sorry for the little boy, who had just started at a small prep school down the road from his house and made friends with a boy called Horlicks Major and been picked for the cricket team, when a rich friend of his mother's had come to stay with the family and said that Kit was repressed and should be sent to Delderton, and had offered to pay the fees.

“But I don't mind being repressed,” Kit had told his new friends. “I don't like it when people tell me I can do what I like. I want them to tell me what to
do
.”

Magda had stopped crying after lights-out and did her best to be a good housemother. Nothing could be done about her cocoa, and she got very confused about checking the laundry—it was a question of luck whose clean washing landed on one's bed—but her German lessons were good, and she was particularly kind to Julia on the morning when the first letters came.

The post at Delderton came just after breakfast so that there was time before lessons began for the children to go to the pigeonholes outside the school office to see if there was any mail.

The aunts had kept their promise. There were three letters in Tally's pigeonhole: one in green ink from Aunt Hester, one in violet ink from Aunt May, and one in ordinary ink from her father, which she pounced on and read first.

There was a letter for Barney and one for Tod and for Borro and for Kit.

Only Julia had no mail.

On Tally's third day at Delderton the headmaster gathered the school together in the hall. He said that it was easy to forget, in the peace of the countryside, that Britain and France and so many of the free people of the world were in danger. Here in Devon we were unlikely to be bombed, he said, but we must be ready to do everything to help the war effort if the worst happened.

At this point the older children looked at each other hopefully, ready to man a nest of machine guns if one was set up in the courtyard, but what the headmaster said was different.

“Already two of the domestic staff have had their call-up papers. So I think it would be fair if every child did half an hour of housework before the start of lessons.”

Everyone agreed with this—except Verity, who said that she didn't think her parents had sent her to school to scrub floors—but of course it was a disappointment. When one has hoped to man the barricades, it is difficult to get excited about doing the dusting or polishing the furniture.

Actually, it was not easy to forget that there might be a war, even at Delderton. Most of the staff had their own wirelesses and at six o'clock the children would make their way to the housemothers' rooms and listen to the news.

Not only was Hitler braying and strutting and threatening, growing madder and wilder in his demands by the day, but Mussolini, the Italian dictator who copied him in everything he did, had invaded Albania, a defenseless country which had done him no harm whatsoever, and the Albanian ruler, King Zog, had fled his country and gone into exile.