The Secret Passage

W
HEN
J
OHN AND
Mary and Ben came to England to live, their Aunt Mabel thought they were the most dreadfully spoiled children she had ever known.

Perhaps it was true. But if they were spoiled, it was only in the pleasantest kind of way. Their mother and father, Mr and Mrs Mallory, were kind and gentle people and their African nurse, Bella, was plump and cheerful and never too tired or too busy to play with them or tell them stories. By the time John was twelve, Mary eleven, and Ben seven years old, they had never heard anyone speak in an angry voice either to them or to anyone else.

They had lived in Kenya for most of their lives. John and Mary had been born in England but they could remember almost nothing about it, although John sometimes said that he could remember what snow felt like—tingling cold as
ice-cream
and crunchy under your feet. Mary wondered if he was right. She knew what snow
looked
like because she could see it, sparkling on the high, white top of Mount Kenya. Their bungalow was built near a river at the foot of the mountain. From the garden they could see the snow-capped peaks, a range of lower, blue-coloured hills and the African village on the ridge immediately above their bungalow, a group of conical-shaped, straw huts that steamed sometimes in the damp weather as if they were on fire.

It was a beautiful place to live. There were very few dangerous snakes and although there were lions and elephants and rhinos they hid deep in the forests higher up the mountains. So John and Mary and Ben were free to play wherever they liked. They ran about half-naked like the African children; Ben, who was dark-haired and dark-skinned was burned almost as black as one. Although they were made to wear shoes so they shouldn't get jiggers in their toes, no one grumbled when they got dirty or tore their clothes. This was partly because they had servants to mend them, of course, but it was also because their mother and father were sensible as well as kind. Mr Mallory had been brought up in London in a stiff, clean house where, so he said, even the coal had been dusted and he was determined that his children should be allowed to get just as dirty as they wanted to. “Let them play in the mud,” he said. “Let them roll in it, if it makes them happy. Mud's good for the skin.” He only made one rule. There was a tub of water kept outside the back door in which they had to wash before they came into the house.

They did not go to school because there wasn't one anywhere near the bungalow. Mrs Mallory taught the two older ones to read and write. She also taught them a little arithmetic but not much, because she had no head for figures.

Ben had no lessons at all. Instead, when the others were busy, he helped his bèst friend Thomas, mind Thomas's father's herd of cows. All African children look after their family's cows until they are old enough to go to school which is not until they are about ten. Thomas was eight and he had about twenty cows to look after. They were thin, boney, good-natured beasts. Thomas spent a lot of his time beating
them with sticks and Ben, who was anxious to be as much like his friend as he possibly could, beat them too, but the cows did not seem to mind. They went, uncomplaining, wherever the two boys drove them, usually to a grazing place high above the village. When they found a good place, Thomas and Ben would sit down and eat the maize—or corn-on-the-cob—that Thomas's mother had given them. It wasn't boiled, as English people eat it, but roasted and nutty from the fire. They talked to each other in Swahili, not in English. They both wore khaki shirts and torn trousers and from a distance they both looked exactly alike. It was only when she came up close to them that Mrs Mallory could tell the difference. Thomas was darker and shinier than Ben, and his hair was woollier.

If it was difficult for John and Mary to imagine what England was like, it was almost impossible for Ben.

“There are toy shops,” his mother told him. “There is one big toy shop in London called Hamleys, where they sell nothing but toys. Just think of it!”

It didn't mean much to Ben. Like John and Mary he had very few toys of the kind English children play with. He had a stone called William that he painted faces on and dressed up in bits of his mother's old dresses and a chameleon called Balthazar, who had a loosely fitting skin like a pair of baggy trousers and two bright, pin-point eyes that swivelled round to watch you when you moved, as if they were on
ball-bearings
. Balthazar was much better than any toy Ben could imagine, so he wasn't very interested, even when his mother said, “You'd like to see a toy shop like that, wouldn't you?”

John and Mary knew why she was talking to Ben like that. Their father worked for the Government on an Agricultural Research station. He had got married when he was quite old and next year, when he retired, they would all have to go back to England to live. John and Mary decided that they were not looking forward to it very much. Everyone said that England was very cold and grey and that it rained there, all the time. But they didn't think about it very much or very often. They were going to stay in Africa another year, and a year seemed an awfully long time.

*

It rained in Kenya too sometimes, so hard that they had to stay indoors. The rain in Kenya isn't gentle and drizzly like English rain but more as if some giant, high above the clouds, has suddenly emptied out his bath water.

One day they woke up to find the rain was coming down in torrents. The sky was dark and it was rather cold. There was no sign of the top of Mount Kenya and even the lower hills were hidden in cloud.

“Never mind,” Mr Mallory said, as he got ready to go out, putting on great yellow oilskins like a fisherman, “It'll clear up soon. By lunchtime, I should think.”

But the rain didn't clear up by lunchtime. It went on and on. Not only that day but the next and the next. At first the children were fairly philosophical about it and invented new and interesting games to play, but after four days they became bored and cross. They began to quarrel over the slightest thing. One afternoon, Ben upset some water over a painting Mary was doing of a leopard stealing fish. Mary was good at painting and she had taken a lot of trouble over this picture which she
was going to give to her mother for her birthday. When the water sloshed over it, smudging the colours, she shouted at Ben and punched him in the chest. They rolled over and over on the floor, scratching and pinching, until Mrs Mallory came in and pulled them apart. She asked them what had happened and they both shouted at her until she put her hands over her ears and waited for them to stop.

Finally, she said, “Ben, you should say you are sorry to Mary. But you didn't mean to do it, did you? So Mary should say she is sorry too.”

“Sorry,” Mary said, feeling rather ashamed.

But Ben was still cross. He said, “Sorry,” but in a grumpy voice and when his mother had gone he hissed under his breath, “Smelly old fat.” Then he ran out of the room, shouting with laughter.

Mary and John stood at the window and looked out gloomily at the road. It wasn't a tarmac road, but made of a kind of red earth called murram which is very dusty in hot weather and turns very quickly into mud whenever it rains. Now water was pouring in thick, reddish streams down the middle of this road and the few people who went by, with big, green banana leaves held over their heads instead of umbrellas, were soaking wet and splashed with red mud all up their bare legs.

“I've never seen anything like it,” Mr Mallory said, when he came home for lunch. “The road down to Embu is cut. If this goes on there won't be any food or petrol or anything coming through from the town. I'm going to try and get there with the Land Rover this afternoon to get some supplies—it looks as if we may need them.”

The children cheered up a little. It was rather exciting to think of being marooned, like people on a desert island.

“Can I come?” asked John.

Mr Mallory shook his head. “Not this time, old chap. There won't be any room in the Land Rover. Besides, the floods are all over the road. It's not safe.”

“I can swim,” John said indignantly.

“Not in a flood,” Mr Mallory said. “No one can swim in a flood.”

He spoke gravely and firmly and John saw it was no good trying to persuade him. He felt rather disgruntled, though. It would be very exciting, trying to drive through a flooded river. Grown-ups had all the fun—though his father didn't seem to think it was going to be fun, exactly. He was very quiet all through lunch and Mrs Mallory looked pale and worried.

“
Must
you go?” she said. Though she was helping Mr Mallory on with his oilskins, Mary thought that she would much rather hang on to him and make him stay.

Mr Mallory put his arm round her and hugged her tight for a moment.

“I've got to try,” he said. “Stores are running low. It may be the last chance for weeks.” He looked at John. “You'll have to look after the family, old chap,” he said, and smiled.

It was a very long afternoon. Mr Mallory did not come back and though Mrs Mallory tried to telephone to Embu, the lines were down and the telephone wouldn't work. Just as the children were going to bed, one of the Agricultural officers who had gone with Mr Mallory came to the house and said that the Land Rover had got through the flood but the
river had risen since then and there was no chance that he would get back that night.

After they had gone to bed, it rained harder than any of them had ever known. The rain crashed against the windows and down on to the roof as if it was trying to beat the house down flat. John decided that the weather wasn't at all exciting
anymore
, only frightening. He got into Mary's bed and Mrs Mallory sat by them all night, telling them stories and singing, but very softly, because Ben seemed to be asleep in the other bed.

But Ben wasn't asleep. He was lying with his eyes tight shut and listening to the rain and wondering how Thomas was feeling in his hut. It would be safer to be in a hut than in a house, he thought. If the rain knocked a hut down it would only be like lying under a heap of mud and straw but if the house fell in they would all be squashed under the walls and the roof and they would never get out. Thinking about it made him shiver all over. He didn't sleep for a long time. When he did go to sleep it was nearly morning and he slept so heavily that he didn't hear the others get up quietly and dress and go into the living room for breakfast.

It wasn't like morning at all but very dark, like the middle of the night. After they had eaten breakfast, the storm started. It wasn't like an English storm, high up in the sky, but all around them. The lightning seemed to be part of the house like a great electric light that flashed on and off and the thunder was like the earth falling apart.

Mrs Mallory sat in a chair with John and Mary on either side of her, hiding their faces in her lap. Her hands, stroking their heads and the back of their necks, felt very cold. She said,
over and over again, “Don't look, darlings—just don't look.”

Suddenly, the door was flung open and Jason, the cook, came in. He was shouting something in Swahili.

Mrs Mallory said, “Oh no—no,” in a funny, whimpering way and then she stood up, dragging John and Mary by their hands.

“We must get out of the house,” she said.

“But it's
raining
,” John said, forgetting to be frightened, he was so surprised.

“We shall get
wet
,” Mary said in the same astonished voice.

“Don't be silly—do as you're told,” Mrs Mallory said. She called, “Bella, Bella …”

Bella came running in. “Take them up to the cowsheds,” Mrs Mallory said. “Hurry …
hurry
.”

The children still hung back, amazed, but Bella grabbed at their hands more roughly than anyone had ever touched them before and dragged them out through the door.

Outside the house, the wind and the rain were so strong that they could hardly breathe. They would have fallen down like ninepins if Bella hadn't hung on to them with her strong, brown arms. Even then, John and Mary could barely stand, let alone walk. Bella picked Mary up in her arms like a baby and shouted to Jason, who seized John and flung him,
struggling
and kicking, over his shoulder.

The children barely knew what was happening. They were carried up the hill to the white-washed cowshed at the very top. The special cows that Mr Mallory kept there for the local farmers to breed from and improve their cattle, were
bellowing
loudly inside. Soaked with rain, frightened and very cold, the children were set down in the shelter of the stone building
and Bella tried to wring the water out of their clothes. It was quite useless, of course, like trying to wring your clothes dry if you were sitting in a bath.

John shouted, “Look Mary … look.”

Down below them, the river had burst its banks. As they watched, great lumps of ground were being torn away. On the far side of the flood a big piece of land with three or four spiky thorn trees and a thatched hut on it, broke into fragments and tumbled down into the wide, brown torrent of water. It was as if the whole earth was being churned up by some enormous plough. Great chunks of red mud, trees, huts, were being thrown up into the air and gobbled up by the water.

“The house,” Mary screamed. The water was up to the house—now it was all round it, eddying and swirling. As they watched, clinging to Bella, the front door seemed to swell out and burst like a balloon and a great, brown spout of water came spurting out like a suddenly turned-on tap.

“Mother,” John shouted. He wrenched himself away from Bella and began to run back, down the hill, but as soon as he was out of the shelter of the stone wall, the rain knocked him flat on his face. Bella rushed after him and picked him up. He was covered from head to foot with red mud.