The Dragonfly Pool Read online

  Tally waited. Her heart was beating fast, but surely it was all right? A school in south Devon must be a boarding school, and one of the advantages of being poor was that she could never be sent away to those places that cost the earth.

  “Apparently they give scholarships from time to time. Not for schoolwork but to children who they think might benefit from being there. Complete scholarships, where everything is taken care of. He says he thinks he could get you a place there.”

  “I don’t want to go away.” She tried to speak in a sensible, grown-up way, but already her voice was letting her down. “I’m all right here. I’m fine.”

  Her father was silent, jabbing his pencil on to his blotter. The blotter was a present from one of his patients: four sheets of pink paper pasted on to a piece of lumpy leather. His study was full of presents his patients had made for him: knitted sausages to keep out drafts, lopsided letter racks . . . Among all the strange objects was a plaster head of Hippocrates, the patron saint of medicine, who, two thousand years ago, had laid down the rules for treating patients with dignity and respect.

  “I don’t want you to go away, Tally, believe me . . . We will all miss you very, very much.”

  “Well then, why do I have to go? Why? Why? ”

  “The nuns are very kind but I want you to have a broader education. Science, modern languages . . .”

  “But I’m learning French. And you could teach me science.

  You’ve always said, as soon as one can read one can teach oneself anything. Please, oh please, don’t make me go away.” She looked at him. Then: “It isn’t about the teaching, is it? It’s because there’s going to be a war.”

  There was a long pause. Her father reached out for comforting words, but he had never lied to his daughter. “Yes,” he said heavily. “I think there’s going to be a war. There may not be but . . .”

  But if there was, everybody expected that London, like all big towns, would be heavily bombarded. A man who did not protect his daughter from that horror must be the greatest criminal on earth. This chance to send her to safety in one of England’s loveliest counties had been a godsend.

  But Tally was angry.

  “Well, what if there is going to be a war? Why can’t I share in it? Kenny’s father says we’re all getting gas masks, and they’re digging a big shelter in the park, and Aunt May has got lots of khaki wool to knit hats for the troops, and anyway we’ve got the balloons to protect us. Why should I miss everything just because I’m a child? And why should I be buried in the country and you be in danger? Everybody talks about sharing—you and the aunts and the nuns. Well, why can’t I share the war? ”

  Dr. Hamilton leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. “Most of the children will be sent away. The government’s made all the plans for evacuation. You don’t want to go to strangers with a label around your neck.”

  “No, I don’t. And I wouldn’t go. They tried to make Maybelle go to a rehearsal for evacuation at her school, and she just screamed and kicked and bit and now they’ve said that she can stay.”

  But even as she spoke Tally knew that she wouldn’t scream and kick and bite. Not about something that concerned her father whom she loved so much.

  “I think sending children away like parcels is wicked and wrong,” she said. “I could take messages and look out for nuns coming from the sky. At school they say Nazi spies are going to come down on parachutes disguised as nuns. Well, I know nuns; I wouldn’t be fooled—you can tell by their shoes. And anyway, there may not be a war in the end. You always say the German people are good, it’s only the Nazis who are wicked, so maybe they’ll rise up and overthrow Hitler and everything will be all right.”

  But her father was near the end of his tether.

  “Delderton is a first-class school,” he said, making a final effort. “Children come there from all over the world—and with the kind of scholarship they give, you can do all the extras: music and horse riding . . .”

  “I don’t want to ride a horse; I’ve got Primrose. I want to stay here and be part of things and help. And anyway, who’s going to look after you? ”

  But she had lost, and she knew it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rich Cousins

  For two nights Tally cried herself to sleep. Then she pulled herself together. What was done was done and she would have to make the best of it.

  It was her father who had taught her that knowledge is power—that if one could find out about something one is afraid of, it made the fear less. So now, when she wanted to know what to expect when she went away to boarding school, she decided to consult her cousin Margaret.

  James Hamilton had a brother called Thomas, who was also a doctor but a very different kind of doctor. He saw only special patients in his elegant rooms in Harley Street, and he charged them about ten times as much as James charged his patients, so that his family was as rich as his brother’s family was poor.

  The house he lived in was in one of the smartest streets in the West End, with a gleaming brass plate on the door giving a list of all his degrees and qualifications—and his two children, Margaret and Roderick, went to the most expensive boarding schools in the country.

  Margaret and Roderick were obedient, tidy children. Their manners were good but inside they were chilly creatures, thinking of themselves the whole time—and they looked down on Tally, who lived in a shabby street and wore old clothes and played with the children of greengrocers and butchers.

  But when they heard that Tally was going to go to boarding school and wanted some advice they were ready to be helpful, and their mother, Aunt Virginia, asked Tally to tea.

  So now Tally rang the bell and followed a maid in uniform up the thickly carpeted stairs to Margaret’s room, which looked like a room in a furniture catalog, with looped curtains and a kidney-shaped dressing table and fluffy white rugs.

  “I was wondering about—oh, you know . . . well, everything really . . .” said Tally. “I mean, is it true you have prefects and feasts in the dorm and crushes on the head girl and all that? And . . . do you like being away?” asked Tally, longing to be reassured. “Do you like your school? ”

  “Oh yes,” said Margaret. “I like it very much. I couldn’t bear to stay at home”—and Tally sighed, thinking how very much she could have borne just that. “It’s strict of course, but all boarding schools are strict, and St. Barbara’s has everything. We have four titled girls there and a millionaire’s daughter and the head girl is related to one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. She’s absolutely super; we all want to do things for her. And we have such fun. Last term we had a midnight feast in the dorm and one of the girls stepped on a tin of sardines, and she shrieked like mad—the tin was open—and that brought Matron rushing in. Only they couldn’t do much to us because the girl who was the ringleader had a terribly rich father who’d just given the school a new sports hall. And we are always hiding prickly things in the beds of people we don’t like and putting spiders in Matron’s slippers.”

  “Yes, I see.” Tally was trying not to think of the poor spiders, squashed to death by unexpected feet. But Margaret was in full cry now, explaining the rules.

  “You have to curtsy when you meet the headmistress and call her ma’am and always walk on the left side of the corridor, but you soon get the hang of it. And of course you have to have exactly the right clothes. We’ve just finished buying my uniform for next term and you wouldn’t believe how expensive it was. Mummy nearly died when she got the bill from Harrods!”

  She went to her wardrobe and took out, one by one, the clothes she would need for St. Barbara’s and laid them on her bed. There were two bottle-green gym slips with pleated skirts and a matching sash to tie around the waist. There were four pale blue flannel blouses, a tie, a pudding-shaped velour hat with a hat ribbon, a straw hat for later in the term, and a blazer edged in braid. The blazer, like the tie and the hat ribbon, was striped in the St. Barbara’s colors of bottle green and blue,
and the motto on the pocket said: BE THE BEST.

  “The best at what? ” asked Tally.

  “Oh, everything,” said Margaret airily. She picked up one of the gym slips and held it in front of her. “There’s always a big fuss about the length of the skirt. Matron makes us kneel down and if the hem is more than four inches off the ground we get detention.”

  Tally tried not to panic. The whole bed was covered in clothes; there was a smell of starch and newness.

  But Margaret had not finished. She went back to the wardrobe and brought out a big carrier bag full of brand-new shoes.

  “The lace-ups are for out-of-doors, and indoors we have strap shoes, and on Sundays we wear these pumps. Then there are sneakers and dancing shoes . . . and I have skating boots . . .”

  After the shoes came Margaret’s underclothes: woolen socks and garters and a liberty bodice that buttoned into Margaret’s bottle-green knickers. The knickers had pockets and elastic around the knees.

  “Mummy thought I could wear the same knickers that I had last term, but I told her I couldn’t. They have to be new because people can see you take your handkerchief out of your knicker pocket. And here are the things we have for games . . .”

  From another cupboard Margaret produced a pair of nailed hockey boots, a brand-new hockey stick, a woolen bathing costume with the St. Barbara’s crest on the chest, and the school scarf. Like the blazer and the tie, the scarf was striped in the school colors of bottle green and blue. It was not a joyful color scheme.

  Like a bruise, thought Tally, but a very expensive one.

  “And we have to have regulation nightclothes, too: some schools are sloppy—they let you wear what you like at night—but not St. Barbara’s. Even the slippers are regulation—and on Sundays we wear special dresses: green velvet with lace collars; I can’t show you everything because the maid is still sewing on name tapes. But here’s my satchel—we have to have proper leather ones with our names stamped on, and hymn books, of course, and a lunch box.”

  But even Margaret, who seldom noticed other people, saw that Tally was beginning to look worried and now she said, “The school will send you a list of the things you need and your aunts will help you buy them. Only you must have absolutely the right things—a girl came last term without her Sunday shoes and she got into awful trouble. Being different is the thing you mustn’t do.”

  At this point Roderick came into the room. He was nearly two years older than Margaret—a fair, good-looking boy who seldom spoke to girls if he could help it. Roderick’s school was so famous and so grand that he didn’t really need to show off about it, but since Tally wasn’t usually easy to impress he mentioned that the Prince of Transjordania was in the class above him and that this term they were expecting a boy who was related to the family of the ex-emperor of Prussia.

  “But we don’t treat them any differently than the other boys at Foxingham,” he said carelessly.

  The rules at Foxingham were of course even stricter than those at St. Barbara’s—there was hazing and caning—and it was a famous rugby school, which had beaten Eton at the game.

  “Have you bought your uniform, too? ” asked Tally.

  “Of course,” said Roderick.

  For a moment he hesitated. Then he went to his room and came back with his brand-new blazer, his tie, and his cap.

  All of these were striped fiercely in red and yellow. Walking out together the boys, thought Tally, must have looked like a swarm of angry wasps or ferocious postmen. The motto on Roderick’s blazer was: OUT OF MY WAY.

  “I’ll lend you some books if you like,” said Margaret. “School stories. I want them back of course, but I’ve read them millions of times. They’ll give you an idea of what to expect.”

  She went to her bookcase and took out Angela of the Upper Fourth and The Madcap of the Remove and gave them to Tally, who thanked her warmly.

  Aunt Virginia came in then and told them to come down to the dining room because tea was ready.

  “You needn’t bother to do that,” said Margaret as Tally began to gather up the clothes on the bed. “The maid will do it.”

  But after tea, just as Tally was getting ready to go home and was alone with her cousins, Margaret said: “By the way, what’s the name of your school? The one you’re going to.”

  “It’s called Delderton.”

  Margaret and Roderick looked at each other. “Delderton? Are you sure? ”

  “Yes. Why? ”

  There was a pause.

  Then: “Oh, nothing,” said Roderick, shrugging his shoulders. “Nothing at all.”

  But as the maid opened the front door to let her out, Tally heard them titter. The titter turned into full-scale laughter—but the door was shutting, and Tally was out in the street.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Train

  Aunt Hester and Aunt May had always done their best to share in Tally’s life. When Tally was six years old and had been cast as a sheep in the nativity play they had read books about agriculture and sheep farming and taken Tally to the zoo to watch the way the cloven-footed mammals moved their feet—and Tally’s performance on the day had been very much admired.

  So now they tackled Angela of the Upper Fourth and The Madcap of the Remove and enjoyed them very much, though they were a little worried about how Tally would get on, having to say “spiffing” and “ripping” all the time, and shouting, “Well played, girls!” on the hockey field.

  What they couldn’t do, however, was get Tally’s school uniform together, because no list came from Delderton.

  “You mustn’t worry, dear,” said Aunt May. “The school will let us know in good time and then we’ll go and fit you up. They’ll pay—it’s a full scholarship.”

  “Yes . . . but there are so many things . . . Eight pairs of shoes; I’ll get muddled. And a liberty bodice . . . I don’t really know what that is,” said Tally.

  She was worried, too, about the rules: the curtsy to the headmistress and remembering to call her ma’am. And if the rules were going to be difficult, breaking them in the right way was going to be difficult, too. The midnight feasts in the dorm, for example . . . What if she stepped on an open tin of sardines and brought Matron running?

  Because Aunt May’s letters in violet ink were apt to be rather emotional and Aunt Hester’s in green ink were almost impossible to read, Dr. Hamilton asked his receptionist, Miss Hoy, to write to the school asking for a list of the things Tally would need.

  But before they got a reply Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and after that no one had time to worry about braided blazers and green knickers with pockets in them, let alone about feasts in the dorm.

  The milkman’s son got his call-up papers for the army and Dr. Hamilton spent more and more time at the hospital, where they were arranging for the evacuation of patients to the country; posters appeared telling people to grow vegetables and DIG FOR VICTORY, and Aunt Hester said she wanted to go and entertain the troops.

  “I know I’m not young,” she said, “but my voice is still good.”

  Then, just a week before the beginning of term, a letter came from the school secretary at Delderton announcing the departure of the school train from Paddington Station at ten o’clock on April 13. There was still nothing about the school uniform or the rules and regulations.

  “They’ll probably fit you out when you get there, like in the army,” said the aunts consolingly.

  And Tally tried not to panic because she was going to an unknown place without any of the right things and without knowing how to behave at all. After all, men were joining the army or going to fight in airplanes or drown in ships, and here she was fussing about liberty bodices and stepping on sardines.

  Two days later there was a phone call from Aunt Virginia. Margaret was not starting school till the day after Tally, but Roderick’s school, Foxingham, which was also in the West Country, started the same day and his train left Paddington at almost the same time.

  “So we could take T
ally to the station,” she said. “There’s plenty of room in the Rolls.” To her husband she had said, “It would be nice for the girl to arrive in a decent car instead of that old crock her father drives. First impressions are so important.”

  Tally looked in anguish at her father. “Oh please, I want you to take me.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” said Dr. Hamilton. “You don’t suppose we’d let anyone else see you off? ”

  Because of course May and Hester were coming, too. Actually, rather a lot of people had wanted to come and see Tally off: Kenny and Maybelle; the receptionist, Miss Hoy; Sister Felicia from the convent . . . but Dr. Hamilton had persuaded them that Tally would do best with only her immediate family to say good-bye.

  Paddington Station on the morning of April thirteenth was in a state of bustle and confusion. Parents towed their children to what they hoped was the right barrier; loudspeakers crackled, announcing changes of platform; porters with their trolleys tried to avoid the passengers who asked them things they didn’t know. From time to time a waiting train would hiss fiercely and a group of agitated mothers or worried children would vanish in a cloud of steam.

  Tally stood with her father and the aunts next to the bookstall. Her stomach had dropped down into some place deep inside her and didn’t seem likely to rise up again for a very long time . . .

  Into this confusion there marched the boys of Foxingham, in their red and yellow uniforms, looking like a line of soldiers or regimented bees. There was a teacher at the head of the line and another at the tail. The boys had said good-bye to their parents at the barrier—the school did not permit parents to come on to the platform—and of course no one showed signs of emotion or looked as though they might cry. Homesickness was not in the Foxingham tradition. Tally had tried to say good-bye to Roderick earlier, but he had been far too lordly to speak to her, and now she did not dare to wave. At the end of the line was a very dark, serious-looking boy and she wondered if he might be the Prince of Transjordania and, if so, how he felt so far from home.