The Dragonfly Pool Read online

  The Foxingham school train left from Platform 2. It looked as though it might be late leaving, but the well-drilled boys stood beside their carriages waiting for the sign that they could board the train.

  “It must be Platform 1 that you’re going from,” said Aunt May, looking at the departure board. She had been awake most of the night, but she was determined to be cheerful and brave. “Look, what a nice lot of girls!”

  Platform 1 had no barrier; it was the end one, by the ticket office and the refreshment room, and the girls who were gathered together there did indeed look very nice. They were all identically dressed in smart navy-blue blazers and straw hats with navy ribbons, and their white knee socks gleamed with cleanliness. Beside them stood calm and elegant parents tweaking at their daughters’ clothes. Two teachers in gray coats and skirts with whistles around their necks moved among the girls. Cries of “Had a good hol, Daphne?” or “Wait till you hear what I did, Cynthia!” filled the air. They were exactly like the heroines in the books that Tally had been reading.

  Tally bit her lip. How was she to join those beautifully turned-out girls, dressed as she was in her shabby tweed coat?

  But at that moment the loudspeaker crackled into life.

  “This is a platform change. The school train for St. Fenella’s Academy will now depart from Platform Six.”

  And in an instant the beautifully turned-out girls and their parents hurried away.

  “Oh dear,” said Aunt Hester, who had been much taken by the well-behaved children in their straw boaters. “I did hope they were bound for Delderton. They seemed so suitable.”

  For a while Platform 1 was empty.

  At least it was empty of anyone who might have been going away to school. There was a girl doing a handstand by the ticket office: her skirt swirled around her head; her knickers were white and pocketless. A boy with wild dark hair appeared, carrying a glass tank containing something bald and white. His shoelaces were undone; water from the tank slopped on to his unraveling jersey. Another boy, wearing a boiler suit, was holding a banner that read: DOWN WITH TYRANTS! Behind him came a very pretty girl with bare feet.

  “Are they from a circus,” wondered Aunt Hester aloud, “or can’t they afford shoes? Her poor feet . . .”

  More children arrived. Here and there were grown-ups: a woman dressed like an Aztec peasant with a blanket around her shoulders . . . a man in corduroys with huge patches on the sleeves and a rent in his trousers . . . a small fat man with an enormous beard.

  The train steamed in.

  “Excuse me . . .” Dr. Hamilton had waylaid a porter. “Is this the train for St. Agnes? The Delderton train? ”

  “Aye,” said the porter. “Better keep out of the way, sir—they’re savages, this lot,” and he hurried off down the platform.

  But now a woman in a loose cloak, with long, red-gold hair tumbling down her back, came hurrying down the platform. She carried a clipboard, and when she came up to a child she spoke to it and ticked off its name, and the child wandered off to the train and got into one of the carriages and opened the window and went on shouting to its parents.

  Now she came up to Tally and said, “Are you by any chance Augusta Carrington? ”

  “No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

  “Oh dear. This list . . . I don’t know why they bother with lists, they never seem to be right. In that case who would you be? ” She peered in a worried way at her clipboard.

  “She’s Talitha Hamilton,” said Dr. Hamilton, frowning.

  “Ah yes, that’s all right, I’ve got you down. You can go to the train—sit anywhere you like. And if you do see Augusta Carrington send her to me,” and she moved away toward a boy with a birdcage who had just come out of the refreshment room.

  “Well, at least it doesn’t seem to matter too much what you wear, dear,” said Aunt Hester, looking very pale.

  Tally said nothing and her father put his arm around her shoulders. He was remembering some of the things that Professor Mayfield had said when he told him that he thought he could get Tally a scholarship to Delderton.

  “It’s an unusual school and very highly regarded. All sorts of eminent people send their children there. The school believes in freedom and self-development, and not forcing the children.”

  Perhaps he should have found out more before he’d agreed to send Tally—but the part he had taken notice of was the description of the beautiful Devon countryside, the healthy food . . . the safety it would provide in times of war. And of course he himself believed in freedom and self-development—who didn’t?

  Now quickly he tried to explain to his stricken daughter that Delderton was what was known as a progressive school.

  But Tally was beyond help. She would rather have gone into a lion’s den than into one of those compartments.

  “I don’t know how to be progressive,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t know how one does it.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “And I don’t know about self-development. I don’t know about any of these things.”

  But it was too late. As for Augusta Carrington, it was quite obvious to Tally what had happened to her. She had stayed at home with her head under her pillow and refused to leave the house.

  “We’ll write to you every day,” promised Aunt May—and Dr. Hamilton, blaming himself utterly, took his daughter’s hand and led her to the train.

  People don’t die from getting into school trains and Tally, as she leaned out of the window to wave, stayed incurably alive, but as she saw her father and the aunts standing very upright on the platform she felt a sense of desolation such as she had never known.

  Doors slammed; the guard waved his flag and put his whistle to his lips and the train began to move. Her father lifted his arm for the last time and turned to lead his sisters to the exit, and Tally, following him with her eyes, saw some of the other parents hurrying away blindly, as if these odd people, too, might be sorry to see their extraordinary children go. For a short time the Foxingham train ran beside hers, and she could see the fierce-striped boys in a blur of red and yellow. Then their train accelerated and they were gone.

  She took a deep breath and opened the door to a compartment.

  There were three people inside. A thin girl with two long sandy plaits sat in one corner, turning the pages of a film magazine. She had gray eyes and a narrow face covered in freckles. People with freckles usually look cheerful, but this girl seemed listless and rather sad, hunched in her seat. Yet the smile she gave Tally was welcoming and friendly.

  “You’d better sit over here,” she said. “Not under the salamander. He slops.”

  “He doesn’t,” said the wild-haired boy crossly, looking up at the luggage rack. His legs were stretched out so as to leave little room, but he moved them for Tally to get past. “I got him a new tank.”

  Tally peered up at the strange pale creature, like an overgrown newt, lurking in the water weeds.

  “Is it an axolotl? ” she asked, remembering her father’s zoology books.

  The boy nodded. “I got him for my birthday.”

  “Are we allowed to keep animals then? ” asked Tally.

  “Not cats or dogs, but small ones that can stay in cages,” said the girl, putting down her magazine. “There’s a pet hut where they live.” And then: “My name’s Julia.” She pointed to the boy with the axolotl. “He’s Barney. And that’s Tod.”

  Tod was the boy who had carried a banner with the words DOWN WITH TYRANTS!, but the banner was now rolled up and he was reading The Dandy.

  “You’d better come and sit next to me,” Julia went on—“there’s a little fat boy who was sitting where you are. He’s called Kit and he’s new like you. He’s in the lavatory. They sent him in a shirt and tie and he’s very upset. I think he’s trying to flush his tie down the loo.”

  “But it won’t go down, surely?” Tally was instantly concerned. “He’ll block everything.”

  Julia shrugged, but Tally was not good at leaving well enough alone. “
I’ll go and see,” she said.

  She made her way along the corridor. The girl with bare feet was hanging on to the window bars. She wore a green shirt with a rip in it and a gathered skirt with an uneven hem and looked very confident. Obviously the rip was in exactly the right place, and the hem needed to be uneven.

  The lavatory door was locked, but after she had banged several times it opened and a woebegone face appeared around it. In one plump hand the little boy held a bedraggled tie.

  “It’s no good—I looked but the hole’s too small. No one’s wearing a tie. No one. And there’s a girl without any shoes, and I want to go to a proper school where they have prefects and play cricket,” he wailed.

  And a tear fell from one of his large blue eyes.

  “We could throw your tie out of the window,” suggested Tally. “That would be simpler. Or I’ll keep it for you till you go home.”

  The idea that he might one day go home again cheered Kit up enough to stop him crying, and he followed her out into the corridor.

  “Wait a minute,” said Tally. “Just let your shirt hang out over your shorts. And take off your socks. I’m going to take mine off, too; they’re a bit clean and white.”

  Back in the compartment they found the teacher with the clipboard. She seemed to have forgotten about Augusta Carrington and looked relaxed and cheerful. Her amazing russet hair tumbled down her back and her amber eyes were flecked with gold.

  “Oh, there you are. Good,” she said, smiling at Tally and Kit. “Is everything all right? ”

  Tally nodded, and Kit, who had been about to repeat that he wanted to go to a proper school where they played cricket, decided not to.

  “Well, if you want anything I’m in the next carriage,” she said. “I’d better go and see how the other new people are getting on.”

  “It’s not fair to make Clemmy take the school train,” said Barney when she had gone. “She hates all those lists and things, and somebody always does get lost. They could get someone boring and bossy like Prosser.”

  “Who is she? ” asked Tally.

  “She’s called Clemency Short. She teaches art and she helps out in the kitchens. She’s a marvelous cook.”

  “I thought I’d seen her before, but I can’t have done.”

  “Actually you can,” said Barney. “She’s in the London Gallery as the Goddess of the Foam, coming out of some waves, and on a plinth outside the post office in Frith Street standing on one toe—only that’s a sculpture.”

  “And on the wall of the Regent Theater as a dancing muse,” said Julia. “She looks a bit cross there because the man who painted the mural was a brute and made the girls stand about in the freezing cold dressed in bits of muslin, and Clemmy got bronchitis. That’s what made her decide to stop being an artist’s model and become a teacher.”

  It was a long journey. The children brought out their sandwiches; they grew drowsy. Julia had stopped turning the pages of her magazine. Tally thought she might be asleep, but when she glanced at her she saw that she was looking intently at one particular picture: a photograph of a woman with carefully arranged curls drooping on to her forehead, a long neck, and slightly parted lips. The caption said: “Gloria Grantley: One of the loveliest stars to grace the firmament of film.”

  “Isn’t she beautiful? ” said Julia, and Tally agreed that she was, though she didn’t really care for her. Gloria looked hungry, as though she needed to eat an admiring gentleman each day for breakfast.

  The train stopped briefly at Exeter and Clemmy came past again, checking that everybody was all right.

  “By the way, you’re in Magda’s house,” she told Tally. “And Kit, too. Julia will show you; she’s with Magda, too.”

  “Oh dear, that’s bad news,” said Julia when Clemency had gone.

  “Isn’t she nice? Magda, I mean.”

  “Yes, she’s nice enough. Kind and all that. But she feels bad about things, and her cocoa is absolutely diabolical.”

  “Cocoa can be difficult,” said Tally. “The skin . . . but why does she feel bad? ”

  “She teaches German and she used to spend a lot of time in Germany, and every time Hitler does something awful she feels she’s to blame. She’s really a philosophy student—she’s writing a book about someone called Schopenhauer—and her room gets all cluttered up with paper and she can’t sew or sort clothes or anything like that.”

  “Perhaps we could help her to make proper cocoa,” said Tally. “She probably needs a whisk.”

  But Kit had gone under again.

  “I don’t like cocoa with skin on it,” he began. “I want to go to a proper school where they . . .”

  But just then the train gave an unexpected jolt and a shower of water from Barney’s axolotl descended on his head.

  When they had been traveling for more than three hours Tally looked out, and there was the sea. Tally had not expected it; the sun, the blue water, the wheeling birds were like getting a sudden present.

  They went through a sandstone tunnel, and another one . . . and presently the train turned inland again. Now they were in a lush green valley with clumps of ancient trees. The air that came in through the open window was soft and gentle; a river sparkled beside the line.

  The train slowed down.

  “We’re here,” said Barney.

  “Really? ” said Tally. “This is Delderton? ”

  Her father had spoken of the peaceful Devon countryside, but she had not expected anything like this.

  “My goodness,” she said wonderingly. “It’s very beautiful!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Delderton

  Tally was right. There was no lovelier place in England: a West Country valley with a wide river flowing between rounded hills toward the sea. Sheltered from the north winds, everything grew at Delderton: primroses and violets in the meadows; pinks and bluebells in the woods and, later in the year, foxgloves and willow herb. A pair of otters lived in the river; kingfishers skimmed the water, and russet Devon cows, the same color as the soil, grazed the fields and wandered like cows in Paradise.

  But it was children, not cows or kingfishers, that Delderton mainly grew.

  Twenty years earlier a very rich couple from America came and built a school on the ruins of Delderton Hall, with its jousting ground and ancient yews, and they spared no expense, for they believed that only the best was good enough for children, and they were as idealistic as they were wealthy.

  The new Delderton was built around a central courtyard; the walls were lined with cream stucco; the windows had green shutters; the archway that led into the building was crowned by a tower with a blue clock adorned by gold numbers and a brilliantly painted weather vane in the shape of a cockerel.

  And the ancient cedar that had sheltered the lawns of the old hall was saved and grew in the center of the courtyard.

  Inside the building, too, the American founders spared no expense. Each child had its own room: only a small one, but private. The common rooms had well-sprung sofas, the pianos in the music rooms were Steinways, and the library housed over ten thousand books.

  But what was important to the founders was not the building, it was what the school would mean to the children who came to it. For Delderton was to be a progressive school—a school where the children would be free to follow their instincts and develop in a natural way. There would be no bullying or beatings, no competitive sports where one person was ranked above another, no exams—just harmony and self-development in the glorious Devon countryside. A school where the teachers would be chosen for their loving kindness and not their degrees.

  And this was exactly what had happened. But now, twenty years later, the building looked . . . tired. The cream walls were streaked with damp from the soft West Country rain; the paint on the shutters was flaking—and the beautiful cedar in the courtyard was supported by wooden props.

  And the nice American founders were tired, too. In the autumn of 1930 they sold the school to a board of trustees who a
ppointed a new headmaster. His name was Ben Daley: a small, portly man with a bald head and a nice smile, who now, at the beginning of the summer term, was looking out of his study window at the pupils coming in through the archway from the station bus.

  And at one pupil in particular—a new girl with straight fawn hair who had stopped and laid her hand on the trunk of the cedar as though she was greeting a friend.

  “It’s three hundred years old,” said Julia, looking up at the tree. “The headmaster’s mad about it—if anyone climbs it or throws stuff into the branches he comes rushing out of his room. No one ever gets expelled here, but if they did it would be because of the tree. That top branch broke off because a horrible boy called Ronald Peabody climbed it, though it was already weak. He fell and broke his arm, but nobody cared.”

  “I wouldn’t have cared either,” said Tally.

  The rooms where the children slept were on corridors on either side of the courtyard. Inside, the building was divided into four houses separated by double doors. Each house had a room for the housemother, a common room, and a pantry. Tally was in the Blue House; her room overlooked the courtyard and the tree.

  “You mean we each have our own room? ”

  Julia nodded. “I don’t know for how much longer; I think the money’s running out a bit, but for now.”

  Tally’s room was very small, but it had everything you could want: a divan bed, a washbasin, a bookcase, and a built-in wardrobe. The door of the wardrobe was somewhat battered and one desk leg was propped up on a wedge, but Tally was delighted. And it solved at once the problem of the feasts in the dorm. No one could have a feast in a dorm which was not there.