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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Serie: How to Be
- Sprache: Englisch
'Expect rebellious nuns, courageous girls and an awful lot of biscuits' Down the Rabbit Hole Some stories are about adventure.Some are about heroes.Some are about ducks. This one is about all three. Calla North and her mum Elizabeth live a life that's far from normal. There are days when the power is cut off and Calla has to do her homework by candlelight; there are others when curious strangers want to talk to Elizabeth about her research on ducks. When Elizabeth says yes to a once-in-a-lifetime trip to save a small brown duck, she sends Calla to the best place she knows: The School of the Good Sisters. Staffed by nuns whose preferred subjects include light aircraft maintenance, camouflage skills, and cake - lots of cake - Calla is about to discover her bravery, and to learn that when trouble comes, there's no better back-up than a Blessing of Nuns...
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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3
5
For my parents
CONTENTS
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THREE THINGS
8Now that I’ve told you all of that, we can begin.
1You figured it out! Well done. Now go back up there and finish the rest of that paragraph. Off you pop. You’ll be back here soon enough.
INTRODUCING ELIZABETH
Elizabeth North is the first person you have to be introduced to. Of course there are other people in this book, and you shall meet them at the right time, but for now there is Elizabeth, for without Elizabeth there would not be a story at all. Elizabeth was a doctor. She was not one of those doctors who went around and helped people to get better. She was a very different kind of doctor—the type of doctor who knows an awful lot of things about one subject in particular, but very little about medicines or broken bones.
And the particular thing that Elizabeth knew a lot about was ducks.
Elizabeth could tell you what a duck meant when it quacked at you, why you shouldn’t feed a wild duck bread,1 why mallards are horrible fathers,2 why ducks have such big feet,3 and what is the best joke about ducks.4
10She also knew a lot about how to survive, but we shall come to this later. Elizabeth had a daughter, Calla Rose,5 a girl with bright yellow hair and three freckles that resembled the precise outline of a mallard’s tertial feather, and it was just the two of them against the world. In the brief moments she could think clearly enough to work, Elizabeth did it in the only way she knew how. She wrote articles and books and sold the clothes off her own back and kept the two of them together and afloat and alive.
It was not an easy life, and it was often one that took them away from the world. On the rare times that Elizabeth spoke to people, or that people spoke to her, they would think of her as a strange and eccentric woman and never talk to her again. Those people were—are—idiots.
Elizabeth North was one of the bravest and strongest women in the entire world.
And I am going to tell you why.
1Bread makes their stomachs swell up.
2I don’t want to give you details but trust me, they would not get a Father’s Day card from any of their children.
3All the better to see you with, my dear.
4Did you hear about the duck who thought he was a squirrel? He was a tough nut to quack.
5Calla comes to play quite a substantial part in this story but right now, we must stay with Elizabeth. Trust me on this.
A TEMPORARILY WONDERFUL CHILDHOOD
The young Elizabeth lived with her parents in a big house in the countryside. Although she was an only child, she did not grow up alone. She had a dog that was so large and brown, that he really was more lion than dog. His name was Aslan and when Elizabeth went to school, he would sit quietly at the front door and not move until he saw her coming back up the drive.
Elizabeth’s parents spoilt her deliberately and happily. They lived for the moment and her childhood was as perfectly formed as the diamonds on her mum’s wedding ring. She would have chocolate cake for breakfast and ice cream for supper before going to bed at midnight and watching fireworks outside the window. And on the days when there were no fireworks and just the distant pink of a setting sun, Elizabeth would sit outside and think about how much she loved her life. It was a strange thing for a child to think, but Elizabeth North was a strange child who lived a strange life.
She went to school, of course, and mixed with other children, but the school was down in the village and not the sort of school that you and I might even recognize as a 12school. It was two rooms, and the older children sat in one, and the younger children sat in the other, and Elizabeth was sent between the two rooms because there was nobody else her age. Sometimes when she was sent from one room to the other, she would wander outside instead and feed the birds with the spare crumbs from her pockets.
On one Friday in July, when it was almost the end of term and everybody was thinking about the school holidays, the little ones were allowed to do colouring in but the older ones had to do maths. Elizabeth didn’t want to do either, so was on her way to slip outside. She had gone precisely three steps when Mrs Fraser, her tall and sensible teacher stopped her.
“Maths,” said Mrs Fraser. “You need to brush up on your times tables.”
“But that’s not fair,” said Elizabeth, folding her arms.
Mrs Fraser didn’t look concerned in the slightest.1 “Life isn’t fair, Elizabeth. You’ll be doing maths this afternoon and if you continue with this attitude, you’ll be staying behind and doing extra. I am quite happy to do my knitting while you do some more sums. I imagine it will be educational for us both.”
“You have no jurisdiction2 on me after school,” said Elizabeth.
13It was somewhat inevitable that Mrs Fraser thought the opposite.
She kept Elizabeth in detention that very day and, straight after the last little one had been picked up by their parents, spent the next hour drilling Elizabeth on why X+Y=Z. In all honesty it wasn’t a very productive session because Elizabeth did not want to be there, and neither did Mrs Fraser.3
But then everything changed.
1Mrs Fraser was EXCELLENT at appearing Unconcerned, and I think we can all learn something from her.
2This is a fancy word that means ‘authority’. Elizabeth had learnt it only two days ago, after hearing it on the TV, and felt that this was the perfect time to practise it.
3She might be a teacher, but she was still human. Just.
HOW IT HAPPENED
It began with a telephone call. It was the sort of telephone call that made Mrs Fraser purse her lips and leave the room. She was gone for a delightfully long time during which Elizabeth took the opportunity to put her pen down, stare out of the window and consider how much she hated maths. Sometimes our happiest moments come before our saddest, and Elizabeth North was no exception. She was not doing maths. She was sitting in the sunshine. She was by herself. It was perfect.
The moment that followed it, however, was not.
Mrs Fraser came back into the room. She had her hand across her mouth, as though she was trying to yawn and hide it. She stood in the doorway for a moment, before walking into the room and even then she didn’t look directly at Elizabeth. Her eyes went to the desk, the window, before coming to rest on Elizabeth’s knees.
Elizabeth wriggled with discomfort. She couldn’t help it.
“Elizabeth,” said Mrs Fraser to her knees, “we’re finished for today. I’m going to drive you home.”
I suspect that if Elizabeth had been told there and then about what had happened things would have been a lot easier for everyone. But some people do not know what 15to do when they are presented with the unexpected, and Mrs Fraser was one of those people. Her way of coping was to talk to Elizabeth’s knees and to drive her home in silence and then to send her to her room.
“But it’s not bedtime,” said Elizabeth. This was a very reasonable point to make and one which was made very reasonably even though Elizabeth’s stomach was starting to knot together with a strange other feeling that she thought might possibly be fear.
Mrs Fraser looked at the front door, the carpet, and the bottom of the stairs. “I need to use your telephone to make some calls. Can you tell me where it is?”
“It’s just there,” said Elizabeth. A shadow in the corner of the hall shifted when she spoke. It was Aslan and he looked as confused as Elizabeth felt. He padded his way across the floor and pushed his head into Elizabeth’s hands, as though he was trying to convince himself that she was really there.
“I just need to make some calls,” said Mrs Fraser again.
“Is everything all right?” said Elizabeth. She wrapped her fingers in her dog’s thick brown fur, taking comfort from his presence.
“I just need you to be brave for me now, please.”
Elizabeth nodded. She nodded because she knew that was what Mrs Fraser wanted her to do, but she was full of questions. She wanted to know what she should be brave about, she wanted to know where her parents were, and she wanted to know exactly who Mrs Fraser was telephoning and what she was doing in her house. 16
But she did not say any of this because Mrs Fraser was already walking towards the telephone and her shoulders were saying, as clearly as shoulders can say that sort of thing, that she should not be followed.
However, they were not saying that she should not be listened to.1
Elizabeth climbed the stairs with Aslan at her side, and when they reached the top step she sat down and so did he. She pushed her fingers under his collar, and he inched closer to her and the two of them listened with all their might to what Mrs Fraser was saying on the phone. I do not think either of them breathed. It was that sort of a moment.
1 Under normal circumstances you should not listen to somebody on the phone. Their business is not your business, even if they are talking about interesting and scandalous things. However, there was a teacher in Elizabeth’s house, and that was a most unusual circumstance, so Elizabeth decided that normal did not apply.
WHAT MRS FRASER SAID
“Both of them? But—how?”
There was a long, awful pause before she spoke again.
“Social services… seriously…? But what on earth do I tell her?”
And thoughts—terrible, big, and almost incomprehensible thoughts—began to make themselves known inside Elizabeth’s heart.
“How do I say that?” said Mrs Fraser. She was talking so quietly that Elizabeth and Aslan had to move down a couple of steps to make sure that they could hear. “Does she not have a guardian? I can’t do this by myself.”
The next sentence, however, was not the sort of sentence that went unheard. It was so loud and clear that the words practically walked up the stairs and introduced themselves.
“Elizabeth has no other relatives so where on earth is she meant to go?”
Elizabeth sat very still.
“I can’t tell her that her parents are dead,” said Mrs Fraser. “How can you ask me to do that?”
But it was too late. Despite her protestations that she did not know how, or even if she could, Mrs Fraser had just told Elizabeth North that both her parents had died. 18
Yes. 19
I know.
AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD
Nothing but silence could follow such a moment and Elizabeth took a strange sort of comfort in it. Silence was simple and straightforward because it meant that she did not have to deal with the sadness inside her heart.
And so her days became long and dark and all the same. Her mornings blurred into evenings, and midnight became midday, and all the while Elizabeth lay in her room and did not go back to school. She did not go anywhere. She stayed upstairs in her lonely house and let Mrs Fraser take charge of everything. Sometimes Elizabeth would hear her talk to people downstairs but as these people were not her parents and never would be, she did not let herself think about them.
In many ways, I do not think that she let herself think at all.
She simply slept and ate and ate and slept and Aslan stayed at her side throughout it all until one morning when he was not there.
And a woman was instead.
THE WOMAN WHO LOOKED A LITTLE BIT LIKE A PENGUIN
She was tall and pale and wore a long black dress that ran all the way from her neck down to her toes. She wore a white scarf wrapped around her head, and a pair of thick black spectacles that balanced on the edge of her nose. It was an overly dramatic sort of outfit, really, but befitting of overly dramatic circumstances such as these.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” said the woman. “I’m a nun. Do you know what that is? I imagine you might not. Not everybody does these days. We’re a bit of a dying art. We look a bit like penguins. But we’re not.”
This was not, perhaps, the best of openings. Allow me to elaborate. The woman’s name was Good Sister June,1 and she had been a nun for six whole months.2 She was part of the Order3 of the Good Sisters, a group of women 22 who were to become very important in Elizabeth’s life. Of course Elizabeth did not know any of this, because she could not see into the future. She simply knew that her dog was nowhere to be found, and an absent dog was the sort of thing that needed to be dealt with first. When she had Aslan at her side once more, she could then figure out who this remarkably strange woman was.
“Where’s my dog?” said Elizabeth.
The woman looked at the ceiling and at the curtains and at the floor, and then at the door. When she eventually replied, she looked at Elizabeth’s toes.
“I knew your mother,” she said.
Which was not, thought Elizabeth, anything approaching a reply.
“My name’s Good Sister June. I teach at a school. Your mum came to visit us a few months ago. She was one of our pupils, back when she was a child. Did you know that?”
Elizabeth did not.
“It was lovely to see her again.”
“I didn’t know she was religious,” said Elizabeth.
Good Sister June shrugged. “Who’s to say what religious is?”
“You’re a nun,” said Elizabeth. “Isn’t that what you do? Isn’t it your job?”
“No,” said Good Sister June, and for the first time since she’d entered the room, she sounded confident. She had even begun to talk to Elizabeth’s face and that was something that no other adult had been able to do since the day that it had happened. “We do have a bit of religion, but my 23order doesn’t actually believe in God. Not in the way that a lot of other people do. We believe in education and trying to do the right thing and, basically, helping other people be the best they can be. We run a school, and some of us pray in private, and some of us work in the community.”
“Brilliant,” said Elizabeth.
It was not the sort of ‘brilliant’ that meant ‘brilliant’ at all. Good Sister June knew this, which is why she looked away from Elizabeth’s face and directed the next sentence to her left ankle.
“But when your mum came to see us, she didn’t come to talk about that. She came to talk to us about you. She knew that you had no other family and so, in the case that something—something happened to either her or her husband—your father—she wanted to make sure that you were safe. It’s rather wonderful that she did.”
Elizabeth did not think there was anything wonderful about any of this.
“I want my dog.”
Good Sister June nodded. “I’m quite sure you do. But I just need you to understand what I’m saying. Your mother asked me to be your guardian and I accepted. Do you know what that means?”
“It means you’ll look after me and Aslan,” said Elizabeth. “Where is he?”
“He’s downstairs—”
“Why isn’t he here?”
“Elizabeth, I promise you, he’s fine and you’ll be able to see him in a moment but I need you to listen to what 24I’m telling you. You’re going to come with me and live in our school. It’s a boarding school, so that means there will be other girls there too. It’s a nice set-up. You’ll be sleeping in one of the tower bedrooms, I think. The school is surrounded by trees but you can see beyond them from the towers. I think if you were to stand on the roof there, you could probably see for miles. Maybe even all the way to the sea.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Elizabeth bluntly. “I’m going to stay here with my dog.”
“I’m afraid you can’t,” said Good Sister June, gently.
The two of them stared at each other.
“You’re too young,” said Good Sister June. “Social services won’t let you grow up here by yourself. They want the best for you and so did your parents. That means school. At least until you’re eighteen. That’s when you’ll come into your inheritance, and be able to make your own choices. But until then, it’s us. There’s no other option. I promise you, it’s not that bad. You’ll make friends your own age, and we don’t do lessons all the time. Quite the opposite in fact. It’s never been that sort of establishment. We bake buns and go for walks and it’s like a little family. Normally we meet pupils off the train at the start of term, but I’ll drive us straight there under the circumstances. Give you a guided tour.”
And then Good Sister June took a deep breath and said the awful thing: “You can’t bring the dog.”
A small sound of pain escaped Elizabeth’s throat.
“We can’t have pets. I’m so sorry, Elizabeth, but we just can’t. There’s no room. Aslan is a big dog and he needs 25space to run around and play, and we just don’t have the facilities for that at the school. There’s barely enough room for us as it is. Mrs Fraser is going to take him. She’ll look after him, Elizabeth. She has such a big garden. She can give him the care he needs. You don’t have to say goodbye. Not until you’re ready. And not for ever. She’s going to send you updates on him. That is—if you’d like them. We’ll do this your way, Elizabeth, there’s no rush. We’re not going anywhere until you’re okay with that.”
Somehow Elizabeth found her voice then. It was not her old familiar voice, but it was one that would do for the moment and she was not sure that she could manage anything else.
“It’s okay,” she said, even though it was not. She looked towards the door, knowing that Aslan lay beyond it and that she could not say goodbye to him even if she tried.
There was nothing else to be done.
“I don’t want to stay here a moment longer,” she said. “I want to go now.”
1 This is the point where I reward you for paying attention to the footnotes. Are you ready? Okay. Here is the great secret about Good Sister June. She is me. Don’t tell anybody!
2 She was so very, very new.
3 An Order is simply a very posh and nun-ish way of saying ‘club’. Nuns are very good at making things sound more complicated than they are, trust me.
AT THE SCHOOL OF THE GOOD SISTERS
Though she did not expect it, nor even want it, Elizabeth North came to love that school with all of her heart. She would not have sent her only daughter there if she had not. When you do not have many people in the world that you love, you take a lot of care of the ones that you have. And Calla Rose was all that Elizabeth had.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
Calla’s story will be told shortly, I promise, but for now, we must stay with Elizabeth and the School of the Good Sisters. Her first few weeks there did not go well. She spent her days surrounded by people, but was for all intents and purposes alone. It was grief that made her this way, and it was natural to be like this, for she had experienced something awful, but there had to be an end to it. There had to be a point where her grief would stop and Elizabeth would come back to the world.
And then on one bright Sunday, as the children came home from church after paying tribute to a faith that half of them couldn’t pronounce and the other half slept through, something happened that did precisely that. 27
That something was a small brown duck.1 It was sitting in the road, with the expression of somebody who didn’t quite know how they’d ended up there, and its wing was held at a strange and sharp angle.
Chrissie Poplin was the first to see it and so she said, “There’s a duck sat in the road!” and looked around to see if everybody had noticed what was happening.
“There is a duck sitting in the road,” said Good Sister Robin who was a stickler for good grammar.2
The prim line of children ignored her. They were too busy scattering and running over to where Chrissie stood.
Good Sister June swept along with the children as though she were leading them into battle, until she raised her hand and halted everyone a few metres away from the duck. She said, “If anyone—and I am looking at you Magda DeWitt3—goes one step nearer to that poor terrified creature without my permission I will send them to bed early for a week.”
28And every child, including Magda DeWitt and Chrissie Poplin, stopped dead where they were.
Every child, that is, except Elizabeth North.
1Are you sensing a theme here? Good. I knew you were smart.
2She is very lovely but we do all have our faults.
3Magda DeWitt is a name that is very important to this story and I’d like to tell you a little bit about her. She was the sort of girl who did not make sense in buildings: she could only breathe properly in the open fields and under a bright blue sky. She was smart: madly, furiously so, but this was not an easy sort of knowledge for her to have inside of herself. She could not control it easily. She was the sort of girl that some people might have simply called naughty or bad. But Magda was never simple nor straightforward, and the people who thought she was were fools.
INTRODUCING DUCKS
Elizabeth moved forward and when Good Sister June turned around to tell her off, she found herself falling silent instead. The girl knelt down and cupped her hands around the duck. She was holding it so gently that it might have been a baby, whilst whispering something under her breath. When she realized that Good Sister June was watching her, she gave the nun a quick, half-shy look and said, “The wing is broken. If I splint it, it’ll heal and it can fly again.”
“Do you even know what a splint is?” said Good Sister June. She did not mean to sound disbelieving, but she had not heard Elizabeth speak voluntarily for months now. The fact that she had suddenly become proficient in first aid for ducks was really quite difficult to come to terms with.
Elizabeth nodded. “It’s a support to help the bone heal. I can strap it up. I know how. I watched my dad do it once.”
Good Sister June waved her hand at Good Sister Robin. “Take the girls home,” she said. “We’ll catch up with you.”
When Good Sister Robin had bustled all of the children away, murmuring sweet nothings about adverbs and proper nouns, Good Sister June lifted up her habit1 and knelt 30 down on the road beside Elizabeth. She looked at the girl and chose her next words very carefully. “It looks pretty badly hurt. I need you to understand what that means. This might not work. Besides, if it’s a wild duck, then it won’t be used to having humans around at all and the stress of that might be too much for it to handle.”
Elizabeth didn’t reply. Instead, she slowly teased out the wing of the bird and let her fingers work out where the break was. The small brown duck closed its eyes. For an awful moment Good Sister June thought it had died but then she saw its chest start to move up and down and realized that the girl had, of all things, sent it to sleep.
As though in a dream, Elizabeth said, “I tried to remember my dad’s face today and I couldn’t. I could remember that he had brown hair and brown eyes but I couldn’t remember him. How he looked. How he was. I thought maybe it was just him that I’d forgotten, but I couldn’t—it was the same with my mum. I couldn’t remember either of them. It’s as if they weren’t ever there at all.” Her fingers stopped moving and she nodded to herself with satisfaction. “There, I found it. It’s a straight break. I think I can help it. Will you find me a stick? I need something really small but really strong.”
Good Sister June glanced around her and then inspiration hit. All of the nuns wore their hair pinned back under their scarves so that it wasn’t visible. “Would a hair clip do?” she said, obedient to the odd authority in Elizabeth’s voice. She worked one of her clips free and dropped it into Elizabeth’s outstretched hand. 31
The girl began to bend out the metal so that it formed a smooth line and laid it over the curve of the duck’s wing. She took her handkerchief out of her pocket, placed the corner of it between her teeth, and tore a thin strip off. She used this to bind the clip into place before flexing the wing very gently to make sure that it would all stay in place. And somehow, the duck slept through the entire procedure.
“I know how to do this,” said Elizabeth. “One of the swans on the lake got hurt once and my dad splinted its wing, and I don’t understand how I can remember all of that like it was yesterday but I can’t even remember his face.”
There was nothing that Good Sister June could say.
Elizabeth got carefully to her feet, cradling the duck against her chest. She said, “I know that it might die. And if it does, it does, but I have to try to make it better. Please let me. It deserves a chance.”
“We don’t allow pets, you know this. I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but I can’t make exceptions.” Elizabeth opened her mouth to protest but Good Sister June held up her hand and stopped her, quite firmly. “We do, however, allow patients,” she said, “and I will allow you to bring this duck home. I will make arrangements for you to have a private space outside to nurse it back to health. You will release it once it is fit and healthy. Are we agreed?”
Elizabeth nodded. “Yes,” she said. A small smile crept across her face. “Thank you.”
1 A habit is a special type of dress. Nuns have special words for everything.
THE FIRST FRIEND OF ELIZABETH NORTH
Elizabeth brought the duck with the broken wing back to full health the same way that people wake up in the morning and go to bed at night. There was simply no other option for the duck other than to get better, and so it did. When the evenings grew warm, she went outside and fed it rolled oats1 from the palm of her hand and told it that it would be well. As the duck ate, she ran her fingers softly along its bones and felt them knitting back into position. She removed the splint after two weeks and after another had passed, she knew that the duck was ready to be released back into the world.
But she also knew that she didn’t want to let it go.
It was an understandable sentiment for anyone and perhaps even more so for Elizabeth North, who had lost everything and everyone she held dear.
She wrestled with these thoughts for a long, long time, and the only thing that distracted her was the wonder of 33 the duck itself. She was fascinated by the way its neck could twist and stretch so far across its body, and the quick, sharp movements of its beak as it cleaned its feathers. Sometimes when she watched it, she would read from a book about ducks that she’d found in the library and name parts of it as though she was casting a spell: calamis, umbilicus, racis, vane.
It was perhaps unsurprising that the duck did not answer her during these moments. However, a girl who had been pretending to weed the communal vegetable patch in the school yard did. This was Chrissie Poplin, the girl who had first spotted the duck back on that Sunday morning all those weeks ago, and she had taken a special interest in the situation ever since. She had not wished to actually touch the duck,2 but she was quite interested in it nonetheless, as it was something different. The fact that it had got Elizabeth out of the evening lectures from Good Sister Honey on light aircraft maintenance was not on her mind in the slightest.3
Chrissie said, “Is your duck getting better?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. She was watching the duck lift up each wing to preen the feathers underneath. She found the duck much more interesting than anything else at the school and so a part of her was not surprised when Chrissie sat down beside her. Remembering the way that 34she’d yelled about the duck back when they first saw it, Elizabeth said, “You can stay but you have to talk quietly. It gets scared.”
Chrissie nodded and watched the way the duck continued to ruffle through its feathers as though neither of them were there. “Is this what you did back in your house? Before you came here?”
Chrissie knew Elizabeth’s story. They all did. It was like something out of a book by Eva Ibbotson and as books by Eva Ibbotson and others like her were among their favourite books from the school library’s well-used collection, the whole school had devoured the real-life tragedy that Elizabeth North had given them.
Elizabeth shook her head. “Not really,” she said, “I just knew what to do. I mean, when I saw that it had a broken bone.”
“It’s pretty cool though. You fixed it. You made him better.”
Elizabeth realized suddenly that she’d never thought of the duck as having a gender. It had simply been a duck. It. That. “Him?” she said, looking at the duck as though it was the first time she’d ever seen it. “Do you think it’s a boy?”
“Definitely,” said Chrissie with a confidence that denied the fact that she was failing in biology that term. She reached out her hand, unable to stop herself, and carefully touched the very tip of the nearest feather. It felt oily and strangely thick. “I thought it’d be lighter,” she said. “It must be really heavy to have to carry them all the time.” 35
“Those feathers have to deal with a lot. He can’t put a coat on if it gets rainy. Or a scarf when it gets cold.”
