Not Just a Witch

‘A dragon. Yes, honestly. Why not go for the best? A pocket dragon. Well, a bit bigger than that. Sort of between a rolling pin and a turkey in size. About the weight of a Stilton cheese. Oh, I can see him. Slightly fiery round the nostrils, you know, with green scales and golden claws! Let’s get the pattern book and have a look.’

She went to the bookcase and got out a book called Ferocious Dragons and Loathly Worms and began to turn over the pages. There were pictures of silvery dragons like the ones that ate princesses and were killed by St George, and gloomy, evil-looking dragons with poisonous claws and fiery tongues. But the nicest dragons were the Chinese ones. They had shaggy heads like Tibetan terriers with their hair in topknots and big, bulging eyes and wide mouths chock-full of teeth which gave them a smiling look. Daniel had seen dragons like that painted on kites and liked them very much.

‘Can you make a dragon from nothing?’ he asked when they had decided that a Chinese dragon was what they wanted.

Heckie looked shocked. ‘No, no, dear boy. I’m only a witch, you know. I can change anything into anything else, but I can’t make things from nothing. What we’ll have to do is find an animal that isn’t happy any more. An animal that’s tired of life – and then I can change it. To mess about with an animal that was enjoying life would be quite wrong.’

They went downstairs to the shop to see if there was an animal there that was bored with living, but there wasn’t. So they went to the park because Heckie thought she remembered seeing a duck that was no longer glad to be alive and, sure enough, there it was, sitting in a clump of rushes by the pond. It was a white Aylesbury drake; its eyes were filmed, its feathers were limp. The other ducks were swimming and diving and gobbling up bread that the children threw, but not this duck. This duck had turned its face to the wall.

Heckie put out an arm. The duck did not have time even for one ‘quack’ before it found itself zipped into the tartan shopping basket on wheels and bundled off to the pet shop.

‘Can I watch you?’ begged Daniel when they had unpacked the animal and set it down on the kitchen floor. ‘Can I watch you make a dragon, please?’

‘No, dear boy, I’m afraid not. And you wouldn’t like it, you know. It’s not just my knuckle – a lot of power comes from my feet. Things happen down there that are not suitable for anybody young.’ She looked down at her toes and sighed. ‘If you come tomorrow after school, the dragon should be ready,’ said Heckie, and Daniel had to be content with that.

In the staffroom at Wellbridge Junior School, the deputy head was in a temper. ‘I’ve had another letter from those professors complaining about Daniel’s work. They say they’ll take him away and send him to a private school if he doesn’t do better.’

Miss Jones, who was Daniel’s class teacher, put down her cup with a clatter. ‘I wish they’d leave him alone. There’s nothing wrong with Daniel; he’s a thoroughly nice boy and his work’s perfectly all right. If they spent a bit more time at home with him instead of nagging about his marks, there’d be some point.’

The deputy head nodded. ‘I’ve gone past that house again and again and there’s no one in. He’s got a lost look in his eyes sometimes, that child. It’s a pretty turn of affairs when the most deprived child in the class is the son of two rich professors.’

But when Miss Jones went to take her class for English, she thought that Daniel looked more cheerful than he had done of late – and indeed Daniel wasn’t worrying about how he was going to do in the spelling test or whether he had passed his music exam. He was thinking that in a few hours he would see a dragon made out of an Aylesbury duck, and nobody who thinks that can look unhappy.

Of course, it would happen that on the one day on which Daniel was longing to get away, his parents were both in for tea.

‘Well, how did you get on with your spelling test?’ asked the Professor Trent who was Daniel’s father. He was tall, with greying hair and a big nose.

‘I hope you got ten out of ten,’ said the Professor Trent who was Daniel’s mother. She too was tall, with thick spectacles and a strong chin. When they were both standing looking down at him, Daniel felt a bit like a puppy who has made a puddle on the carpet.

‘I got eight out of ten,’ said Daniel, hoping that this would be all right, but it wasn’t.

‘Really?’ said Daniel’s father. ‘And what words did you get wrong?’

Daniel sighed. ‘Separate,’ he said. ‘And mystify.’

Daniel’s parents thought this was odd. Daniel’s father had been able to spell mystify when he was four years old, and Daniel’s mother said that surely when one understood that separate came from the Latin word separare there could be no difficulty. ‘How many did Sumi get right?’ she wanted to know.

‘She got them all right. She always does.’