The Dragonfly Pool

Kit, though, had still not settled in and followed Tally about lamenting from morning till night. Kit did not want to be a fork or pick worts to dye his sheep’s wool—and he did not want to go ping on the triangle when they played the Toy Symphony in music lessons.

Music was taught by an elderly professor of harmony who had hoped for a quiet life by returning to teach in the country. New children were usually persuaded to learn whatever instrument was needed for the orchestra, but when he met Kit the professor knew he was beaten.

“Oh Kit, surely you can just go ping,” said Tally wearily. “It doesn’t take a minute.”

But she was really very sorry for the little boy, who had just started at a small prep school down the road from his house and made friends with a boy called Horlicks Major and been picked for the cricket team, when a rich friend of his mother’s had come to stay with the family and said that Kit was repressed and should be sent to Delderton, and had offered to pay the fees.

“But I don’t mind being repressed,” Kit had told his new friends. “I don’t like it when people tell me I can do what I like. I want them to tell me what to do.”

Magda had stopped crying after lights-out and did her best to be a good housemother. Nothing could be done about her cocoa, and she got very confused about checking the laundry—it was a question of luck whose clean washing landed on one’s bed—but her German lessons were good, and she was particularly kind to Julia on the morning when the first letters came.

The post at Delderton came just after breakfast so that there was time before lessons began for the children to go to the pigeonholes outside the school office to see if there was any mail.

The aunts had kept their promise. There were three letters in Tally’s pigeonhole: one in green ink from Aunt Hester, one in violet ink from Aunt May, and one in ordinary ink from her father, which she pounced on and read first.

There was a letter for Barney and one for Tod and for Borro and for Kit.

Only Julia had no mail.

On Tally’s third day at Delderton the headmaster gathered the school together in the hall. He said that it was easy to forget, in the peace of the countryside, that Britain and France and so many of the free people of the world were in danger. Here in Devon we were unlikely to be bombed, he said, but we must be ready to do everything to help the war effort if the worst happened.

At this point the older children looked at each other hopefully, ready to man a nest of machine guns if one was set up in the courtyard, but what the headmaster said was different.

“Already two of the domestic staff have had their call-up papers. So I think it would be fair if every child did half an hour of housework before the start of lessons.”

Everyone agreed with this—except Verity, who said that she didn’t think her parents had sent her to school to scrub floors—but of course it was a disappointment. When one has hoped to man the barricades, it is difficult to get excited about doing the dusting or polishing the furniture.

Actually, it was not easy to forget that there might be a war, even at Delderton. Most of the staff had their own wirelesses and at six o’clock the children would make their way to the housemothers’ rooms and listen to the news.

Not only was Hitler braying and strutting and threatening, growing madder and wilder in his demands by the day, but Mussolini, the Italian dictator who copied him in everything he did, had invaded Albania, a defenseless country which had done him no harm whatsoever, and the Albanian ruler, King Zog, had fled his country and gone into exile.

On the following day as Tally was walking across the courtyard she saw a girl standing alone by the archway with a suitcase and a violin case beside her. She was tall and thin with frizzy black hair, and for some reason Tally knew at once who she was. She had the look of someone who had come far, like a camel across the desert.

“You’re Augusta Carrington,” she said.

Augusta nodded and said, “Yeth, I am.”

She had a ferocious metallic brace on her teeth, which made her lisp.

Clemmy now came out of the school office, holding a list and looking shaken.

“Are you sure, Augusta? ” she asked. “It says here that you can’t eat cheese or strawberries or wheat or eggs or nuts or rhubarb. You’re allergic to all of those.”

Augusta nodded.

“And fur and feathers,” she said, spitting a little through her brace.

Although Tally and her friends all took to Augusta, the allergy to fur and feathers made it difficult when they brought her to the pet hut, where they had their meetings. If she sat on the top step she sneezed all the time, and on the second step she sneezed often, but on the bottom step she was all right, and able to be sympathetic about their problems.

“You could call the axolotl Zog,” she suggested.

Actually she said “Thog” because of her brace, but they understood her.

“You shouldn’t call anything after a king,” said Tod. “Kings are evil.”