The Dragonfly Pool

There had been five weeks of term left when they returned from Bergania, and every day Tally had waited for a letter. Karil knew her address at school and at home; all the children had exchanged addresses. For while they had hoped that Karil would be able to come straight to Delderton; they knew that there might be delays.

But there had been nothing. Tally knew now how Julia felt as she waited for a letter from her mother. None of the others had heard anything either; nor had Matteo. At first Tally had written almost every day, then three times a week, then twice . . . Pride didn’t come into friendship, she told herself, and she knew it might take him a while to settle down, but still there was only silence.

Now, as the king said, “With the help of God we shall prevail,” and the national anthem was played, Tally was remembering Karil’s words as they sat by the dragonfly pool.

“I would have liked us to be friends.”

She had believed him. She had believed everything he said about wanting to be free, about being weary of being a prince.

But she had been wrong. Surely there was no one who could not write a letter and put it in a letter box.

And it hurt. For the rest of the term she had waited and hoped, and here in London, too, when she came home for the summer holidays, but still there was nothing. Well, she wasn’t going to turn into one of those people who sighed and hovered around postmen. There were plenty of other things to do.

And indeed, during those first few days when the long-awaited war became a fact, there was hardly a spare moment.

Aunt May went off to the town hall hoping to become an air-raid warden but was directed to the wrong room and found herself lying on a stretcher, covered in bandages and labeled SERIOUS BURNS in a first-aid practice. Aunt Hester and Tally filled sandbags in the park and tried to shoo off the little children who wanted the sand to make castles.

New gas masks were issued, but Mrs. Dawson, whose dachshund Tally took for walks, refused to be fitted for hers unless there was a gas mask also for the dog. The blackout began and Dr. Hamilton’s surgery was filled with patients who had fallen downstairs in the dark or walked into lampposts. No one knew whether laying in stocks of food was sensible or unpatriotic. Aunt Hester thought it would be hoarding and therefore bad, but Aunt May thought it must be good to save space on ships which had to bring food from overseas, and bought a large sack of pepper which she put under her bed.

“They say pepper is going to be very hard to get,” she said.

Statues were boarded up and the aunts found a paragraph in the newspaper that excited them very much. Among the paintings which were being crated up and sent for safety into a disused mine in Wales were the pictures in the Battersea Arts Museum, which included The Angel of Mercy for which Clemency had posed.

“So she’ll spend the war underground,” they told Tally. “She’ll be as safe as can be.”

Evacuation of schoolchildren to the country began, but without Maybelle and Kenny.

“They didn’t even try to make me go,” said Maybelle. “I drew blood last time.”

Two days after the outbreak of war, Tally’s aunt Virginia telephoned to say that she was taking Roderick and Margaret down to safety in the West Country till it was time for term to begin. Fortunately she had been able to buy their new uniforms before there was talk of shortages or even rationing.

“Roderick has had such a good term,” she told them. “He has made friends with the Prince of Transjordania—such a nice boy—and Foxingham has won their cricket match against Eton. It really is a splendid school.”

She kindly offered to take Tally away with them, but Tally told her father she would rather be hung, drawn, and quartered than go with her cousins to Torquay—and Dr. Hamilton, endlessly busy at the hospital with the evacuation of patients, did not argue.

On the last night before she was due to go back to Delderton, Tally and her father climbed up the hill past the convent and looked out over London. Their own barrage balloon had been joined by dozens of others, silvered in the moonlight. They did not look like kindly uncles now, nor like benevolent sausages—but like serious sentinels protecting the much-loved city.

“We shall come through,” said Dr. Hamilton, and took his daughter’s hand. “You’ll see, in the end we shall come through.”

The next morning, just as the taxi arrived to take them to Paddington Station, the postman came—and there was a letter for Tally in an unfamiliar hand. In an instant she was filled with certainty and happiness. Karil had written at last—he must have been ill; she had been completely wrong to doubt him. She tore the letter open.