“Most people don’t believe in guardian angels, but what exactly is a guardian angel? ” she said. “Could it be something quite different to what people think…? ” And almost at once everyone had started working, completely absorbed. Tally found that she was painting her street: the rows of houses, her father’s surgery and above them, flying over the roofs, London’s own guardian angels, the barrage balloons — and it felt as though she was joining her life in London with her new life at Delderton.
But the lessons everyone spoke about were Matteo’s biology classes. “They’re special,” they said, and when Tally asked in what way, they said it was no use explaining; she’d see.
Making friends was the most important thing, but what Tally loved was the way Delderton grew out of the countryside. Going over to the gym she would meet a red squirrel or pass a great bank of primroses as scented and rich as if they had been planted there. And each morning, as she woke, she heard a thrush singing in the cedar tree.
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.”
But Barney said it wasn’t Zog’s fault he had been born a king, and when they had looked carefully at the creature’s bandy legs and round black eyes he really did look quite like a Zog.
So that was one problem solved. The snails on the other hand were still lying about on other snails as though they were old sofas.
“I wish Matteo would come back,” said Borro restlessly.
But Matteo was still away, and biology had been postponed again.
Tally had heard a lot about Matteo as a biologist — but it was what he was like as a tutor that she wanted to know.
“He’s your tutor, too, isn’t he?” she asked Julia as they were getting ready for bed. “What’s he like? ”
Julia had been replaiting her hair. She put down her hairbrush and didn’t answer straightaway.
“He’s not like anybody else,” she said.
“But do you like him? ”
“Yes, I like him very much, but that isn’t what it’s about. You’ll see…”
CHAPTER SIX
London Interlude
After they watched the Delderton train steam out of Paddington Station, the aunts felt completely wretched, and Tally’s father vowed that he would take her away at the end of the first term.
Then came Tally’s letters and everything changed.
“This is a very interesting school,” she wrote on her second day. “The first night I thought I would be homesick, but it was my housemother who was homesick… Being a fork is a bit odd but it can be quite peaceful because you can think your own thoughts…” and she described the cedar tree the headmaster loved so much, and the art classes, and Clemmy. By the time her second letter came it was clear that Tally was enjoying herself — and as it was a sunny morning the aunts, who always took such an interest in Tally’s life, set off for the Thameside Municipal Baths.