School for Skylarks Read online

  Ada turned to Lyla.

  ‘So you see, he’s never had a father to write him letters, unlike you.’

  Solomon paused and glanced at Lyla, and Lyla saw that he was reluctant about firing the letter plane, but she nodded a determined get on with it to him, and, a little sadly perhaps, he turned and launched the Supermarine Mk II Spitfire, sending it straight and true through the window and out over the knot garden where it was caught in the tangled branches of the old damson tree.

  ‘That’s what we do with letters we don’t want, isn’t it?’ said Ada, turning to Lyla.

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Lyla, glancing out and seeing how the letter, caught on a twig, looked frail and small as a songbird. She bit her lip – then in a determined voice added, ‘Because he doesn’t love me.’

  9

  THE SUPERMARINE SPITFIRE MK II IN THE DAMSON

  My darling Lyla,

  I have received orders to leave for France tomorrow. I am older than I was and my role in this war will be very different to that in the last. It is unlikely I will find myself in the front line fighting this time, and, on account of my languages perhaps, I have been recruited for some rather shadowy work, a kind of undercover intelligence gathering – so sometimes I may find myself unable to write to you. Therefore, should you ever think of me (I know it may be some while perhaps before you do), do not be alarmed if you do not hear from me for long periods of time.

  How I will miss having dear Solomon at my side, as chauffeur, runner, valet, as I did in the last war. Solomon, of course, was hit in the leg and will never serve again, though he is the younger of us.

  This will be a nasty war. Poor Poland is caught between Germany and Russia. Hitler will invade Britain, and London will be badly hit. Our prime minister is a blind man and a fool, and Germany a dangerous enemy.

  Darling Lyla, I am so glad to think that you will be safe at Furlongs, with Ada and with Solomon.

  Yours always,

  Father

  10

  BUCKET

  That night when Lyla went up to bed, she found as usual that her lamps were lit, her covers turned down, and the Yellow Silk Room cosy again in the way that seemed designed to make her feel ungrateful.

  To make her feel doubly ungrateful, tonight there was a new detail. On her pillow sat an interesting-looking wicker fishing basket tied with a blue ribbon and and a label.

  His name is Bucket.

  He’ll be good for keeping mice at bay, Love Ada.

  It’s a bit awkward to be given something by someone you’ve been plotting against, so Lyla yanked sulkily at the ribbon. The basket lurched and Lyla started at a squeal and a hissing that was followed by an alarming slithering inside that rocked the basket to and fro.

  In such a house as Furlongs, where the butlers were paper-plane-making-lion-tamers and the great aunts went about with gelignite, there could be no knowing what unpredictable, unknowable kind of creature that was good for keeping mice at bay might be inside a basket, but after a while Lyla’s curiosity got the better of her caution. She lifted the lid and saw a small nose and bright eyes and the pale cinnamon face of a young ferret. She lifted the lid a little more and saw a fluffy feather-boa kind of tail.

  Bucket put his tiny forepaws on the rim of the basket, placed his snout between them and twitched it and twitched it again.

  Lyla gazed at him, enchanted, and whispered, ‘Hello. I’m Lyla.’

  She placed a finger on his snout and ran it back to the tip of his head, and then, because Bucket didn’t make any intimidating snarling noises, she ran it further down his back. He remained still, and, with a nervous, cat-like caution, seemed to assess the quality of her character before making up his mind about her.

  ‘I’m quite all right, you know,’ Lyla whispered sadly, a little defensive. ‘In fact, there’s not much wrong with me at all. It’s only that I was stolen from Mother when she was sleeping, so now I’m in the wrong place.’

  She ran her fingers along his sinuous spine once more, and gradually he began to purr and his tail grew full and bushy. After a while he placed his snout in the palm of her hand and crept, one tiny paw over the other, out of the basket and on to the bed, before bouncing back on all four feet, watching Lyla and shaking his head from side to side, making little took-took-took noises and his tail vibrating with joy.

  Lyla was touched that Bucket should already consider her a friend and be inviting her to play with him.

  11

  LAUNDRY BASKETS

  For the next few days, Lyla wandered about from place to place, coddling Bucket and whispering to him. Bucket was a very gentle creature really. If he was happy, he would lie around Lyla’s neck; and if he was scared, he needed urgently to be somewhere dark and would scuttle up the sleeve of Lyla’s jersey. Lyla had discovered how much more fun it was to do things if you had someone to do them with. Nevertheless, she was worried about Mop and decided she must write to her.

  Furlongs

  Ladywood

  North Devon

  Dearest Mop,

  The only good thing is that now I have a friend called Bucket. He is my first real friend and I am going to take him everywhere I go and when I come to London, which will be soon, you will meet him. He is a very naughty ferret. Last night I had to put him in my sock drawer because he twitches and whines so much when he is dreaming of mice. When he wakes up he has to do a great deal of yawning and stretching. He keeps escaping and hiding in laundry baskets and shoes and does wicked things like taking all the feathers out of pillows though Great Aunt Ada says she doesn’t give a hoot about pillowcases and cushions and things, that they’re there to be used as one pleases. All because of Bucket I don’t have any socks left nor any stuffing in my pillows – but he is my only friend here.

  Furlongs is actually quite a fun sort of place. I don’t think you would like it because it is quite still and nothing ever changes, and I know you like change and to be in a whirl and to plan for every minute of every day because that keeps away your melancholy . . . but sometimes I think it could even be quite nice to stay here if it weren’t for your being so far away.

  Great Aunt Ada is either very, very clever or very, very dotty. She keeps gunpowder and cordite in the Billiard Room and is very likely to blow the house up, so it is unsafe and I might die because she is unpredictable – there’s no knowing at all what she’ll do next, and her butler is a lion tamer, so there’s no knowing what he’ll do next either – but he does love Aunt Ada very much and is a devoted servant.

  Anyway, I hope my plan is working and I hope I can come home soon, but if I don’t, PLEASE, PLEASE, DON’T FORGET ABOUT ME. DON’T LEAVE ME HERE FOREVER.

  All my love,

  Lyla

  12

  THE RED LIBRARY

  Lyla had decided that she and Bucket must explore the room Solomon called the Red Library, because libraries tended to be magical, secret places in which anything might happen.

  She crept in and gazed around her. The books went all the way around the walls and up to the ceiling on all sides, so you would need to be a monkey to get to the top shelves, but Lyla spied a set of library steps with castors and grinned at Bucket. Wheels were just the thing, so she climbed the steps and began to propel them both up and down the length of the room. Bucket didn’t think much of this kind of transport at all and scuttled up her sleeve in horror, but Lyla, grinning, continued regardless, running a finger along all the spines as she went.

  The first book she stopped at was The Homemade Projectile, and the next, The Primary Explosive. Since those titles were a little unnerving, Lyla gave up on books and went over to the globe that stood in the mullioned window. She twirled it with the tip of her finger and watched all the tiny islands of the world spin by, wondering which small and sandy one she could go to live on one day with Mop.

  ‘Mop and I will go to . . .’ She shut her eyes tight as the globe spun and wished for somewhere that had monkeys and mangoes. She stopped the globe, opened her
eyes and read aloud, ‘Baffin Island . . .’ She frowned. ‘We’ll go to Baffin Island . . .’ And then because she couldn’t think what you might do on Baffin Island, for it looked a white and cold sort of place, she spun the globe again and whispered, ‘After Baffin, we’ll go to . . .’

  This time she kept her fingers on the warm, middle part of the world, and when it stopped spinning she read, ‘Hummingbird Island.’

  She wondered if Hummingbird Island was a hard-to-get-to-small-and-faraway place, and then she began to wonder if it was nearly cauliflower cheese o’clock, because globetrotting was hard if you found yourself on Hummingbird Island but didn’t know what sort of things happened there, and she was about to give up when she heard the sound of motors.

  She crept to the window, peered out, yanked the curtains closed, retreated in alarm, then peered out once more just to make sure.

  Two motorcars had pulled up on the gravel, the official black sort that set her pulse racing.

  The men from the Ministry were here. The soldiers were on their way.

  The sort of men that inevitably travelled in those sorts of motorcars had gathered on the forecourt and were gazing up at the windows and towers. Watching them, Lyla suddenly felt very small and not at all like a Lady Lyla. Then, with a flash of inspiration, she raced upstairs, tore into her room, grabbed the cape Ada said had belonged to the Green Countess and slung it about herself. She looked in the glass. The cape had been out of date for a century or more, but Men from Ministries wouldn’t know that. She tugged the hood so only her chin was visible and then took Bucket from his basket and put him on her shoulder. Bucket rather approved of the cosy hood of the cape and arranged himself rather fetchingly about her neck like the fur stoles that countesses probably wore all the time, and Lyla decided that the whole effect was most grown-up-making and was very satisfied.

  She rushed downstairs, for she must get to the door before Solomon. At this hour he would probably be in the pantry, but you could never tell, for he was most punctilious about things like opening doors.

  13

  LADY LYLA

  From the balustraded Gallery overlooking the Painted Hall she saw the men from the Ministry of Works huddled together below, looking about, awestruck as tourists in a cave of stalactites. She lifted her head and, taking care not to trip on her skirts, went down the stairs. As she went, she tried to think of grand and grown-up-sounding things to say. By the time she got to the bottom, she’d thought of so many that she determined she must get them all out quickly, before they got muddled, because words had a habit of doing just that when you most needed them.

  ‘Lady Lyla?’

  ‘Well, actually no, that is, yes and no,’ Lyla said in a tumbling rush. ‘But in fact, Furlongs is quite ready and quite suitable for your needs and you may take possession immediately. I shouldn’t think they’ll mind at all about the ghost or the mice or the milk that freezes inside the cows, but you must please tell them to take great care of my elderly relative – she is most delicate and I doubt she’d survive in any other place and they must feed her devilled kidneys at eight, cauliflower cheese at one and Welsh rarebit at seven.’

  This being the very first instant that Lyla drew breath, one of the men stepped forward and said with some urgency, ‘We’re here to assess the safety of the Tudor Undercroft for a gymnasium—’

  ‘Undercroft?’ interrupted Lyla. She bowed her head as if to consider the suitability of the Undercroft – deciding such a place, if it existed at all, was probably a damp sort of cellar – and said, ‘Oh no, probably not at all suitable. They’ll get damp in their bones and mildew on their uniform and arthritis in their knees.’

  ‘Ah, well, we could perhaps allow the headmistress to make up her mind about that.’

  ‘Headmistress?’ asked Lyla, a sea-sicky swell forming in her belly. ‘What kind of headmistress?’ To her knowledge soldiers didn’t require headmistresses nor, for that matter, gymnasiums.

  ‘Did you not receive our letter?’

  Lyla wondered if there’d been a second letter that Solomon had perhaps intercepted.

  ‘Letters go astray in this house; they’re turned into aeroplanes,’ she said quietly.

  Then, because she had to know, she asked again, ‘What kind of headmistress?’

  The men glanced at one another, and one of them inspected a clipboard very closely and answered, ‘Miss Pinnacle, the Headmistress of Garden Hill School for Girls.’

  ‘Garden Hill School for Girls,’ echoed Lyla, nauseous. Her hand rose to Bucket and she stroked him anxiously. A school? If a school came to Furlongs, what would happen to her? Would she have to go to it? Would the men from the Ministry perhaps not return her to London at all? Besides, there was Great Aunt Ada to consider. She wondered if it were possible to conceal a headmistress and an entire school from her great aunt for the duration of the war. Plumping for the negative, she began to burble.

  ‘The Undercroft is old and below ground and therefore entirely unsafe and on no account must anyone use the ground floor nor the first floor, nor in fact any floor because all the upper floors are unsuitable. There are buckets in simply every room and bats in every wardrobe, naked Greeks in the Orangery and knights in armour in the corridors, so you see the whole house is quite, quite unsuitable. Garden Hill girls are probably delicate and unused to lion tamers and armadillos and they’ll get consumption or develop nervous dispositions.’

  ‘Lady Lyla, I’m afraid,’ said another man, ‘they’re arriving shortly’ He glanced outside. ‘In fact, they’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘Well, we must decide what to do with them, must we not?’

  Aunt Ada’s voice was a foghorn, a gong and a church bell all in one, and coming down, as it did, from the Gallery, it was as if a thunderclap had spoken, and now they were all staring up at Great Aunt Ada, and her goggles, overalls and canary. All, that is, except Lyla, who pressed herself against the wall and hissed, ‘As you see – she’s quite delicate – very delicate.’

  At the sound of approaching vehicles, all those in the hall turned to see a cavalcade of lorries and buses heading determinedly past the bracken and the sheep.

  14

  A STEEPLE

  Lyla, glued to the window, stared in fear and envy at the unending stream of girls in burgundy uniform that disembarked from the buses and gathered on Great Aunt Ada’s forecourt. Great Aunt Ada, however, eyed, with a sort of scientific curiosity, the desks, lockers, beds, pianos and blackboards that were accumulating on the gravel.

  She turned to Lyla. ‘Your escape plan, I take it? Most impressive. Resourceful. Imaginative. Determined. All most commendable. Besides, in fact, rather a relief. Schoolgirls are so much cleaner and more orderly than soldiers.’

  Lyla stared at her great aunt. It was in fact a relief to her too that Ada should take the invasion of Furlongs by hundreds of schoolgirls so much in her stride, but that was the only upside to the circumstances, because she didn’t know anything about girls of her own age nor what they did or learned or thought or talked about.

  Solomon appeared and ran to the window, then turned to Great Aunt Ada, ready at her command to bar the door, hold off all intruders, to defend his mistress and her house to the last. ‘My lady—’

  Great Aunt Ada held out a hand to restrain him.

  Then the cook appeared from the kitchens and peered out cautiously from the top of the stone stairs, still in her flowered apron, her face still very pink. She took another step, gazed out of the window, then threw her hands up,

  ‘The last straw, that is. I’m not feeding all that lot. I got enough on my hands what with all them merchant seamen bein’ so cold and me knitting for them every hour God gives me.’

  Aunt Ada turned to her and said, ‘Dear Prudence, do stop that. The merchant seamen shan’t mind at all if you don’t send them any more jerseys. Do take her back downstairs, Solomon.’

  ‘Yes, my lady.’ Solomon approached to shepherd Prudence away.

  Lyla crept
to the stone stairs, climbed a couple of steps to the arrow slit and stood on tiptoe to peer out. The girls wore burgundy blazers, stripy ties, grey pinafore dresses and straw boaters. Lyla’s hands flew to the fastenings of the ancient green cape. She let it fall about her and hurriedly kicked it under the curtains, but since Bucket was so cosy and sleepy she left him where he was.

  The girls were forming pairs and falling into lines, all the while gazing up at the walls of Furlongs in astonishment and wonder. Through narrowed eyes, Lyla saw their long socks and decided that they were probably quite prickly and that she’d quite happily never ever wear socks like that nor a dress that swung from side to side. She saw that they whispered to each other and wondered what sort of things schoolmates said to one another. She saw too that some were holding hands, and that made her a little sad for – never having been to school herself – her only friend until Bucket arrived had been Winnie.

  Solomon reappeared with the china and the silver candelabra and dust sheets to move one part of Furlongs to another. Ada saw him and sighed.

  ‘Really, Solomon, what has got into you? They’re not vandals come to sack the place – they’re schoolgirls.’

  Alone at the window, Lyla absently toyed with the hem of her cape, wondering if perhaps burgundy was actually a nice colour, even if Mop didn’t like it. Perhaps Lyla was more school-shaped than Mop because there was something about all the Garden Hill girls wearing the same colour and doing the same thing at the same time that looked actually quite fun.

  Hockey sticks, pianos, pots, pans, ink-stained desks, tattered chairs, lockers, bedheads, blackboards, and all manner of unlikely things now surrounded the fountain, and in the midst of it all, high-up hair like a steeple that might direct you to a righteous place, was a small, shrill woman with the voice of a town crier. That must be Miss Pinnacle, Lyla thought, and because Miss Pinnacle looked so fearsome, she instantly decided that perhaps, like Mop, she wasn’t so school-shaped after all.