Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
READ ON
PHILIPPA PEARCE was the daughter of a miller and grew up in a mill-house near Cambridge. The house, the river and the village feature in many of her best-loved children’s books. She was educated at the Perse Girls’ School in Cambridge and then at Girton College, Cambridge, where she read English and history. In addition to writing books, she worked as a scriptwriter-producer for BBC radio, as a children’s book editor, a book reviewer, lecturer, storyteller and as a freelance writer for radio and newspapers. Philippa Pearce’s much-loved books for children include Carnegie Medal winner Tom’s Midnight Garden, A Dog So Small, The Battle of Bubble and Squeak, which won the Whitbread Award, and The Little Gentleman. Philippa Pearce died in 2006.
Puffin books by Philippa Pearce
THE BATTLE OF BUBBLE AND SQUEAK
A DOG SO SMALL
THE LITTLE GENTLEMAN
THE ROPE AND OTHER STORIES
For younger readers
LION AT SCHOOL AND OTHER STORIES
To Pam, not a gift but a tribute
CHAPTER ONE
The middle of the night, and everyone in the house asleep.
Everyone? Then what was that noise?
Creak! and then, after a pause, Creak! And then, Creak! And then, Creak! As regular as clockwork – but was this just clockwork? Behind the creaking, the lesser sound of some delicate tool working on metal.
The girls heard nothing. Amy Parker was so young that nothing ever disturbed her sleep. Peggy, too, slept soundly.
Sid Parker, their brother, heard in his dreams. He was the eldest by a little, and slept more lightly. Besides, he had been half expecting to hear something. He had dreaded to hear it. He came swimming up from the depths of his dreams to the surface: now he was wide awake, listening. Creak! he heard; and then Creak! … Creak! … Creak!
Sid broke into a sweat as he listened.
And their mother? Mrs Sparrow heard it. The noise woke her, as the crying of her children would have woken her. But this was someone else’s job. She nudged her husband, the children’s stepfather. She nudged and nudged until Bill Sparrow stirred, groaned. He had been dreaming of the garden: monster marrows, and runner beans that towered over their apple tree …
‘Bill!’ she whispered. ‘Come on! Wake up!’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just a minute, and I’ll do that.’
‘Listen.’
Creak! And then, Creak! And then, Creak!
‘Can’t you hear it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But it’s in the house!’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Downstairs!’
‘Yes.’
‘Bill! What are you going to do about it?’
He nearly said again, ‘I don’t know.’ Then he pulled himself together. He tried hard to think clearly what he ought to do. First, he ought to wake up properly. Then, he ought to get up. He ought to find out what was making the noise that bothered Alice so. That was it: find out.
‘I’m getting up,’ he said aloud. ‘I’m going to find out about that row downstairs.’
He reached for the pencil torch that Mrs Sparrow kept under the pillow. He wouldn’t switch on the lights; he wouldn’t even use the torch until he had to. He would surprise whatever it was. Whoever it was.
Burglars?
He ought to arm himself. A poker. But if you haven’t open fires upstairs, you haven’t pokers. He was in a bedroom: there wasn’t a heavy spanner, or even an umbrella in that bedroom.
He paused as he was passing his wife’s dressing table. He picked up her heavy pot of cold cream.
‘What are you doing, Bill?’
He pretended not to hear. If he had to do something about this noise, then he’d do it in his own way.
Softly he opened the bedroom door. Now that the door was open, he could hear it clearly: Creak! … And then, Creak! … And then, Creak!
Across the little landing were the doors of the children’s bedrooms. The girls’ bedroom door stood just ajar, as they liked it. Sid’s door was also open – not ajar, but wide open. Bill Sparrow shone his torch in, cautiously, then boldly. The bed was empty.
He felt his way downstairs. He made for where the noise seemed to be coming from. He went from the foot of the stairs across to the kitchen. Much louder now: Creak! … Creak! … Creak! Clearer, too, the irregular sound of some kind of instrument that gnawed at metal.
And he became aware of a human undertone: a voice that whispered over and over again: ‘Please, hush! … Please, hush! … Please! … Please! …’
‘Sid,’ said Bill Sparrow to himself, in wonder.
Across the kitchen to the walk-in larder. The larder door was only pulled to. Bill opened it gently, and shone his torch-beam inside.
Sid Parker crouched on the floor, in front of a cage in which two mouse-like creatures had frozen into stillness on the instant. One had been working a little treadmill fastened to the inside of a cage wall. The other had been gnawing at one of the bars of the cage.
The creatures had frozen. But Sid himself turned his head slowly, to see who shone the torch. He said, ‘They’re gerbils. My gerbils. Mine.’
Bill said: ‘Those things?’
‘Yes.’
‘They were making that noise?’
‘Yes. They’re not supposed to be up and about at night. But they are.’
‘Like me.’
But Sid rarely smiled at his stepfather’s jokes. He asked, ‘Did Mum hear?’
‘You bet.’
The kitchen lights blazed on; the larder door was flung wide; Alice Sparrow stood in the doorway, like a flaming torch, leaving no corner unlit, catching in her glare her husband and her son. Catching them red-handed.
‘Well!’
The gerbils had flashed into life. One whisked out of his treadmill; the other from his wire bar. They vanished into the hay that stuffed the inner box of their bedroom. The only indication of their presence in the cage was the drumming of tiny feet on the floor of the bedroom. The gerbils were drumming the alarm for extreme danger.
Sid had covered his face with his hands.
As for Bill Sparrow, he dropped the jar of cold cream. It would have smashed and splattered on the larder floor, but his wife caught it, under his arm, as it began its fall. She was expert at preventing mess.
Then the row began.
Alice Sparrow made the row. Bill Sparrow sat on the bread bin, leaning against the larder wall to recover himself. Sid now stood up in front of the gerbils’ cage, meeting his mother’s gaze, enduring it.
‘It’s no use your trying to hide them! I saw them!’ cried Mrs Sparrow. ‘Rats!’
‘No,’ said Sid. ‘Gerbils.’
‘Don’t you contradict me at three in the morning,’ said Mrs Sparrow. ‘They’re smelly little rats. Where’ve they come from?’
‘The toolshed.’
‘And none of your cheek! Where’ve they come from?’
‘A boy at school gave them to me. Jimmy Dean’s cousin. He gave them to me with the cage, last week. I put them in the shed. But then the nights began getting colder. I had to bring them indoors just for the night. I had to. They’re used to hot deserts.’
‘They go back to Jimmy Dean’s cousin tomorrow without fail. Today, that is. How many times have I got to say that
we’re not having animals in this house? You’ve roller skates and a camera and a transistor: what more do you want?’
‘Two gerbils,’ said Bill Sparrow in a mumble that no one heard.
Sid said: ‘Mum, Jimmy Dean’s cousin isn’t at school any more. He’s moved. Gone to Australia with his family. That’s why he gave his animals away. So I can’t give them back, Mum. Honest, I can’t.’
She would not soften. ‘Who gave them to Jimmy Dean’s cousin, then?’
‘No one. His dad bought them for him, in a Pet Department.’
She cackled with angry laughter. ‘Some kids have fools for fathers. Where did you say he bought them?’
‘The Pet Department in the Garden Centre.’ Sid feared something – some plan – in his mother’s mind. He was right.
She said: ‘The Garden Centre isn’t far. You can take those rats back.’
‘They’ll never take them back!’ cried Sid.
‘As a gift they will,’ said his mother. ‘They can sell them twice then, to two sets of fools.’
‘Please, Mum!’ He was almost crying.
‘No! You take them back.’
‘I won’t!’
‘Then I will. It’ll make me late for work – and why I should have to carry a cageful of smelly rats! – But I’ll take them.’
‘Mum, they’ll say they don’t want any more gerbils, even as gifts. They’ll have more than they can sell, anyway. Please, Mum, don’t take them.’
‘Rubbish!’
Bill Sparrow mumbled again. They paid no attention to him. Loudly, clearly, he repeated what he had said: ‘I’ll take them.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘What?’
‘I’ll take them,’ Bill Sparrow said again.
Alice Sparrow looked at him with distrust; Sid with dislike.
‘Why you?’ asked his wife.
‘I’ll mind less than you do. I had white mice when I was a kid.’
‘You keep quiet about that,’ said Mrs Sparrow sharply.
‘All right.’
‘But you can take them. And mind you leave them at that Garden Centre! Sid, you go back to bed.’
Sid went.
That was the end of the row. The gerbils had crept out of their bedroom to hear the end of it. One had climbed into the wheel again, and was treading it round: Creak! … Creak! … Creak!
‘How am I going to endure that racket for the rest of the night?’ asked Alice Sparrow.
‘That wheel probably just needs a drop of oil,’ said Bill. ‘But, in the meantime, I think I could – yes, I can unscrew it from the cage wall.’ He did not even need a tool; his fingers did the work. The wheel, released, fell over on to its side. The gerbils did not seem much put out.
‘Come back to bed,’ said Bill. He put an arm round his wife’s shoulder. She shook it off irritably.
‘You go up,’ said Alice Sparrow. ‘I must clear up the mess.’ The gerbils had pushed some of their bedding through the bars of the cage, to fall on the larder floor. ‘And I’ll make myself some tea.’
Bill went.
Mrs Sparrow brushed up the mess from the larder floor. She noted that the gerbils made some more, at once. She seethed at that. But the kettle began to murmur. As it sang up and up towards boiling point, so she simmered down and down. She made the tea. While it brewed, she looked into the larder again. More mess on the floor, of course. And the gerbils were gnawing metal again; but the gnawing by itself was not noisy. Nor – Alice Sparrow sniffed the air – did gerbils smell. Nor were they really like rats, to look at. Their tails were furry, for one thing.
On the other hand, she didn’t like animals, had never liked animals, and never would like animals. It was bad luck that the three children had not taken after her in this. They were like their father, who had died soon after Amy was born. No doubt, if he had lived, the house would have swarmed with cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, budgerigars and canaries in yellow clouds. What would she have been like, then? Alice drank her tea slowly and thought all kinds of things.
She poured a second cup of tea and took it upstairs with her. Sid’s bedroom door was shut. She opened it quietly and looked in. She was pretty sure he was awake, but his back was towards the door, his shoulder hunched high like a wall. There seemed no point in saying goodnight to that shoulder. She closed the door again.
She went into the girls’ room. As she stood over her, Peggy stirred.
‘Mum? Something happened?’
‘Nothing important, love.’
Peggy slept again.
As for Amy, she was deeply asleep, as usual. Her mother knelt by her bed, put her arms round her, hugged her. There was little fear of disturbing Amy. She hugged her, kissed her, buried her face in the warmth of sleeping little girl. She knelt there for minutes.
When at last she left the child, her second cup of tea was almost cold.
In her own bedroom: ‘Bill!’ she whispered.
But Bill Sparrow was already asleep.
Alice Sparrow’s last thought before sleep was that Peggy and Amy need never know that gerbils had been in the house. Better so.
At breakfast-time next morning, there was no mention at all of the gerbils, unless you count Mrs Sparrow’s saying to her husband: ‘Don’t forget.’
‘No,’ said Bill.
And once, when Peggy was going to the larder for more cornflakes, her mother said – to Peggy’s surprise – ‘Sit still. I’ll get them.’
And when Mrs Sparrow was getting Amy into her anorak, Amy said: ‘What’s that noise?’
‘There isn’t a noise,’ said her mother.
Amy said, ‘A grinding sort of little noise in the larder, like tiny little people gnawing their own knives and forks. Bill hears it.’
‘He doesn’t,’ said her mother.
‘Why are you afraid of them?’ asked Amy.
‘This isn’t the time of day for fairy tales,’ said her mother.
Sid sat silent and rather pale, eating his breakfast, looking at nobody.
By eight o’clock on a weekday morning the house was beginning to empty itself. The first to go were Peggy and Amy. Friends called for them on their way to school. Peggy’s friend was Dawn Mudd. Mrs Sparrow had once said sarcastically that she ought to have been Sunset Mudd: she was the last – after a long gap in time – of a very large family. She was already an aunt several times over, and her mother was always knitting baby clothes for grandchildren. Dawn Mudd was small, with straight red hair and gimlet eyes.
Peter Peters came with Dawn Mudd. (‘They must have been at their wits’ end for names, when he was born,’ Mrs Sparrow said.) He was in the same infant class as Amy.
After these four had left the house, it was Bill Sparrow’s turn. He bicycled to work in the warehouses of the General Supply Company. This morning he left with a gerbil cage and gerbils in his large bicycle basket.
Then Mrs Sparrow left. At one time she had made a point of leaving last, so that she could lock up behind her; but that had always put her in a rush. (She had a job in the offices of the same General Supply Company: full time during school term; mornings only in the holidays.) Now Sid had started at secondary school, and was old enough to be entrusted with responsibility. He locked up.
By half past eight, on any weekday, the house had been emptied of life.
This morning, already, they had all gone, except for Sid.
As usual, his mother had washed up and tidied before going off. The kitchen was spick and span. Sid stood in the middle of it, in no great hurry yet. The school bus stop was just at the end of the road.
He stood in the middle of the kitchen and shut his eyes. He imagined Bill Sparrow riding along with the gerbil cage in his bicycle basket, the gerbils keeping their footing with difficulty, like tiny sailors in a rough sea.
Round Sid, the house was still and silent. It waited for him and his imaginings to go. He was the last living thing.
He kept his eyes shut. He said aloud slowly: ‘I wish this h
ouse would smash. I wish it would crash and smash and fall on me. Brick by brick by brick. All the bricks in this house can fall on me and kill me. The council can have it back again, all rubble. Me under the rubble.’
He stopped speaking.
Deep silence.
The house waited, bored.
He opened his eyes. Everything as before, clean and tidy.
He walked into the walk-in larder and stood looking around. There was not a trace of where the gerbil cage had been. His mother had swept up the last wisp of bedding from the floor after Bill had taken the cage out to his bicycle.
He thought again of Bill on his bicycle. He would be within sight of the Garden Centre by now.
He looked round the larder. In perfect order.
There was a small bowl of dripping on the shelf – bacon fat from breakfast, still partly runny. He took it up in two hands, testing its weight. He held it in front of him, but high – high –
Carefully, he dropped it.
The bowl smashed and the fat splattered everywhere.
He was frightened at the mess he had made.
He left the larder door ajar.
He opened the kitchen window a little, and left it like that.
He gathered together his school things and rushed out of the house. He locked the door behind him and kept the key in his hand. He ran down the front path, along the road, and up Mrs Pring’s front path to her little bungalow. He shot the key through the letterbox with a yell (‘Key as usual, Mrs Pring!’), leapt over one of the Pring cats as it ambled round the corner of the house, and was out in the road again, running. He caught up with Jimmy Dean, bound for the same school bus. He was thinking of Bill Sparrow again, although he would rather not have done.
Jimmy heard him coming and waited.
‘Hi, Sid!’
‘Hi, Jimmy!’ Certainly Bill would have reached the entrance to the Garden Centre by now.
‘Saw the match last night?’
‘You bet!’ Would Bill have turned into the entrance? Would he be dismounting? Lifting the gerbil cage from the bicycle basket?
‘What a smash-up!’
‘I’ll say!’
They walked together the rest of the way to the stop for the school bus, talking football. Jimmy Dean was a football fiend.