The Secret Passage - Chapter Five
"Someone is Watching Me"
by Nina Bawden

"I'm sure Ben did it," Mary said that night after they had gone to bed and Ben was fast asleep and snoring a little because he had adenoids - so the doctor said - in his nose. "Of course he did. He probably saw the clock and wound it up while we were looking out of the window, just to tease us. It's the sort of thing he would do."

She was pretending to sound cross but she was secretly relieved that she had thought of such a sensible explanation. Mary was a very down-to-earth person who did not like mysteries, or, indeed, anything fanciful: she had always disliked fairy stories, for example, and much preferred to read about real people to whom real things happened.

John was quite different. He was too old to believe in fairies, but anything queer and unexplained fascinated him. He liked to lie awake in the dark and tell himself ghost stories; sometimes he frightened himself quite badly, but it was a nice, exciting kind of fear. He had been thrilled by the thought that someone might have been hiding in the House of Secrets - perhaps a fugitive from justice - and although he knew that what Mary said was probably true, that the ticking clock had just been one of Ben's tricks, he suddenly felt rather depressed all the same. He thought that Mary often made vague, mysterious things seem very ordinary and dull. He said, with a little sigh, "Did he really have time? We only looked out of the window for a minute."

"Ben's very quick and sort of neat, like a cat," Mary said. "And he probably wanted to get his own back because I'd said his horse wasn't valuable."

John thought for a minute. Then he said, "But he didn't have time to polish the brass bedstead, did he?" and laughed, feeling rather pleased.

But Mary had an answer to this too. "I asked Aunt Mabel about brass. She doesn't polish everything - there's a coal scuttle in the dining room and a brass jug in the hall. And she said all brass didn't have to be polished, sometimes it has a kind of varnish on it so it can stay bright for years." She stopped, feeling rather sorry and ashamed. She knew John liked to make up stories in his head and that she often spoiled them by being too matter-of-fact, but she also knew that she was made that way and couldn't help it. "I'm sorry," she said in a small voice.

"It doesn't matter," John said. He was silent for a bit and then he said, "I mean it really doesn't matter. It's just as exciting even if there's no one else there. It's secret - no one wants that old attic. We can go there whenever we like and make it our own private place. No one will know we're there."

"We'll have to be careful," Mary warned him. "Aunt Mabel's got eyes in the back of her head." She giggled, thinking of two spare eyes peeping out through the untidy mess of Aunt Mabel's grey hair. "We could clean it up - I suppose we can't wash anything because the water must have been turned off - but we could find a broom - there must be one somewhere - and sweep the dust up. And I could paint some pictures if Uncle Abe will let me have some paints, and hang them on the walls."

John said eagerly, "And we could take some food - sausages and things - and cook them. Uncle Abe's got a little primus stove in his shed. He doesn't use it and it's almost rusted up, but we could drag it through the passage and make it work. And even if there isn't any water in the taps we could fill up one of those old lemonade bottles in the cellar and take that..."

He yawned, not because he wasn't interested in the plans he was making, but because he was simply too tired to stay awake much longer. "We could polish up that old grate in the corner - we might even light a fire - and perhaps we could borrow a rug to put in front of it. There are so many rugs all over the house, no one could mind if we just borrowed one... It'll be such fun, won't it?" he murmured drowsily, "such fun..."

Mary didn't answer because she was already asleep.

They woke up the next morning, their heads full of ideas as if their brains had been working all the time they were asleep. John was going to collect some nails from the cellar, and some pieces of wood to make shelves so that they would have somewhere to put books, when they had books; Mary decided to ask Aunt Mabel if she had any old pieces of material that she could stuff with rags and make into cushions. If the oak chest was polished up and had cushions on it, and there were bookshelves in the corner, the attic would look beautifully bright and comfortable. As for food - it would be unfair to take anything out of the larder, but it would be quite all right if they each saved something from their breakfast, a piece of bread or a sausage or something. "Just something that we would have eaten anyway," John explained. "So it doesn't cost Aunt Mabel anything extra."

It seemed more sensible not to tell Ben anything until breakfast was over and Aunt Mabel had gone out to sell flags for Lifeboat Day. Although Ben was quite good at keeping secrets he was only young. Snatching food from the breakfast table would make him excited and giggly; he might easily give the whole show away.

They had quite forgotten that Aunt Mabel had asked them to help her on Lifeboat Day and she didn't mention it. But when they were halfway through breakfast - just as John had managed to slip a beef sausage into the pocket of his shirt - Uncle Abe appeared in the kitchen.

"I want some volunteers," he said in a loud voice.

The children looked up from their plates and stared.

He looked quite extraordinary. He was wearing a long, pale green tunic fastened at the waist - or where his waist would have been if he had one - by a broad, golden belt. His big, freckled arms were bare, so were his enormous, pale feet. On his head he wore a curious, green head-dress with pieces of real seaweed pinned on to it, and in one hand he held what looked like a huge, three-pronged fork. He grinned at the children a little sheepishly. "I'm supposed to be Neptune," he said. "This is my Trident." He waved it in the air and gave a short laugh. "Well - what d'you think of the outfit, eh?"

The children were silent for a moment. Their faces had gone pink and John's cheeks looked strangely puffed out and tight as a balloon. Finally Mary spoke, in a funny, prim sort of voice because she was trying so hard not to laugh. "I think you look very nice, Uncle Abe," she said.

John made an extraordinary sound, like a bursting paper bag. Then he got up from the table and clatter down the passage towards the garden, whooping with hysterical laughter.

Uncle Abe drew his brows together. "Well," he said. "I knew this rig didn't exactly suit my figure but I didn't think I looked as funny as all that. Dignified, that was the effect we were aiming at. Dignified and striking." At that moment, Aunt Mabel came into the kitchen, carrying a large paper parcel. Uncle Abe said to her, "It doesn't look, you know, as if I'm going to be quite the attraction we thought. Looks as if it might have quite the opposite effect, in fact. Young John has just rushed intemperately from the room." He looked at Aunt Mabel hopefully. "Shall we call the whole thing off? I don't mind making a first class fool of myself - I'm not complaining about that - but we don't want to drive people away, do we?"

"You won't do that," Aunt Mabel said calmly. "You look very..." She paused and looked at Uncle Abe consideringly. "Very - er - suitable," she finished.

Ben said suddenly, "What did he mean about volunteers?"

Aunt Mabel gave him a quick little smile. "We're having a ceremony, Ben," she said. "We want to get as much money as possible for the Lifeboat. So we're having a band, and Uncle Abe is going to sit in a boat at the end of the jetty and when the band strikes up, he's going to get out of the boat and walk up the jetty..."

"Neptune, rising from the sea," Uncle Abe said in a sad, resigned voice. "Striking terror into the hearts of the young men and maidens. An imaginative lot, the Lifeboat committee." He sighed deeply and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling.

"...and he is going to have two attendant Sea Sprites," went on Aunt Mabel firmly. "They were to have been the grocer's little boy and girl, but unfortunately they have German measles." She put the brown paper parcel down on the end of the table, unwrapped it, and shook out two filmy green tunics. She held them up thoughtfully. "I should think they will fit Mary and Ben quite nicely."

"ME," Ben said in a horrified voice. "ME. You mean I'VE got to wear a DRESS?"

Aunt Mabel nodded. "They're a bit thin and transparent. You'll have to wear a petticoat under them."

"PETTICOAT?"

"Yes. And a good warm vest underneath so you don't catch cold."

"VEST?" Ben said. Uncle Abe winked at him but Ben didn't smile.

Aunt Mabel said, "Yes, Ben. Tunic, petticoat and vest. You'll be warm and you'll be pretty."

"PRETTY," Ben shouted. His face was so red and disgusted that Mary almost laughed although she really felt rather sorry for him: most boys hate dressing up but Ben hated it more than most.

She said soothingly, "Perhaps you can have seaweed in your hair. And a trident, like Uncle Abe. Then everyone will see you're a boy sea sprite."

Ben looked at Aunt Mabel with deep suspicion. "Can I have a trident?" he asked.

"You can have mine," Uncle Abe said quickly. "You can be my Bearer."

"It's an awfully Good Cause," Mary said. "It's to help all the poor sailors who might drown at sea." She glanced shyly at Aunt Mabel as she said this, afraid that it might make her unhappy. But Aunt Mabel was looking just as she usually did: poker-faced and a little cross.

Ben said nothing for a minute. He just glowered round the room, his lower lip stucked out. Then he drew a deep breath and said, very unenthusiastically, "All right. I don't mind."

Mary gave a little sigh of relief. Once Ben had made up his mind, he stuck to it. He didn't look exactly happy - his grim, resigned expression suggested a Roman Gladiator facing certain death in the arena - but he stood quite still while Aunt Mabel dressed him up in the tunic and tied a gold sash round his waist and pinned a few strands of seaweed in his tousled, dark hair. Then he sat glumly in a chair and watched Mary change into her costume.

Mary enjoyed dressing up. It was a pity that the expedition to the House of Secrets would have to be put off for another day but by the time she had fastened the gold belt round the filmy green dress she had quite forgotten her disappointment and was feeling very cheerful and happy. Mary liked pleasing people and it would please Aunt Mabel if she and Ben helped to collect a lot of money for the Lifeboat. She spread out her skirts and danced round the room. "Do I look all right, Aunt Mabel?" she said.

Aunt Mabel looked at her smiling face. "Very pretty," she said. "Pretty as a picture." She swallowed and added, in an odd voice, "You need something for your hair. I won't be a minute."

When she had gone out of the room, Ben said, "Why don't you paint a picture of Mary, Uncle Abe. Aunt Mabel says you used to paint pictures."

"I did once." Uncle Abe gave one of his deep, gusty sighs.

"Did you sell them? That's what you do with your statues, isn't it?"

Uncle Abe grinned. "I try to sell them. But does anyone buy them? That's the point."

"I thought that's why you went up to London yesterday," Ben said.

Mary frowned at him; she thought it was rude of Ben to be so inquisitive. But Uncle Abe didn't seem to mind. He just shrugged his shoulders and said cheerfully. "That's right. But it was fruitless errand, as they say." He scowled at Ben in his mock-fierce way. "Take my advice, my boy, and learn a good trade. Ben a plumber or a greengrocer."

"I'm going to be a man in a Bank," Ben said promptly. "Because they always have money." He thought for a minute and added, "Couldn't we collect money? Like we're going to collect for the Lifeboat - only we could collect just for ourselves?"

Uncle Abe regarded him thoughtfully. "We might, at that. We could dress you up in rags and old newpapers and stand you on the pavement with a notice. 'Starving Family to Support.' How would that do, eh?"

Ben eyes gleamed. "I could cover my face with powder so I'd look pale and sick and go without shoes. I could paint my feet with red paint, so it would look like blood - as if I'd cut my poor feet on the hard stones."

"Fine," Uncle Abe said approvingly. "You've got a flair, Ben. The right touch of inspired imagination. You'll go far."

Ben looked pleased and Mary said quickly, "Oh don't Uncle Abe. If you say things like that he'll think you mean it and he'll go and do it - he'll go collect money and then the police might can and he'd get into dreadful trouble."

"I would not," Ben said crossly. "If I saw a policeman come I'd run. I'd run so fast he couldn't catch me."

"Not in bare feet you wouldn't," Uncle Abe said. "Mary's right, Ben. Begging isn't thought a respectable profession in England." He laughed loudly, wiping his eyes, and when Aunt Mabel came back she eyes him suspiciously. "What's the joke?" she asked.

Uncle Abe hiccoughed. "Not on you'd enjoy, Mabel. Isn't it time we were off?"

"Yes. In a minute. Come here, Mary," Aunt Mabel said, her voice soft and her hands gentle as she smoothed Mary's hair back from her forehead and showed her a little pearl band. The pearls were sewn on black velvet stretched over a stiff frame. "To keep your hair back," Aunt Mabel said. "You can keep it, afterwards."

Mary thought it was the prettiest thing she had ever seen. She drew a deep, happy breath. "Oh, Aunt Mabel, it's lovely." She stood still while Aunt Mabel fitted it over her head and then stepped back to look at her, with a queer, thoughtful expression in her eyes.

"Was it yours, when you were a girl?" Mary asked. "It is nice of you to give it to me." She felt awkward and shy suddenly and said, "Thank you - oh thank you," under her breath.

Aunt Mabel said, "Yes, it was mine. But there's no need to thank me. It's only an old thing I hadn't any use for. Come on - it's time we were off. I don't know what John's doing. I found him skulking in the garden - I told him to keep an eye on Miss Pin."

"Here's your Trident," Uncle Abe said to Ben. "Carry it over your shoulder. And try to look as if you were enjoying yourself."

Ben looked at him in disdain and made no reply.

John waited for about half an hour after the others had gone partly because of Miss Pin and partly because he wanted to savour the thought that he would be in the House of Secrets, all alone. John had alway found that almost the best part of doing something was the excitement of thinking about it beforehand. His heart thumped away inside him all the time he was looking after Miss Pin, taking her the warm milk she always had at ten o'clock and the chopped lettuce and sliced banana for Sir Lancelot. Miss Pin didn't talk to John as she talked to Ben but treated him as a kind of servant; when he had finished filling her kettles she said, "You may go now," in a very grand, regal way.

But John didn't go. He stood by the door where she couldn't see him and waited until he heard a little, fluttery, snoring sound. Then he peeped round the clothes-horse that screened her and saw she was asleep. She would sleep like this, huddled up small in her gay shawl, the feathered hat nodding on her head, until lunch time. John went out, very quietly, and closed the door.

He didn't take any of the things with him that he had planned to take. It would be more sensible to put up the bookshelves another time, when Mary and Ben would be there to help him. He thought he might look for a rug to put in front of the fireplace and perhaps find a broom to sweep up the attic, but first of all he just wanted to be there, by himself, looking at the sea from the window and thinking his own thoughts without anyone bothering him.

John never minded being alone. In a queer way, he was much less nervous of strange and lonely places when he was by himself; as he climbed the big, dark staircase of the house next door, he thought that if there were ghosts - as there well might be in this old house - he wouldn't mind at all. He would creep quietly past without disturbing them, just as if he were a ghost himself.

He didn't go into any of the rooms. He went straight up to the sunny attic, climbed on to the oak chest and pushed open the creaky old window. It was a warmer day than usual and the air felt soft and fresh. It was very enclosed up here with the old roof slanting up on either side of the window, and very private. John liked the feeling that he was shut right away from the world and that no one knew where he was.

He stood on the chest for a long time, blinking drowsily like an owl in the sun. He thought if Mary and Ben were here, they wouldn't let him be so lazy and quiet. They would be talking loudly and wanting to do things. He sighed a little and began to feel guilty. When they knew he had spent the morning in the attic, they would expect him to have cleaned up a bit or done something to make it look nice and homely.

He wondered if there would be anything inside the oak chest that would do to furnish the attic. The lid was heavy and creaked as he opened it and a strong and musty smell came from the inside.

It seemed to be full of old clothes - several pairs of dark trousers and two jackets with gold buttons and gold trimmings - and some bundles and found an old tweed hat with a label fastened on to the side with a pin. The label said, 'Father's gardening hat'. It was a very old hat with moth holes in it - a funny thing to keep so carefully wrapped up, John thought. In another newspaper bundle he found a pair of girl's satin slippers, dirty white with tarnished buckles on the front. He put the slippers and the hat back in their newspaper wrappings, lifted out the trousers and the jackets and found, at the bottom of the chest an odd mixture of things: a wooden box with chess men in it, a packet of seeds, an old hammer and a photograph album tied up with a red ribbon.

John untied the ribbon and opened the album. The photographs were rather brown and faded, and showed stiff looking people in old-fashioned clothes. As he turned the pages, the photographs became less faded and the clothes the people were wearing were much more modern. There was a photograph of two girls, one tall and frowning, one short and plump and smiling. Underneath was written, Mabel and Hetty. John stared at the picture; then, suddenly, his heart seemed to jump right up into his throat. Hetty was his mother's name. It gave him a very strange feeling to see what she looked like as a little girl, with a short dress and bows in her hair. Slowly, he turned over more pages but there were no more pictures of his mother. There was one of Aunt Mabel in a long white dress, holding a bouquet of flowers and several of a big, smiling man in naval uniform. The last page of the album was torn a little and looked as if someone had torn out a photograph rather roughly - a corner had been left behind. John wondered who it was a photograph of and what had happened to it. He closed the album and looked inside the chest. He found it in a corner, screwed up and squashed with all the things that had been lying on top of it. He smoothed it out on his knee and looked at it carefully. It was a picture of Aunt Mabel - a young, pretty Aunt Mabel whose hair was short and curly instead of scragged back from her face. She was smiling and holding a tiny baby wrapped in a lacy shawl.

John wondered who the baby was and thought, perhaps it was himself. He had been born in England and Aunt Mabel had known him when he was small. But why had she torn the photograph out of the album and left it loose in her chest? He knew now that this must be Aunt Mabel's chest. She had packed all these things away in it and left them behind when she sold the house and no one had touched them since. The jackets with the gold buttons must have been her husband's naval uniform; the gardening hat probably belonged to her father. Perhaps she had wanted to keep it, when he died, to remember him by.

John put the things back in the chest, folding the clothes as carefully as he could. He put the photograph of Aunt Mabel and the baby in his trouser pocket; he thought Ben and Mary would be interested to see it. When he had closed the lid, he suddenly felt rather lonely and miserable. For the first time that morning he wished that Mary and Ben were with him and he decided that he would go back home to wait for them.

He went slowly down the attic stairs and opened the door on to the top landing.

And then he stopped, holding his breath.

He could hear something: a slow pretty tune that seemed to float gently up the dark stair well to where he was standing. Someone, somewhere in the house, was playing a piano. There was a piano, he remembered, in one of the big rooms on the ground floor. But who was playing it? It couldn't be a burglar - not an ordinary burglar, anyway, because no ordinary burglar would stop to play the piano. Could it be a ghost? The tune was soft and somehow mournful; the sort of tune a ghost would play if a ghost could play.

For a few minutes John stood where he was, very still and quiet. Then slowly - very slowly - he began to creep down the stairs. His heart was thumping but he was more curious than frightened.

When he reached the hall, he could hear quite plainly where the music was coming from: the big room at the back where there was the picture of the man on the white horse. John went slowly to the door of this room and looked in. There was a large, gilt-frame mirror opposite the door and he could see the piano reflected in it and the person who was playing it. It was a girl in a high-necked brown jersey; a girl with very long, straight, dark hair, a pinched, monkeyish face and big, dark eyes, rather like Ben's. The eyes were looking at John in the mirror, but John couldn't believe she was really seeing him because she went on playing. But the tune got slower and slower and at last she stopped altogether and stood up.

John drew a long breath and went into the room. She was standing by the piano, facing him. She was tall - taller than he was.

"Who are you?" she said. "I thought - I thought someone was watching me."

She wasn't a ghost. Her voice was quite ordinary and she was just as nervous as John was.

He said boldly, "Who are you?"

She didn't answer for a minute, but stood, looking at John and hugging her elbows as if she was feeling shivery. Then she said in a low, breathless voice, "I am Victoria."

The Secret Passage - Chapter Four
The House of Secrets
by Nina Bawden

"Perhaps one of those old keys will fit," John panted as they wriggled back through the tunnel. He was not at all frightened now, he was much too excited. He had been in the cellar the House of Secrets. He only had to find a key - just one key - and he would be in the house itself!

Mary had left the bunch of keys on the bench in their own cellar, but when she scrambled out of the cubby hole and went to fetch them, the keys were gone. "I'm sure I left them here," she said in a loud, surprised voice.

"Be quiet - oh be quiet," John hissed behind her. He was looking up at the cellar door, his eyes wide with alarm. It stood ajar and a familiar, rattling noise came from the kitchen. "It's Aunt Mabel, stoking the Beast," he said.

Mary whispered, "She must have moved the keys, Yes - there they are, back on the nail."

She and John looked at each other in horror. They were filthy; their clothes were black and their hair and eyebrows were whitish grey with dust.

"We're awfully dirty. She'll be hopping mad," Ben said cheerfully.

"She'll find out about the passage," John said. This thought made his heart thump very fast. If Aunt Mabel knew where they had been she would almost certainly stop them going through the tunnel again and he would never see the house next door - never, never. He clenched his fists and muttered, "I couldn't bear it, I couldn't." He looked frantically at Mary. "What can we say? She must have been down here to get the coke for the Beast - she'll know we weren't just playing in the cellar."

Mary drew a deep breath. "Just don't say anything," she said. "Or you either, Ben. Just leave it to me."

Her back was very striaght and her head held very high as she marched up the cellar steps and into the kitchen. John and Ben followed her; John felt very scared, but Ben hummed a jaunty little tune under his breath. Aunt Mabel looked at them, her mouth open. "Whatever..." she began.

Mary gabbled very fast, "I'm sorry we got so dirty, Aunt Mabel. But we've been hiding in the cellar - in the cubby hole." It was almost true, she thought, they had been hiding in the cubby hole, but all the same the colour came and went in her cheeks and she stared guiltily at the floor.

"So that's where you were." Aunt Mabel said. "I wondered what you'd been doing with those old keys."

John said quickly, "Do you mind us playing with them, Aunt Mabel?"

Aunt Mabel shrugged her shouldres. "They're no use to me. Just a bunch of keys I've had for years. As a matter of fact, I think I brought most of them from the house next door - they won't fit many of the locks here."

John gave a little gasp, then a slow smile appeared on his face. It really was possible, then, that one of the keys would fit that cellar door. This made him feel so excited and happy that he stood, grinning to himself and looking rather foolish. Aunt Mabel gave him a curious look. Then she glanced at Mary and Ben and her lips twitched slightly. "You look as if you'd been climbing chimneys," she said. "It's good thing you had some old clothes on."

Her tone was quite uncomplaining and Mary suddenly realised that Aunt Mabel was not in the least like Mrs Epsom; she never made a fuss when they got dirty or tore their clothes. Then she saw a flimsy blue envelope on the table and everything else went out of her mind. "Is that from Daddy?" she cried.

"No," Aunt Mabel said. "It's from Mrs Epsom. Your father has gone on leave - Mrs Epsom says he's on safaru in the Northern Frontier District." She picked the letter up and put it in her apron pocket. "I expect he'll send you a postcard."

Ben laughed. "He won't be able to buy postcards there," he said scornfully.

"Won't he? I don't know much about Africa." Aunt Mabel looked at the children, frowning a little as if something was worrying her. Then she said sharply, "Run along and have a good, hot bath. Use plenty of soap. You look as if you could do with it."

When they had gone, she sat down, took the letter out of her pocket and read it. When Uncle Abe came in for his supper a little later, she was still sitting there, staring thoughtfully and somehow sadly in front of her, the letter still in her hand.

"Anything wrong?" he asked, surprised. Aunt Mabel didn't often sit like this, doing nothing.

Aunt Mabel glanced at him. "You'd better read this," she said shortly.

Uncle Abe took the letter and read it. Then he folded it carefully and handed it back to her. "Poor little beggars," he said softly. "Do they miss their father very much?"

"I think so," Aunt Mabel said. "They don't talk about him - but Mary runs to the letter box every morning. I hear her feet scampering down the passage and then coming back, very slowly. He hasn't written to them, not once. It looks as if he has quite forgotten about them. You saw what Mrs Epsom said? He seemed half out of his mind with grief..."

Uncle Abe blew his nose very loudly. He said, "He must have loved their mother very much."

He'd have fetched her the moon out of the sky, if he could," Aunt Mabel said in a dry voice. She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair in the way she often she did when she was thinking very hard about something. "He wasn't in a fit state to go off into the wilds on his own. Suppose something happends to him? What will happen to the children then?"

"I daresay he'll turn up safe and sound," Uncle Abe said slowly.

Aunt Mabel sighed. "I hope so. They're my sister's children and I shall do my best to do my duty by them. But it won't be easy. They expect such a lot - their parents adored them, spoiled them, to my mind."

"They don't seem spoiled to me. What do you mean?" Uncle Abe said.

Aunt Mabel shrugged her shoulders impatiently. "Oh - they just seem to expect everyone to love them. I haven't got time to fuss over children. I can just about afford to feed them as long as they're not particular but I can't afford to give them a lot of clothes and toys. I can't afford to give them anything..."

Uncle Abe was looking at her with an odd expression on his face. He said suddenly, "You can give them a home. That's the most important thing. I know that - after all, you've given me one. Oh - I know I'm supposed to be a lodger, but when did I last pay my rent? Tell me that?" He threw out his chest and thumped it with his big fist.

"Oh - don't ask silly questions," Aunt Mabel said. She got up from her chair and started to lay the table for supper, putting down the knives and forks with a lot of unnecessary noise.

Uncle Abe said, "It's not a silly question. I owe you a lot of money - money that you need now, for the children."

Aunt Mabel took no notice. Her cheeks were rather red and her eyes very bright.

Uncle Abe cleared his throat and said loudly, "As a matter of fact, I may be able to pay you back sooner than you expect. I've got an interview tomorrow, with a man who runs a big Art Gallery in London. He wrote and said he's like to see some of my stuff."

Aunt Mabel smiled. She didn't often smile, but when she did it was usually Uncle Abe who reminded her of her young husband who had been drowned at sea. Mr Haggard had been younger than Uncle Abewhen he died, but he had been a big, brawny man too, with flaming red hair.

She said, "In that case, you'd better remember to put on a clean shirt when you get up in the morning. And wash your neck thoroughly and clean your nails. They look as if they could do with it."

She spoke to Uncle Abe in the same sharp, almost angry way that she spoke to the children but Uncle Abe didn't mind because he was used to it.

John had the bunch of keys fastened to his belt. They were all wearing the dirty clothes they had worn the day before but they couldn't get into the passage until Aunt Mabel was out of the house.

They thought she would never go. Usually she went shopping as soon as breakfast was cleared away but today she had taken it into her head to turn out one of the kirchen cupboards and put clean paper on all the shelves. John and Mary hung around, trying to hurry her up by helping her, but she seemed maddeningly slow, taking down each piece of china from the top shelf and wiping it carefully before she put it back again.

Mary said, "Aunt Mabel, you really ought to get out in the open air. It's good for you."

From her perch at the top of the step ladder, Aunt Mabel looked down at Mary's pink face.

"Well," she said. "Since when have you been interested in my health, may I ask?"

John said innocently, "We've been thinking you looked a bit peaky, Aunt Mabel."

Aunt Mabel gave a funny little snort. "I'll go out when I'm good and ready. Not before. I've got a lot to do because it's Lifeboat Day tomorrow and I shall be busy selling flags."

"To pay for the new Lifeboat? The one that's down on the front, near the pier?"

Aunt Mabel nodded. "It isn't fitted out yet, though. We shall need to collect a lot of money."

"Will you be out selling flags all day tomorrow?" John asked eagerly. He grinned at Mary, whose eyes shone. They could only get into the passage when Aunt Mabel wasn't there and even if she went shopping she might easily get back before they did and find out what they were doing. If she was going to be out all day, tomorrow would be a wonderful opportunity.

"Most of the time, I expect," Aunt Mabel said. She gave them a small smile. "As a matter of fact, I thought you might like to help..."

"Oh," said John and Mary together. Their response was hardly enthusiastic and Aunt Mabel looked at their crestfallen faces in surprise. Although she believe they were spoiled, she had almost without realising it, come to think of Mary and John as very helpful children who were usually willing to do things for people. She said, rathet crossly, "Well - we'll talk about it tomorrow. I'm sure I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do."

Mary said quickly, "It's not that we don't want to, Aunt Mabel. We didn't mean..."

"Never mind what you meant," Aunt Mabel said. "I'm too busy to talk about it now. Run along and play - and take Ben with you. What's Ben doing?"

"Sitting with Miss Pin," John said, with a little sigh.

Ben had been with Miss Pin for the last hour. She was talking about Aunt Mabel. The oil stove threw a yellow, feathery pattern on the high, dim ceiling; Ben sat close to its lovely warmth, on the leather footstool, and listened. From time to time, he fed the tortoise, Sir Lancelot, with a piece of fresh lettuce.

Miss Pin was saying, "You should have seen you Aunt Mabel when she was young. She was the prettiest girl in Henstable. Tall and bonny, with long, graceful legs, like a deer. I used to sit here, in this room - it was just after my arthritis had laid hold of me properly - and listen to her, singing in the big garden next door. She sang all day, such sweet, pretty songs, to amuse her little sister. That was your Dear Mamma, Ben. I never saw any two sisters so loving. When your Aunt Mabel was married, your Mamma was her bridesmaid, in a pretty dress of white lace. They asked me to the wedding - such a pretty card, with gold bells all over it. Of course I couldn't go. Even if it hadn't been for my arthritis, it wouldn't have been Safe. I daren't leave Papa's treasure, you see. I'd promised him I would guard it always. But your Aunt Mabel came in to see me afterwards and brought me a piece of wedding cake. I've still got it somewhere - in that old chest in the corner, I think. She was wearing such a pretty dress..."

"Get on to the sad bit," Ben said. He was much more interested in hearing how Mr Haggard's ship had gone down in a great storm in the Pacific Ocean, than he was in the dress Aunt Mabel was wearing when she got married.

Miss Pin frowned. "Don't be impatient, boy. All in good time. Just fill my kettle first, will you, dear?" She waited while Ben put a kettle on the oil stove and gave her a new one for her lap. Then she put her hat straight on her head, tucked her bright shawl firmly about her, and went on. "For about a year, Ben dear, your Aunt and her nice young husband were happy as the day is long. My Dear Mamma used to say you can only have so much happiness in this life. Your Aunt Mabel had it all - in one short year."

She sighed deeply, but Ben knew she was enjoying herself. Like Ben, Miss Pin thought sad things were more interesting than happy ones. She huddled up in her chair, looking like an aging parrot, and went on in a low, trembling voice. "It came to an end so suddenly. That terrible storm at sea - I can see it, Ben. The great, purple waves breaking over the ship, the fierce winds buffeting it, the poor sailors... The storm only lasted about an hour, but long before it was over, all was lost. They sent out S.O.S messages, but there was no ship near enough to help them. The ship broke up completely, and went down with the brave Captain standing on the bridge, saluting. The crew took to the boats, but no lifeboat could last in that sea. No one was saved except the ship's cat who came floating ashore at some island or other, riding on an old plank and miaowing like a banshee. Just think, Ben! Your poor Aunt had only been married a year." Miss Pin raised a corner of her shawl to her eyes as if to wipe away a tear. "Until fourteen years ago, she was the merriest creature you ever saw. Then, suddenly, everything changed. In one
month - one short month, Ben, her poor husband died and she lost her little girl. Of couse your Mamma was still with her, to comfort her, but she wan't there long. She married just after - out of the school-room..."

"Lost what?" Ben interrupted her in an astonished voice. This was part of the story he hadn't heard before. "I didn't know Aunt Mabel had a girl."

"Indeed she did. The prettiest little thing. Very delicate, of course - like a little doll. Your Aunt and your Mamma were living in the big house next door - their parents were dead long since, you know - and your Aunt put the dear baby out in her pram while she got ready to go shopping. When she came out, the child was gone."

Ben's eyes were large and round as saucers. He whispered, "Did the Enemy take it? The baby, I mean?"

Miss Pin looked at him. There was a queer, sharp look in her boot-button eyes. She said slowly, "I suppose he did, Ben dear. But I shouldn't have told you. Mrs Haggard will be cross with me."

"Her bark is worse than her bite," Ben said kindly. "But you needn't worry. I won't tell her I know."

He was going to ask Miss Pin if Aunt Mabel hadn't looked for her lost baby and why the police hadn't found it, but just at that moment the door opoened a crack and John's face peered through it.

He said, in a carrying whisper, "Ben, she's gone out. Hurry..."

Ben stood up. "I've got to go now, Miss Pin. Thank you for having me," he said politely.

"It's been a pleasure, Mr Mallory," she said in her queenly way. "I shall be delighted to see you again. Have you still got the little horse?"

Ben dived into his pocket and brought out some rubber bands, a mint toffee that he had half sucked and put back in its paper, a nail or two and the green horse.

"What do you call him?" Miss Pin asked.

"I call him Pin," Ben said, rather shyly. He was afraid she might not like this.

But she didn't seem to mind. Her black eyes snapped and she said, "Guard him well. He is part of my Papa's Treasure. He will bring you luck."

This time, the passage did not seem nearly so dark, nor so long. In case the torch gave out, they had bought a new battery with half a crown John had found in the pocket of his best suit. And Mary had a wet flannel, rolled in a polythene bag and stuffed under her jersey. "We can't go into someone else's house with our hands all dirty," she explained.

So before they tried to open the door at the head of the stairs, they stood in the cellar of the next door house and solemnly tried to clean up their faces and hands by the light of the torch. The result was rather streaky and the flannel looked very black indeed. Mary put it back in the polythene bag and left it by the cellar steps. Then she ran up to stand behind John while he tried to open the door.

It wasn't as quick and easy a business as they had expected. There were a great many keys in the big bunch, but none of them seemed to fit. John didn't say anything, but his face began to lose its cheerful expression and became determined and sad as he went on, trying one key after another.

"We could saw the door down," Ben suggestion. "There's and old saw in our cellar."

"Don't be silly," Mary said crossly. "You can't damage someone else's house. You'd be a kinf od burglar."

"Well, we are burglars, aren't we?" Ben said, looking at her with such an innocent-looking-pretending smile on his face that she could have pushed him down the stairs.

She set her lips and said, "Not really. I mean, we're not going to steal anything. And it isn't as if anyone lived here. We can't be doing any harm."

John said in a despairing voice, "There's no point in talking about it because it doesn't look as if we're going to get in."

Suddenly, he threw the bunch of keys away from him and they landed with a crash in the middle of the cellar floor. He stumped past Mary and Ben to pick them up and then stood, staring in front of him with misery written all over his face.

Mary went down to him. "Have you tried them all?" she asked. It made her feel sad inside to see John looking so unhappy. She knew that although she wanted to get inside the house, she didn't want it as badly as John did. She put her hand on his arm and he looked at her with a shaky little smile and said, "It's horrid, isn't it? But I suppose it was nice thinking we might be able to see inside. It was better than nothing."

Ben said, from the top of the stairs, "But the door's not locked at all!"

They looked up and saw a crack of light at the top of the steps. The crack widened and they saw Ben's figure outlined against the crack from the opening door.

"But it was locked. I'm sure it was locked," John cried.

"Well, it isn't now," Ben shouted back impatiently. "Come on. It's your old house, John. Don't you want to go first?"

John made a funny, choking sound in his throat and was up the stairs in two long leaps. He rushed through the door but once he was over the threshold he suddenly stopped, so that Ben bumped into him.

"Ouch," he said.

John turned on him. "Ssh. Don't make such a noise."

"I couldn't help it," Ben grumbled. "I banged myself on the nobbles of your spine. You're so thin." He was rubbing his poor nose and his eyes were watering.

"Sorry," John said. "But I just . . . I just feel we shouldn't rush and shout and bang about. The . . . the house mightn't like it. It's been shut up so long that it isn't used to a lot of noise..."

He had such a solemn look on his face that Mary and Ben did as he said, walking behind him on tiptoe and speaking in whispers. And, as a matter of fact, once they had come out of the ice-cold, bare old kitchen into which the cellar door had opened, they walked quietly and spoke in hushed whispers quite naturally.

It was such a very splendid house. It was cold as a tomb and dark because most of the curtains were drawn but once their eyes got used to the dimness they could see that the rooms were full of beautiful things. There were deep, soft carpets on the floor; in the wide hall there was even a carpet hanging on the wall, fine and soft and patterned with glowing red and gold colours. There were gold cabinets full of delicate china birds and shepherdness and shelves that reached up to the ceilings full of old, beautiful books, and statues standing in the hal and on slender, marble columns in the big drawing room, and pictures - pictures on all the walls. Some of them were small and full of light, dancing colours and some were large and dark, in heavy carved gold frames. There was a picture of a boy in a dark velvet suit holding a dove on his wrist that Mary felt she could look at for ever and ever, and one of a man in a great, scarlet cloak, sitting on a proud, white horse. John stood in front of this picture for a long time. "The man's eyes are so sad," he said. "It makes me feel funny - sort of sad and happy at the same time."

They went into all the rooms downstairs and then climbed to the first floor up a wide, curving staircase. The bedrooms were all very big and full of pictures like the rooms downstairs and had high, old-fashioned beds with curtains hanging round them. Ben tugged at one of the curtains and a little shower of dust fell. "No one's slept here for ages," he said.

"Of course they haven't," Mary said. "Mr Reynolds - the old man the house belongs to - hasn't been here for ages," he said.

"Two years," John said. "That's what Aunt Mabel told me. Can you imagine anyone having a lovely house like this and all these pictures and just leaving it?" He stared round wonderingly at the room they were in, which was very pretty with blue, velvet curtains at the windows and a black and gold cabinet with glass doors tha had a collection of small ornaments inside. Ben went up to the cabinet and pressed his nose against the glass. "They're like Miss Pin's," he said. "Look Mary - there's a little horse like mine, it's exactly the same colour."
"It looks the same," Mary agreed. "But it can't be, quite. These must be very valuable things. That's why they're all locked up."

"My horse is valuable too," Ben muttered mutinously. "And I think he's prettier," He took out Pin and fondled him lovingly.

"He is pretty," Mary said consolingly. "But he can't be so precious. Otherwise Miss Pin wouldn't have given him to you."

Ben said nothing but scowled at her fiercely and stumped up the next flight of stairs, glowering and dragging his feet.

There was a bathroom on the next floor with a big marble washstand and an enormous bath that had four gold lion's paws for feet. There were more bedrooms, but they were not so big and grand as the ones on the first floor, and the furniture was plainer. At the corner of the landing there was a door; John opened it and they saw a narrow flight of stairs, curving up round and round, as if it led up a tower. There was no carpet on the stairs and though the wall had been painted, it must have been a very long time ago because the paint was peeling off and there were holes in the plaster; in one place a big piece had fallen down and the laths were showing through. They climbed up, round and round, until the backs of their legs felt tired. Then, quite suddenly, the stairway took a final twist and they found themselves standing in a pool of brilliant sunlight that made them blink.

"It's the attic," John cried in a high, excited voice.

They were at the very top of the house, in a big, long room with sloping ceilings and a wide window through which the dusty shafts of sunlight streamed. It was a bare, neglected place; there was worn, green lino on the floor and several panes of glass were missing from the windows. The corners of the ceiling were grey with cobwebs. There was a dusty chest standing under the window and against one wall there was an old brass bedstead. It had a thin mattress that was half hidden by a red silk shawl with bright coloured birds embroidered on it. The shawl had been arranged carefully over the mattress as if to cover it up as much as possible.

Mary stared and stared at the bedstead. Her breath came very fast and she was suddenly so excited that she could hardly speak.

She said in a choking voice, "That must be the bed Aunt Mabel was talking about. The one she and mother used to play on. Do you remember? She told us about it in the train - she said it might still be here."

"I wonder," John said. "I wonder..." He went up to the bed and touched the silk shawl. It made him feel queer to think of his mother and Aunt Mabel being young and playing games on this old bed. His face was very grave. He said, "Perhaps no one has been up here since Aunt Mabel went away. That would be years and years..."

"Fourteen years," Ben said suddenly.

"How do you know?" Mary asked.

Ben shrugged his shoulders. "I just do."

Mary and John looked at each other. They saw Ben was annoyed about something so it was no good trying to make him explain how he knew.

"Aunt Mabel said she sold the house after her husband died," John said slowly. "Perhaps that was fourteen years ago. It's an awfully long time. I wonder if we're the first people to come here - in all these years."

"Of course we aren't, stupid," Ben said.

"We might be," Mary said. "After all, if Mr Reymolds had come up here and seen what a nice room it is, he's have painted it up and hung pictures in it."

"Perhaps he didn't think it was nice," John said. But that didn't seem likely, because it was nice room, sunny and bright, with a friendly feeling to it. The window was high up in the roof and when John and Mary stood on the oak chest, they found they could see the sea, just as Aunt Mabel had said. It was very dark blue; the sun, shining on it, made sparkles of light that were so bright it almost hurt to look at them. John and Mary stood in silence, watching the seagulls and a tiny steamer, moving slowly across the horizon. After a little while, John said, "It's lovely here. Mr Reynolds can't have seen how lovely it is - he can't have come up here at all."

"Someone else has been up here, though," Ben said.

They turned from the window and looked at him. He was sitting on the bed, his hands in his pockets, smiling to himself.

Mary sat down on the bed beside him. "Please tell us, Ben dear," she said pleadingly. "I'm sorry I was rude about Pin. I think he's a beautiful horse and much nicer than the one in the room downstairs."

Ben whistled a little bit longer. Then he relented, partly because Mary was looking at him so coaxingly, and partly because he couldn't resist showing his brother and sister how clever he was.

"You know Aunt Mabel's got some brass candlesticks in the dining room?" he said. "Well - you know she's always polishing them. She says they go dull if you don't. Well - this brass bed is all shiny and bright, isn't it?" Just as if it had been polished yesterday."

It was quite true. John and Mary were a little bit ashamed because they hadn't thought of this for themselves. "You are clever," Mary said.

"Yes," Ben said smugly. He grinned so broadly that Mary thought it must make his cheeks ache.

"That isn't the only thing," he said. "Just listen."

They listened. At first, they could only hear the singing of the birds which was very loud because the attic window was up in the roof and birds were beginning to nest under the caves. Then they heard something else. Something so ordinary that they really hadn't noticed it. It was a ticking clock.

John found it. It was lying on its back on the bed, hidden under the embroidered shawl. It was a cheap-looking alarm clock with a fat, loud tick.

Ben said triumphantly, "You see? That sort of clock has to be wound up every day."

Mary said, "Perhaps we jogged it - perhaps we sort of jogged it when we sat down on the bed and it started going by itself..."

John shook his head. "No," he said. "No. It must have been wound up." His eyes blazed bright. "Someone must have been here," he said.

The Secret Passage - Chapter Three
The Secret Passage
by Nina Bawden

The house next door belonged to a man called Mr Reynolds. He was an art collector, Aunt Mabel told John, and the house was full of paintings and other tresures he had brought from all over the world.

"He's got a big house in London as well," Aunt Mabel said, "and a castle somewhere in France. It's my belief that he bought my house chiefly to have somewhere else to hang all his pictures - though what pleasure he gets out of them, I can't think. He hasn't been down here for at least two years."

It seemed queer to John that someone should buy a lot of pictures and hang them up in a house he never visited. It made the house next door seem more mysterious than ever. John wished he could get inside it to find out what it was like but he didn't say so to Mary. He was afraid she would laugh at him, as she had laughed when he told her he had seen the face at the window. He had only seen it for a moment, a dim, pale blur at one of the top floor windows, and after a little while he began to think he must have imagined it. No one could possibly get inside the house; it seemed so very empty and shut up and the garden walls were so high. John thought it was sad that a house should be so silent and unwanted and wondered if it would feel different from other houses that were used and lived in.

It was partly because he was an imaginative boy that he thought so much about the house, and partly because he had very little else to do. Mary was busy helping Aunt Mabel - she made the beds and went shopping and washed up the dishes - and Ben spent as much time as he could with Miss Pin. Neither Mary nor John knew what they talked about, shut up in that dark, stuffy room, but they could hear their voices droning on and on behind the clsoed door, like bees on a summer day.

"What do you talk about all the time?" John asked Ben.

"Oh - just things," Ben said mysteriously. "About olden times when she was a girl. It's like a story. She tells lovely stories."

Aunt Mabel seemed to be glad tha Ben like Miss Pin. She let him carry in her trays at meal-times and fill up her kettles and answer the little brass cow bell that she rang whenever she wanted anything. "It saves my legs," Aunt Mabel said.

One Saturday morning, when the children had been in Henstable for two months, Aunt Mabel was busier than ever. A man had telephoned from London the night before to ask for a room for the weekend; he had said that if he like The Haven, he might stay longer. Aunt Mabel said it was a stroke of luck to get someone at this time of the year; she asked Mary to help her clean out one of the guest rooms and make the bed and she sent John to buy a chicken from the fishmonger.

The visitor arrived just before lunchtime. Peeping over the banisters, the children saw a small, pale man with a high, bald forehead and two pointed, yellow teeth that stuck out in front of his mouth. He didn't come upstairs to see the room that Mary had helped Aunt Mabel get ready for him, but went straight into the dining room, leaving his suitcase standing in the hall. Aunt Mabel showed him to a table, then came out again and whispered up to the children, "You'll have to wait for your lunch."

The children waited, crouching together on the stairs. They saw Aunt Mabel come up from the basement carrying the visitor's lunch on a tray. There was a chicken, brown and still spitting from the oven and separate little dishes of peas, carrots and potatoes, all glistening with butter. Ben's mouth watered. "Do you think he'll eat it all? Every bit??" he said wistfully.

Aunt Mabel came out of dining room with an empty tray and disappeared down to the kitchen. When she reappeared, ten minutes later, she was carrying the pudding - crusty apple pie with a jug of wrinkled, yellow cream. She smiled cheerfully at the children before she went into the dining room but when she came out again she didn't look cheerful at all. Her face was stiff and anxious. On the tray was the lovely, crisp chicken. It was barely touched.

Ben whispered, "Golly - did you see? There'll be lots left for us!" He smacked his lips with a juicy noise and rubbed his stomach.

"Don't be silly," Mary said sharply. "If he hasn't eaten the chicken - it means he doesn't like it. And if he doesn't like the food, he won't stay."

John said, "Perhaps he doesn't like first courses. Perhaps he only likes pudding. And it's a lovely apple pie."

They watched anxiously while Aunt Mabel took in the coffee and brought outthe remains of the pudding.He had hardly eaten anything - just the smallest hole had been made in the side of the sugar-dusted crust. Aunt Mabel didn't look up at the children. She stumped straight down to the kitchen.

"Perhaps he wasn't hungry. Or perhaps he's a vegetarian," John suggested hopefully.

"Vegetarians eat apple pie," Mary said.

They were silent for a minute. Then Ben said, "He'll have to pay for it anyway, won't he?"

"I don't know." There was a little frown on Mary's forehead. She was thinking of how hard Aunt Mabel had worked to make the house look nice and cook a good lunch. And of how much the chicken and the cream had cost. Everything cose a lot - even gas, for cooking. The Gas Bill had arrived at breakfast time and Aunt Mabel had sighed when she saw it.

Then the visitor came out into the hall. He was wiping his mouth with his handkerchief and looking round him in a lost sort of way.

John whispered, "Perhaps he wants to go to the bathroom."

Mary stood up. She wasn't quite sure what she was going to say but she knew she was going to say something and it made her feel shaky and queer. She went a little way down the stairs and said in a loud voice, "Do you want anything?" The man looked up, startled, and she went on quickly, "I'm afraid you didn't eat much of your nice lunch. I hope it was because you just weren't hungry, not because you didn't like it."

The man didn't answer. He simply stared at Mary with his pale eyes. Although he had eaten so little, he hadn't been very tidy about it: there were food stains on his waistcoat and on his tie. Mary felt dreadfully nervous but she took a deep breath and went on, "We hope you'll like our boarding house and stay here for a long time because Aunt Mabel needs lots of money to pay the Gas Bill and things like that."

"Good heavens," the visitor said. "Good heavens." He looked quite atonished and rather angry. He glared at Aunt Mabel who had come into the hall while Mary had been talking. She gave him a stiff, apologetic smile, marched to the foot of the stairs and said in an icy voice, "Mary - all of you - go down to the kitchen this minute."

They went, in silence. Aunt Mabel followed them. When she had closed the kitchen door she said, "Mary, you are a naughty, impertinent girl. Please remember in future that you are not to speak to my guests or bother them in any way. This gentleman is an important man in the City - he has come down here to have a rest, not to be badgered by rude children." She was very white and shaking.

Ben said, "He doesn't look like an important man. He looks just like a rabbit." And he giggled suddenly, his hand across his mouth.

"He looks like your bread and butter," Aunt Mabel said. "Don't you forget it." And she went out and shut the door.

No one spoke for a minute. Mary was staring hard at the floor, the blood burning in her cheeks.

Then Ben said, "What did she mean? Why does he looke like our bread and butter?"

John looked at Mary and said slowly, "I think she means what she said in the train - that she gets all her money from visitors who come and stay here. And unless people come and stay and pay her for it, she can't buy food for us."

Ben shrugged his shoulders. "I don't like bread and butter," he said. "I like bread and butter and jam."

In the afternoon, Aunt Mabel sent them down to the sea and told them to stay out of the visitor's way until tea time.

It was very cold. Although it was March, none of the daffodils in the gardens had opened and even the buds looked pinched and cold as if the sharp winds had frozen them. As for the sea - the children thought they had never seen anything so grey and wild, not at all like the sea at Mombasa in Kenya where you could swim all day and see marvellous fish and rocks if you dived under the clear, blue water.

Since they came to England, they had spent a great deal of time by this chilly sea because Aunt Mabel had decided they were not to go to school until the Summer Term. They had all caught coughs and colds and when she took them to the doctor, he said, "No school for a bit. They're perfectly healthy, but they've live in Africa for so long that they haven't any resistance to English germs. Let them run about and get used to the climate."

They had to run about most of the time, to keep warm. It was so cold that Mary and John and chilblains on theur fingers and toes that itched and burned whenever tey were indoors by the fire. Aunt Mabel put ointment on the chilblains and gave them cough mixture for their chests. She was kind to them in that sort of way - a brisk, rather impersonal way like a nurse or a schoolteacher. But she never once kissed them good night or asked if they were happy. Mary sometimes thought that if she hadn't got John and Ben, she might have felt very sad and lonely indeed.

"She's not cross, exactly," she said to John, "I think it's just that she doesn't like us much."

They were sitting on the beach in the shelter of a slimy green breakwater, throwing stones into an old tin can that John had stuck up on a pole. Ben was looking for cockles in a patch of shiny mud left by the outgoing tide. He was crouching on his haunches, watching for the tell-tale wriggle in the mud and then burrowing with his fingers to find the tiny, pink-shelled creatures that Uncle Abe liked to eat for tea.

"She's not used to liking people," John said. "I mean - she's never had a family to practise on, has she? And I think she's worried because it costs so much to feed us and mend our shoes and that sort of thing."

"Why doesn't Dad send her some money, then?"

John frowned. "Perhaps he hasn't got any. After all, the house was swept away and everything. Or perhaps he hasn't thought about it. You know how vague he is - Mother always paid the bills, didn't she?" He went rather pink, suddenly, and threw a stone very hard at the tin.

"Well, what about Uncle Abe and Miss Pin? I mean - if the rabbity man looked like our bread-and-butter why don't that?"

"I don't think they pay anything," John said surprisingly. "You remember Uncle Abe said she was an angel? Well, it couldn't be because she's so sweet and kind, could it? So I think he said it because she lets him stay free."

"Did he tell you that?" Mary said.

"No. I guessed because he never sells any of his statues and all his clothes are so awful. But he did tell me about Miss Pin. He was showing me how to model a head in his workshop yesterday and he said, where was Ben, and I said he was helping Aunt Mabel clean Miss Pin's room - you know she lets him dust her little animals and things - and Uncle Abe said it was a blessing Ben got on so well with the old lady because it took some of the weight off Aunt Mabel's shoulders. I asked him if Miss Pin had always lived here and he said yes, she's been a lodger at The Haven for as long as anyone could remember. Long before Aunt Mabel bought it. Uncle Abe said Miss Pin had a niece who used to pay her bills, but when Aunt Mabel took over the boarding house, the niece came down to see her and said she couldn't afford to pay any longer and Miss Pin would have to go into a Home. But Aunt Mabel wouldn't hear of it; she said as long as she had her health and strength the poor old soul could stay with her, and welcome."

"I think that was very nice of Aunt Mabel," Mary said slowly.

"Uncle Abe said she has a heart of gold. But as soon as he'd said it, he gave one of his funny laughs and said he must admit it didn't show. Then he stopped laughing and said I'd learn when I got older that people weren't always what they seemed to be. He said Aunt Mabel was really a very loving sort of person but she hadn't had anyone to love for so long that she'd got out of the habit."

Mary said, "I suppose she must have been awfully sad when her husband was drowned. I remember Dad said he was quite young and they hadn't been married long." Mary felt tears prickling behind her eyes. She turned her head away so that John should't see and said, "There's one thing I don't understand, though. Ben says Miss Pin is rich."

"She's batty," John said scornfully.

Ben heard him say that. He had just come up with his pail full of cockles. "She's not," he said angrily. "She's nice. And she knows a lot of things you don't know. She's told me some of them. She knows something you don't know about the house."

"What?"

"Shan't tell you." Ben glared at John. He had got thinner since they had come to Henstable and his eyes looked bigger and darker than they used to look. He stamped his foot and said, "She wouldn't tell you either. You're too mean and horrible."

"You tell me, then," John said. He got up and advanced on Ben who jumped over the breakwater and stuck out his tongue. John scrambled after him and grabbed hold of his arm. "Come on," he said, giving Ben a little shake, "tell me."

"I won't. It's a secret," Ben said. He shook himself free and faced his brother, his dark eyes blazing.

"Stop it, both of you," Mary said. She felt suddenly that she couldn't bear it if they quarrelled. She said coaxingly, "Let's go home - we've got to cook the cockles and it must be mearly time for tea."

But tea wasn't ready. As they walked towards The Haven, they saw that a taxi had stopped outside and that the rabbity man was getting into it. Aunt Mabel was standing on the step, watching him go.

"Is he leaving?" Mary asked as they came up to her.

Aunt Mabel didn't seem to hear, she just turned on her heel and went indoors. It wasn't until they were all downstairs in the kitchen that she said, "Yes, he's gone. Mary, lay the table, will you?"

She put the kettle on and lit the grill to make toast for tea. Her expression was so stiff and forbidding that none of the children dared say anything. When tea was ready, they sat down at the table with downcast eyes. None of them felt in the least hungry.

After about five minutes, Mary said nervously, "Aunt Mabel - did the man go away because of what I said?"

Aunt Mabel glanced at her briefly - "No - no, of course not. He left because his bedroom was too cold." She gave a short laugh. "As if a grown man would bother about what a little girl said!"

Mary felt a little better, but not much. It was kind of Aunt Mabel to say it wasn't her fault, but she had spoken in such a cold, angry way that she still felt very miserable. She sat, staring at her plate and so did John and Ben.

Looking at their faces, Aunt Mabel thought they were sulking. It didn't occur to her that they were unhappy because they thought she was dreadfully cross with them. She didn't even know she had sounded cross. She had had such a lonely, worrying life - it was even more worrying now she had three children to look after - that she had grown rather prickly and sharp-voiced without realising it. She was a stiff, rather shy sort of person and although she would have liked to be kinder and more loving to the children, she did not really know how to begin. As a result, her brisk, unaffectionate ways froze up even Mary's kind heart and, as she sat, eating her toast, she began to think that it was all very well for Uncle Abe to say Aunt Mabel was nice and loving underneath. But it didn't make her any easier to live with.

After tea, Aunt Mabel went down to the shops to get fresh fish for Miss Pin's supper. The only kind of fish Miss Pin liked was plaice, boned and steamed in butter. As soon as she was gone, Ben said in an excited voice, "I've got an idea." He was very pink and his eyes shone. "It's an idea how to make money."

Mary and John looked at each other. They remembered that it had been Ben who had asked Aunt Mabel if she was really poor, when they were in the train coming to Henstable. He had never mentioned it since, but that was like Ben. If he had a problem he didn't talk about it, but turned it over and over in his mind until he had an answer to it. He said now, "We can collect cockles. I saw some men on the beach collecting cockles and they said they sold them to the fish shop. We could do that, then Aunt Mabel would have enough money to buy lots of bread and butter."

John said, "But you can't collect enough cockles in a pail. Not enough to sell."

"We want a sack, like the men had. There are lots of sacks in the cellar."

Ben ran to the door at the far end of the kitchen, opened it, and disappeared. Mary and John followed. They had never been in the cellar and they peered cautiously down the flight of wooden stairs that led down into darkness. Ben's voice floated up to them. "Put the light on. The switch is just inside the door."

John switched on the light and went down the stairs. The cellar was a low, rambling, pleasant place that smelt of dry wood and dust. There was a pile of coke for the Beast in one corner, a stack of wood in another and a bench against one wall with a saw and some nails on it. Under the bench, John found a pile of sacks; he and Mary began shaking them out and choosing the two best ones.

Meanwhile, Ben roamed round the cellar. Set in the brick wall at one end, were two arched little doors - very low, as if they had been made for dwarfs or children. Ben opened one of the doors and found a cubby hole with an earth floor and a wooden ceiling; a tiny room that would have made a splendid hide-away if it had not been full of packing cases and empty lemonade bottles. He wondered if there was another room behind the door but when he tried to open it, it seemed to be locked or stuck.

He called out to John and Mary, "Come and help. I think it's locked."

"There are some keys here," Mary said. There was a big bunch of keys hanging on a nail above the bench. She took them down and went over to the little door. John tried several keys before he found a small one that exactly fitted the lock. It was rusty and stiff; it took two hands and all his strength to turn the key, but it did turn and the door swung creakily open.

There was a small room behind this door, just as there was behind the other one. At first, the only difference seemed to be that this room was empty and when the children peered in, the air inside felt colder than the air in the cellar. Then they saw that high up in the wall at the back was a small, square, dark hole. A chill little wind blew out of it and a queer smell - a mixture of earth and mice and shut-upness.

"What is it?" Mary whispered.

No one answered for a minute. Then BEn said in a low, awestruck voice, "It's the Secret Passage." There was a bright, mysterious look in his eyes. He said, very fast, "I couldn't tell you because Miss Pin asked me not to. But now you've found it for yourselves, it's all right, isn't it?"

He looked anxiously at Mary who took his hard little hand and said, "Of course it's all right. But a passage must go somewhere. Does Miss Pin know where it goes?"

Ben shook his head. "She just said it was a place to hide. But we could go and see couldn't we?"

Mary said, "I've got a torch. It was hanging up with the keys." She looked at John. "You go first..."

John drew a deep breath. It was stupid to be scared, he told himself. He was eleven, nearly twelve - nearly grownup.

Ben said eagerly, "I'll go. I'd like to go." The menacing dark hole didn't worry him at all. What could be there, after all, except a mouse or two?

John said quickly, "No. It may be dangerous. I'm the eldest. I'll go."

As he pulled himself up to the hole, the torch in his hand, he grinned to himself in spite of feeling so sick and clammy. If he wasn't so frightened he would be quite ready to let Ben go ahead - it would be more sensible, really. Ben was smaller and less likely to get stuck.

The hole led to a tunnel which was just high enough for John to crawl through, knees scraping on rubble. It was very short; after about two yards it opened into a much bigger place, high enough for John to kneel up. He swept the torch round and saw brick walls and rafters above his head.

"We're under the house," Mary said, wriggling beside him. "Oh blow - I've torn my dress. It must be the foundations of the house."

"What a swizz," John said in a cheerful, grumbling tone, secretly rather relieved that this was all there was - just this dry, clean place with the floors of the house above.

But it wasn't all. "Look," Ben squeaked. "Give me the torch..."

At one side there was another hole, just above the level of the ground. This time there was no doubt about who was to go first. Ben snatched the torch from John and crawled in. His muffled voice came back to them. "Come on - it goes on an awfully long way."

This tunnel was very low and it was more difficult for Mary and John to get through it than for Ben. They had to squirm along on their stomachs, using their elbows and knees, and it was rather alarming because Ben was so far ahead that they couldn't see the light from the torch. Mary was so closed behind John that his feet kicked dust and earth back into her face. At one place the tunnel seemed to be almost blocked by a mess of brick and rubble as if someone had tried to wall it up at some time. John called, "Ben..." and Ben's voice sounded hollow and strange. "Come on... come on, it's not far now."

Quite suddenly, the tunnel ended. It just stopped, high up in a wall. Ben was shining the torch and John and Mary crawled out, head first, and pitched on to a pile of wood shavings. "Just as well that was there," John said, sitting up. "Or we'd banged our heads horribly hard. Give me the torch, Ben."

They were in quite a big room, very dry, with a brick floor. It opened into another room with a series of cubby holes along one side, stacked with wine bottles lying on their sides. At the far end was a flight of wooden steps and a closed door at the top. John shone the torch up the steps. He caught his breath.

"Mary," he shouted, "Mary - do you know where we are? We're in the cellar of the house next door. We're in the House of Secrets."

He ran up the stairs and tugged at the handle of the door, quite forgetting to be frightened in the excitement of being in the very place he had so longed to see. But the cellar door was locked.

The Secret Passage - Chapter Two
Mr Agnew, Miss Pin and the Face at the Window
by Nina Bawden

John was awake before the others the next morning. The bare attic was flooded with clear sunlight and when he climbed up on to the rickety chair to look out of the window, he saw a pale blue sky with little clouds floating high up in it, like puffs of smoke. At the end of the garden was a line of houses with blue slate roofs and, behind them, a darker blue line where the sky met the sea. Everywhere, gulls were diving and screaming, making a tremendous noise that almost drowned the rhythmic sucking sound of the sea on the beach.

The garden immediately below the window was long and bare and narrow; at the end of it, there was a wooden shed. The garden of the big house on the other side of the high brick wall, was much larger and looked dense and overgrown with a thick shrubbery of dark, speckly evergreens.

John jumped off the chair. "Wake up," he said, "Mary, wake up. Come and look at the sea."

Mary yawned sleepily and rolled over in bed.

Ben sat up and sneezed so hard that his bed rattled.

Mary opened her eyes. "You've caught a cold," she said accusingly.

"I habend." Ben glared at her before he sneezed again. He said in a hoarse voice, "I habend gotta code."

Aunt Mabel thought differently.

"You'll stay indoors this morning," she said, after Ben had sneezed his way through breakfast. (Ben had never had a cold before and he had no idea how to be polite about it. When he wanted to sneeze, he just sneezed: it was like sitting at a table with an erupting volcano.) "John and Mary can go out," Aunt Mabel went on. "But you must stay with me."

"I don't want to," Ben said. "I want to go out. It'll make me worse to stay in a stuffy old house."

"You'll do as you're told," Aunt Mabel said.

She spoke rather sharply. She thought Ben was likely to be more difficult to control than John and Mary. She was probably right. Ben wasn't really spoiled or even particularly naughty, but he was tough, determined little boy who had been simply used to having his own way. Up to now, there had been no real reason why he shouldn't have it. In Africa, there had been no need for a lot of tiresome rules; since his parents had known Ben was sensible enough to keep out of danger, they had let him go more or less where he liked and do what he liked. The first person who had tried to hedge him in was Mrs Epsom with her endless, boring, "Don't do this . . . don't do that." It seemed to Ben, suddenly, that Aunt Mabel was going to be just like her, and he went dark red with anger.

"I won't," he said. "I won't. I wan' to go and look at the sea. I habend gotta code." And he gave a simply tremendous sneeze.

Perhaps if Aunt Mabel had laughed at him, it would have been all right. But she didn't. She was too worried in case Ben would not obey her. She knew very little about children; certainly, she had no idea how to manage Ben any more than she would have known how to manage a strange wild animal suddenly dumped down in her kitchen.

She said briskly, "Don't be stupid. I won't have it. If you go out, you might get pneumonia and I've got enough to do without nursing a sick child. If you don't do what you're told, you'll have to go straight up to your room and stay there."

Ben looked at Aunt Mabel and Aunt Mabel looked at Ben. If Mary hadn't been so nervous about what was going to happen, she might have noticed that they both looked rather alike for the moment, staring at each other with the same angry, determined expression in their brown eyes. Then the colour vanished from Ben's face and he looked as white as a piece of paper, with two dark holes for eyes.

"I hate you," he said. "I hate you." And he flew at Aunt Mabel, whirling his arms like a small windmill in a gale.

She caught hold of him by the wrists. She slapped him once, on his bare, sturdy legs. Then she took him by the collar and marched him out of the room with a grim expression on her face.

Mary and John stood still, feeling shocked and unhappy. John crept to the door and listened, but there was no sound from upstairs. They waited for about five minutes, until Aunt Mabel came back into the kitchen, stalked past them without a glance and bent over to poke the Beast. She riddled violently, so many hair pins tinkling on to the floor that her bun became unfastened and her hair fell down like a curling grey snake. She slammed the boiler door and turned to face them, two red spots high up on her cheeks, hands on hips, feet firmly planted at ten to two. She was wearing a pair of flat, flappy houseshoes; Mary thought that they made her look rather like a pair of kippers She said curtly, "Ben's got to learn to do what he's told. But that's no reason why you should hang about looking like a pair of miseries. Get your coats on and go down to the sea - a bit of air will do you good."

Mary said nervously. "If you don't mind, Aunt Mabel, we - we'd rather not go without Ben the first time. We'd rather wait until his cold is better."

Aunt Mabel looked at her. Then she shrugged her shoulders and said grudgingly, "All right. I don't mind what you do as long as you clear out from under my feet." She began to clear the table. Mary started to help her, but she said, "I'll do this - if you want to help you can go and tell Mr Agnew his breakfast will be ready in ten minutes."

John looked doubtfully at Mary. "Where is Mr Agnew?"

"Shed at bottom of garden. Put your coats on. Wind's bitter."

They went up the basement stairs and along the passage to the back door. The long, thin garden was empty and bare-looking, even when the summer came, John thought, nothing much would ever grow there. A sound of hammering came from the wooden shed and on a nail outside the open door a man's jacket was hanging. It wasn't an ordinary looking jacket - it was huge, immense, more like an over-coat. The children stared at it, amazed. John whispered, "He must be the biggest man in the world..."

"Ssh," Mary said, because Mr Agnew had suddenly appeared in the doorway. He was big - a vast, red-haired giant with piercing blue eyes under shaggy eyebrows and great, hairy, gingery arms emerging from a short-sleeved red shirt. "Well," he said. "What is it? Who are you?" He looked and sounded very fierce.

"Please," Mary said in a small voice, "Please, Aunt Mabel said to tell you breakfast is almost ready."

He looked down at her, frowning. Then his brow cleared and he laughed, a great, resounding laugh that echoed round the narrow, walled garden like thunder. The children understood why his snore was so loud - everything about Mr Agnew was larger than life. "Why - it's the Orphanage," he said. He clapped a big, hammy hand on each of their shoulders. "Come in," he said. "Come into the workshop."

"We're not orphans," John said with dignity, but Mr Agnew did not appear to hear him. He propelled them into the shed. In the centre of the wooden floor stood a great lump of some sort of stone, taller even than Mr Agnew. "Well," he said, "what do you think of it? Don't be afraid - just tell me."

The children looked at the statue in silence.

"What is it?" Mary said.

Mr Agnew gave an explosive snort. "Can't you see? D'you mean to tell me you can't see?"

"I can," John said unexpectedly.

Mr Agnew bent his bright blue gaze upon him. "Well?" he said in a threatening voice.

"It's a fat woman," John said. "Kneeling."

They didn't understand why Mr Agnew should laugh at that, but he did, longer and louder than he had laughed before. His big stomach shook like jelly, tears streamed down his cheeks, he began to gasp for breath and ended in a kind of hoot like a ship's siren, Hoo, hoo, hoo... John and Mary watched him, astonished. Finally, he wiped his eyes and said in a choking voice, "That's good. That's rich. My Venus, my beautiful Venus - fat woman, kneeling. Hoo, hoo..." He slapped the statue affectionately with his hand. That's brought me down a peg. D'you know, I think that's what I shall call her."

He stood for a moment, gazing at the statue and rasping his hand over his plump, unshaven chin. He seemed to have forgotten the children altogether.

John said, "Your breakfast's ready, Mr Agnew."

"What?" Oh..." He smiled at John. "Don't call me Mr Agnew. Call me Uncle Abe. Honorary Uncle." He reached his jacket down from the hook and began to put it on. "Do you like messing about with clay? There's some terracotta on that bench. See what you can do with it."

He picked up two lumps of the red clay, big as footballs, and tossed one to each of them. Mary looked at hers, and then at the front of her coat. "It's very kind of you," she said. "But - but Aunt Mabel might be cross." She thought of Mrs Epsom. "If we get dirty, I mean."

Uncle Abe drew his bristly eyebrows together. "You're not afraid of Mabel, surely?" He looked searchingly at their downcast faces. "Good lord - I believe you are." He sounded as if the idea astonished him and made him rather angry. "You needn't be, y'know," he said, frowning sternly. "Your Aunt's an angel. Understand that? An Angel." He glared at them, turned on his heel and marched towards the house.

"She's a funny sort of angel," John said thoughtfully.

"Yes." Mary sighed and looked up at the top floor of The Haven, at the tiny attic window that glinted in the sun. "Poor Ben. He must be awfully miserable," she said.

But Ben wasn't miserable, he was far too angry. No one had ever slapped him before or punished him in any way. He sat on the edge of his little bed, rebellion and fury burning in his heart, muttering crossly under his breath. He had sneezed so much that his head ached. When he had been angry in Africa, he had always gone off on his own, with Balthazar, until he felt better. He began to think about Balthazar and how he would probably never see him again and after a little while he began to feel comfortably sad and a lot less angry. He thought it had been rather unkind of him to tell Aunt Mabel that he hated her. Perhaps it had made her cry. He hadn't really meant to make her cry. He thought she had probably not meant to be so cross with him and that she might easily feel unhappy about it now. He decided that he would go and find her - not to say he was sorry, because he didn't think he had done anything wrong - but so that she could say she was sorry to him.

He crept down the stairs, rather cautiously just in case she wasn't feeling as sorry as she ought to feel, just yet, and stood at the top of the basement stairs. He was just going to start down to the kitchen when he heard a deep, man's voice and then Aunt Mabel's, answering him. Ben sighed. It was no good going down to the kirchen if she wasn't alone, she would just shoo him back to his room. He decided to explore a little instead. He peered into the big, silent dining room that smelt musty and shut up and had lots of tables with chairs stuck up on top of them. There was a big, dark sideboard with lots of bottles of sauce on it and a grandfather clock in the corner that ticked with a fat, comfortable sound. Ben unscrewed the tops of some of the bottles and tasted the sauces with his tongue. Then he found a glass and a spoon in a cupboard in the sideboard and tried making a mixture to drink. He mixed and tasted and mixed and tasted until his tongue felt rather sore. So he cleaned the glass and the spoon, very carefully with his dirty handkerchief, and put them back.

Further along the passage, there was a closed door. Ben wondered if it led into another empty room; he was just about to turn the handle when he thought he heard someone talking inside. Not quite someone, though - it had been a thin, squeaky sound, rather like a mouse talking. He waited for a little, then, very quietly, he opened the door and went in.

He must have been wrong, he thought, because there was no one there. It was a small roon, and very dark. Thick velvet curtains hung at the window, leaving only a narrow slit for the light to come through. The walls seemed to be hung with rich, dark red material that had gold thread woven into it. Above the mantelpiece there was a big picture in a heavy gilt frame, but it was so dark that Ben could not see what it was meant to be. The room was very full of chests and little tables - so full, in fact, that there was barely room to walk. In front of the fireplace there was a perfectly ordinary woodern towel horse with clothes folded over it that looked out of place, Ben thought, inthis rather grand, gloomy room. Near the towel hourse, Ben saw something that interested him. On a small, carved table, there was a collection of miniature china and some small, pretty figures carved in a kind of green, cloudy glass. Ben threaded his way through the furniture, being very careful not to knock anything over, and picked up a tiny cup painted with freen and yellow flowers.

Behind him a voice said, "Careful, Boy. That piece is valuable."

He was startled that he almost dropped the cup. He put it down gently on the table and said, severely, "You made me jump."

There was someone in the room after all, watching him with eyes that were dark and shiny as boot buttons. The clothes horse was being used as a screen, and inside that screen, in front of a tall oil stove, sat a little old woman in a brilliantly coloured shawl and a queer hat that was all feathers. Beneath the hat her tiny face peeped out; it was wrinkled all over and a pale, yellowish colour. Although she was wearing a shawl and the feather hat, her feet were bare and resting in an enamel bath steaming with hot water. She held a kettle in her lap; another sizzled on the top of the oil stove.

"Who are you?" Ben said, rather rudely.

The old woman's eyes snapped. "I think that is a question I should ask you."

"I'm Ben Mallory," Ben said.

She bowed her head in a queenly way so that all the feathers dipped and waved.

"I am Muriel Pin. Delighted to make your aquaintance."

She was wearing long, black gloves. Very slowly, she took the right one off. Her fingers were thin and frail looking and covered with rings that flashed as she held out her hand. Ben took it and they shook hands gravely.

"Are you cold?" Ben said.

"Yes, I am, Mr Mallory. How very intelligent of you to observe - people seldom do. Mrs Haggard, now, thinks I am simply eccentric." Her voice sank to a thread of a whisper. "I believe she thinks I am a little mad. Mad Muriel, she calss me behind my back - she thinks I don't know it. Servants have no respect nowadays."

"I'm cold too," Ben said. He thought the hot bath and the kettles were a very sensible way of keeping warm. "I've been cold ever since I came to England."

Miss Pin placed her ungloved hand against the side of the kettle on her lap. "Getting cool," she said. She exchanged it for the kettle on the oil stove, poured more hot water into the bath and then held the empty kettle towards Ben. "Would you mind filling this up for me, Mr Mallory. Over in the corner - there." She pointed with a scrawny finger.

In the corner there was a brown velvet curtain that rattled back on brass rings and revealed a washbasin. Ben filled the kettle creafully - it was rather a tricky business - and took it back.

"Put it down here," the old lady commanded. "No, no, stupid boy... can't you see?" She bent sideways and picked up something from the floor. "This is Sir Lancelot," she said. She showed him a small tortoise with a green ribbon tied round his shell. She spoke to it in the thin, squeaky voice Ben had heard through the door. "Sir Lancelot - meet Mr Benjamin Mallory." The tortoise slid out his scaly old head and blinked black eyes at Ben. "He suffers with the cold, as I do. Sometimes I give him baths in warm olive oil. You may stroke his chin, if you care to."

Gently, Ben stroked the dry old chin. He said, "Do tortoises like that? I wish I had a pet. In Africa, I had a chameleon." He thought perhaps Miss Pin would like to hear about Balthazar, so he sat down on a red leather stool beside the enamel bath, and told her about him. She seemed very interested.

"Tell me about Africa," she said, her boot-button eyes glistening. "It must be a very wild, strange place. I have always wished to travel but my Dear Papa never allowed it, though he, of course, spent much of his life in India. Until his Enemies hounded him out, of course. When that happened, we fled to Henstable." She gave a little sigh. "We came here when I was a child of ten and I have never left it since."

"How old are you?" Ben asked.

"Eighty-two."

Ben drew a deep breath. He looked at her face and her shawl and her feathered hat and thought he had never seen anyone so odd-looking, or so old. "Who are the Enemies?" he said.

"Hush." Miss Pin leaned forward in her chair, hunching herself up until she looked like a crooked old witch. "Don't speak so loud. They are all around us - watchinng and listening. You need not be afraid, though. We are quite safe, her in this hous. That is why Dear Papa named it The Haven. Even should They force their way in, there are places to hide. Places where They would never find us. You're not afraid, are you?"

"Of course not," Ben said boldly, though her secretive, whispering voice sent delicious shivers running up and down his spine. "If They came in, though - the Enemies, I mean, where would you hide?"

She said slowly, "I don't know that I should tell you. Can you keep a secret?" She looked at him thoughtfully. "I believe you can. You're a sensible boy, aren't you?"

Ben nodded, hugging his knees. He thought she was the most interesting grown-up he had met for a long time.

She took the kettle off the oil stove, tested the temperature, and placed it on her lap. "When we came here," she said, "I thought this a very old house. So poky - so different from our grand house in London. I was a very lonely child - Dear Papa would not allow me mix with other children in case I should meet an Enemy, you see. I had everything a child could want, we were very rich, you see, because of all the treasure Papa had brought home from India, but for most of the time I was very dull. Then, one afternoon when Cook was out, I discovered the secret passage. I was exploring the cellar..."

"What is a cellar?" Ben said.

In his excitement, he spoke much too loudly. Aunt Mabel who was outside in the passage, heard him and thrust open the door. "Ben, you naughty boy," she said in an exasperated voice. "I thought I told you to stay in your room?" She seized Ben's arm and jerked him crossly up from his stool. "Do as I tell you another time. I'm sorry he's bothered you, Miss Pin."

Miss Pin was sitting very upright in her chair. In spite of her funny hat and her bare feet and the kettle in her lap, Ben thought she looked grand and imperious, rather like a queen. She spoke like a queen, too.

"You are exceeding your duties, Mrs Haggard. Mr Mallory is a friend of mine. I am pleased to have him visit me."

"Oh. Oh well, if you say so..." Aunt Mabel sounded rather flustered. "But you'll tire yourself - you know the doctor said you weren't to tire yourself." In spite of her grumpy voice, Ben saw that she was very gentle as she plumped up the cushions behind the old lady's back and settled her more comfortably against them.

"It tires me far more to be lonely all day," Muriel Pin said. She looked at Ben. "You'll come again, won't you?" She sounded quavery and humble, suddenly, not queenly at all.

"Yes, I'll come back," Ben said.

"I'd like to give you a present," the old lady said. "Come here."

Ben stood beside her, while she selected a tiny horse from the little table beside her. "Look after him," she said. "Papa brought him back from India."

The horse felt cool in his hand. "Thank you," Ben said, "He's lovely. I'll take care of him for ever."

"Come along Ben, do," Aunt Mabel said, from the door.

When they were outside in the passage, she marched him along it until they were safely out of earshot. Then she took his shoulder and turned him to face her. She said sternly, "Listen to me, Ben. You're not to bother Miss Pin, whatever she says. She's old and sick. Let me see what she gave you."

Rather reluctantly, Ben showed her the little, pale green horse.

Aunt Mabel sighed. "Well, I suppose she can spare that, she's got enough old junk. It'll be one thing less for me to dust. But you're not to take anything else. Or ask for anything. Do you understand that? She's a poor woman and she can't afford to give greedy little boys presents."
Ben was furiously angry. "I wouldn't ask for presents. And anyway, she's not poor. She's rich. She told me." He was so cross that he went red, right to the tips of his ears.

Aunt Mabel looked at him. Then she shrugged her shoulders. She said, half to herself, "I suppose it's harmless enough." She glanced at her watch. "Your cold sounds better to me. It won't hurt you to run along into the garden with the others."

When Ben ran into the garden, he was bursting to tell Mary and John about Miss Pin and to show them his little horse. But they were far too preoccupied to listen to him. They were standing halfway down the garden, staring up at the big, neglected old house on the other side of the high brick wall. The sun had moved round in the sky and the windows were all in shadow. They looked very blank and empty.

"But I did see it," John was saying in an excited voice. "I did, I did."

"What did you see?" Ben panted up to them, the little horse clasped tightly in his hand.

Mary laughed. "John thinks he saw someone in the house next door but he couldn't have, because the house is empty. Aunt Mabel said so. So he's just being silly."

"I'm not." John went red. He hated it when Mary laughed at him. He was breathing rather fast and his hands were clenched in front of him. "I'm sure I saw a face - a face at the window."

The Secret Passage - Chapter One
"England Must be a Very Small Place"
by Nina Bawden

When John and Mary and Ben Mallory first saw their Aunt Mabel they thought she looked very disagreeable. She was tall and thin with a long, thin face and grey hair insecurely fastened in a straggly bun at the back of her neck. Whenever she turned her head, a little shower of hairpins fell out. When she met the children at London Airport, she was wearing a faded brown coat and stockings that wrinkled on her skinny legs as if they had been intended for a much fatter person.

John thought she probably looked like that, so shabby and cross, because she was a widow. His father had told him that her husband, Mr Haggard, had been drowned at sea. But Ben thought it must be because she lives in England. He had lived in Africa all his life; this was his first visit to England and he had decided, almost as soon as he got off the plane, that he didn't like it. How horrible it was, not at all like Africa - so cold and grey and sunless. No wonder Aunt Mabel looked pinched and hunched-up and pale.

Her voice sounded disagreeable too. The very first thing she said to them was, "Here you are! I thought you were never coming. Your plane is two hours late."

It did not occur to the children that she had been worried. They thought she was simply angry.

"I'm sorry," Mary said timidly. There was a hard, uncomfortable lump in her throat and she had a funny, fluttery feeling in her stomach - sick and hungry at the same time. They were coming to live here, with Aunt Mabel becuase their mother had died of pneumonia and their father was ill. Mrs Epsom, the district commissioner's wife, who had looked after the children when their mother went to the hospital, had told them he had had a nervous breakdown. Mary had not understood what that meant; she only knew that her father had seemed very silent and strange when he had put them on the plane in Nairobi. She had cried and clung to him and begged him to let her stay, but he had kissed her and told her to be a brave girl and give his love to Aunt Mabel. So although it was exciting to come to England - as exciting as visiting a foreign country - it had been a sad journey too. All the long hours in the plane Mary had felt the sad part and the exciting part churning around inside her. And now that she had seen Aunt Mabel she felt she wanted to cry.

"Oh - it's not your fault," Aunt Mabel said. She looked at Mary and then bent to kiss her cheek. It was a clumsy little peck as if she was not really used to kissing people. She shook hands with John and said, "I expect all grownups tell you that you've grown. As far as I'm concerned, you really have. You were fifteen months old when I last saw you. That was just before you went out to Kenya."

"I'm afraid I don't remember you," John said very politely. "But I was very young and it was a long time ago. I'm twelve now and Mary's eleven. Ben's only seven, but he's big for his age."

"He certainly is," Aunt Mabel said. She glanced rather nervously at Ben, who was glaring at her in the fierce way he had when he was wondering what people were like. Aunt Mabel thought he looked more like an African boy than an English one, with his dark, sunburnt skin and dark eyes. She said, "You need a hair-cut."

It wasn't a very encouraging remark, but Ben grinned at her and took her hand as they went out to the airport bus.

John and Mary were quiet in the bus. They felt that their aunt was not very pleased to see them. But Ben bounced and wriggled on the seat, looking out of the window and squealing with excitement. He had never seen so many houses and roads and cars before.

"England must be a very small place," he said suddenly.

"What a funny thing to say," Aunt Mabel said. It didn't sound as if she thought it was funny, her voice was slightly annoyed, but after a minute she smiled at Ben just the same. It is difficult not to smile at someone who expects you to smile at him. She didn't understand what he meant, but John and Mary did. The hundreds and hundreds of houses were all so small and cramped together that it looked as if there couldn't be enough space for the people to live comfortably.

"Wherever do all the children play?" Ben said in an astonished voice.

Aunt Mabel glanced out of the window. "In the gardens, if they're lucky enough to have them. If not, in the streets or the parks."

"But there's no room," Ben said. "Round our house there was miles and miles and miles."

Their farm, in Kenya, was near a river at the foot of a mountain. From the bungalow they could see snow-capped peaks, a range of lower, blue coloured-hills, and the African village on the ridge across the valley - a group of conical-shaped straw huts that steamed sometimes in the damp weather as if they were on fire. There were no dangerous snakes, and though there were lions and elephants and rhinos, they hid deep in the forests, high up the mountains, so John and Mary and Ben had been free to go wherever they liked. The blue hills, the wide, beautiful valley, had been their playground.

"Well, there's no room here," Aunt Mabel said shortly. "Certainly not in the towns, and in the country there are fields full of crops and you aren't allowed to play in those, let me tell you."

Ben wrinkled his nose. "It sounds horrid," he said.

John and Mary looked at each other. It did sound depressing and it looked depressing too. The sky was lead grey and seemed to press down low over the little houses and the crowded streets and the hurrying people. It was all very flat, there were no hills and only a few dead-looking trees - John thought they were dead until he remembered that in England the trees lost their green leaves in winter. Their bus swept into London over the Hammersmith Flyover.

"Look!" shouted Ben, kneeling up on his seat. "The cars are going underneath. We're up in the air."

John and Mary might have been excited by this too if they had not been so cold. Even Aunt Mabel, who didn't seem inclined to notice things about people, saw that they were cold. When they got out of the bus and were waiting for a taxi to take them to the railway station, she turned Mary's collar up round her neck and said, "That coat isn't warm enough. Your blood must have got thin with being in Africa."

"Mrs Epsom said you would get us some warm clothes," John said.

"She said you would probably buy us some toys too," Ben added with a happy grin. In Africa he had had very few toys of the kind English children play with. He had had a stone called William that he painted faces on and dressed up in bits of his mother's old dresses and a chameleon called Balthazar, who had a loosely fitting skin like a pair of very baggy trousers and two bright pinpoint eyes that swivelled round to watch you when you moved, as if they were on ball bearings. Mrs Epsom had told him Aunt Mabel would buy him toys, to comfort him when he realised he would have to leave Balthazar behind.

"Oh, she did, did she?" Aunt Mabel said. She didn't say anything else until they were sitting in the train and eating the ham sandwiches she produced out of a brown carrier bad. While they ate she watched them thoughtfully and rather anxiously with her sharp brown eyes. She was thinking of the letter Mrs Epsom had written to her.

'I imagine that their father will eventually make some financial arrangement for the children, but at the moment he is in no state to do so. He is quite broken up by his wife's death and we are afraid that unless he recovers soon the farm will go to rack and ruin. He talks of selling the farm, but it is unlikely he will find a buyer in the present political situation. He seems to have no money in the bank. We think he has always lived beyond his income. The children seem always to have had everything they want. You will find them very spoiled as well as uneducated. Their mother taught them at home instead of sending them to school. My husband has advanced money for their fares and a few clothes. I have asked Mr Mallory over and over again if you can afford to support the children, but all he says is: There is no one else...'

Aunt Mabel said in a brusque voice, "You may as well know - I can't afford to buy you a lot of clothes and toys and things."

They looked at her in surprise and she went on in an odd, almost indignant, way, "Mrs Epsom says you've been used to have everything you want. I think we'd better get it straight from the beginning. You'll not go without anything you really need, but there's no money for frills. I hope you'll understand that."

"Yes, Aunt Mabel," Mary said, though she didn't really understand at all. She supposed they always had had everything they wanted, but it had never seemed to cost much money. After all, there were so few shops where they lived, in Africa, that it would have been difficult to spend a lot of money. She wondered if Aunt Mabel was really poor and if they would all have to live in a mud hut, but she didn't like to ask her.

Ben wasn't so tactful. He said, looking bright and interested, "Are you a beggar, then?"

Aunt Mabel's face went very red. "Certainly not."

John said quickly, "He didn't mean to be rude. He just wanted to know if you were really poor like some of the Africans are. Some of their children have big swollen stomachs that stick right out because they're starving."

"Oh," said Aunt Mabel. "Oh - I see." She said, to Ben, "I'm not poor, not in that way. But I keep a boarding house and if it's a bad season, I don't make very much money. When it rains a lot, no one wants to come to the sea, and they cancel their bookings."

The children looked at her blankly.

"What is a boarding house?" Ben said.

"It's a place people go to for holidays. It's my house, you see, and they pay me to come and be guests in it. I've only got two guests now because it's winter. Mr Agnew and Miss Pin. Mr Agnew is a sculptor - he's very busy all the time, and you must be sure and not bother him. Miss Pin is - is a little peculiar." She gave a little sigh. "Just now, there isn't anyone else."

Mary said, "Is it the same house that you and Mother lived in, when you were girls?"

"No. That's the house next door. It's a big place - when my husband died it was too big for me to keep up. So I sold it to a man who took a fancy to it; he wanted it for summers, he said - he had more money than sense, if you ask me - and now he's old and ill and it's shut up mostly. It's a pity, it's a nice old place with a huge garden and lots of rambling rooms. And attics. We used to play up in the attics - you can see the sea from some of the windows, and there was an old brass bedstead that we used to play on. We used to tie string to the posts and pretend we were driving a horse and cart. I wonder if it's still there - I left a lot of stuff behind when I left and as far as I know he never turned anything out."

Aunt Mabel smiled and her face was soft and much gentler, suddenly, as if she were remembering a very happy time.

Mary said, "What was our mother like, when she was a little girl?" Her eyes were very bright and she was breathing very fast. John and Ben looked at her and then down at their feet. It was the first time any of them had spoken about their mother since the dreadful morning Mrs Epsom had come into their room and told them that they would never see her again. Mary's question made them feel very lost and strange.

Aunt Mabel caught her breath. "She was very pretty. Very pretty and gay." She looked at John and Ben, sitting still and silent as wax images and then she looked at Mary as if she were really seeing her for the first time. She said in a low voice, "She looked a bit like you..."

The train stopped. A large notice on the platform said HENSTABLE, and outside the Waiting Room there was a coloured poster of a girl in a bathing costume, sitting by a bright, blue sea. The poster said, Sunny Henstable Welcomes You.

They didn't feel very welcomed, though. It was dark and cold and the wind sliced through their thin clothes like a sharp knife.

"It must be like the North Pole," Ben said.

They climbed into a taxi and drove away from the twinkling lights of the station, into the dark town. The houses all seemed very tall and narrow and somehow sloping, as if the fierce, cold wind from the sea had blown them sideways. The taxi stopped outside a house with The Haven painted on the lighted fanlight above the door. It was a particularly tall, thin house that seemed to lean against the much bigger house next door to it - a large, looming building with a heavy, pillared porch and dark, empty windows. "That must be the house they used to live in," John whispered, while Aunt Mabel paid the taxi driver. "It looks spooky..."

Inside The Haven, it was almost as cold as it was outside. The hall was narrow and high and smelt musty. There was a closed door on the left. "That's the dining room," Aunt Mabel said. "Of course, we don't use it in the winter."

They went to the end of the hall and down some narrow stairs to the basement. Here there was a big kitchen and at one end of it there was a black, menacing looking object from which came a steady whispering sound.

"Thank heavens the Beast is still alight," Aunt Mabel said cheerfully. She smiled at their surprised faces. "I call it the Beast," she said. "It won't hurt you, though." She opened a little door in the front of the old, black boiler and a lovely shaft of warmth extended into the kitchen. They stood in front of it, thankfully warming their frozen hands. "You look like a lot of shivering monkeys," Aunt Mabel said. "Come on now, move about and get warm. Which one of you is going to lay the table for me?"

The children looked at her, then at each other. Rather slowly, Mary came away from the fire and looked at the things Aunt Mabel was taking out of the dresser cupboard and putting on the deal table; a pile of mats, a bundle of knives and forks and spoons, four glasses. She tried to remember how the table always looked at home, how the knives and forks went and which side of the mat you put the glasses but both her brain and her fingers seemed numbed with cold.

"Hurry up," Aunt Mabel said. "Good heavens child, haven't you laid a table before?"

Mary shook her head, feeling shy and ashamed. She said, "Jason always lays the table at home," and her eyes filled with tears.

Aunt Mabel clicked her tongue against her teeth. "I forgot you'd been waited on hand and foot. Well, I haven't the time for that. Or the inclination, I may as well tell you. So you'd better start learning to do a few things for yourself."

In spite of her sharp voice, she explained how to lay a table patiently and clearly and Mary quite enjoyed doing it. She decided that it would be fun to learn how to do things in a house - perhaps she could make beds and clean windows and so on. At the back of her mind was the idea that in this terrible, cold climate it might be just as well to make yourself useful indoors. Perhaps John had the same idea because after they had had supper, he offered to help wash up, but after looking at the three weary little faces, Aunt Mabel said that it would be more sensible to go to bed.

They were to sleep up in the attic, as all the other rooms were furnished for the paying guests. They trooped, one by one up the narrow stairs, past what seemed like endless closed doors.

"Are all the rooms really empty?" John whispered, half fearfully, glancing along a long, dark passage.

"Yes." Aunt Mabel thrust open one of the doors. "You may as well look now," she said. "Then there'll be no need for you to go poking about when my back's turned."

They peered into a dim, high-ceilinged room which had a big bed in the middle of it, shrouded in a white sheet. The light from the street lamp outside came through the window and made dark, eerie shadows in the corners. John clutched at Mary's hand and she could feel him shiver.

He said in a small voice, "It'll be funny living in a house where the rooms are all shut up and empty, won't it?"

Mary squeezed his hand sympathetically. She didn't think the empty rooms were frightening, only rather dreary, but she knew that John was much more nervous in some ways than she was. He wasn't a coward, he was a normal, strong, healthy boy, but he often saw ghosts and other alarming, shadowy things in places where Mary very seldom saw them and Ben never saw them at all. Ben was a very practical person who was only afraid of good solid things that he knew were dangerous, like charging elephants and angry rhino.

Aunt Mabel shut the door with a bang and said, to John, "It seems you've got more imagination than is good for you."

The house seemed very quiet and still but as they reached the second landing they heard something - a low muttering that gradually got louder and louder until it burst into a deep, vibrating roar. The children stood stock still. The roar seemed to shake the house; then, suddenly, it stopped short in a loud snort and a sniffle.

They heard nothing more for a moment. Then, from behind them, they heard another queer sound. It was Aunt Mabel, laughing.

"That's Mr Agnew," she said. "He snores. He has a quite exceptional snore. In the summer he sleeps out in his shed in the garden so he won't disturb the other guests."

"But it's only seven o'clock," Ben said. "Why should a grown-up man be asleep at seven o'clock?"

Aunt Mabel said crisply, "Mr Agnew is an artist. Artists aren't ordinary people. Mr Agnew likes to sleep at funny times - sometimes he sleeps all day. I expect he'll wake up soon and want his lunch."

The children looked at each other. Mary said, cautiously, "Where does Miss Pin live?"

"On the ground floor, because of her arthritis," Aunt Mabel said. "Not that it matters much where she is. She never leaves her room."

The children digested this information in silence. What odd people they must be, Miss Pin who never went out, Mr Agnew who slept during the day.

Aunt Mabel seemed to know what they were thinking. "There's no harm in people being a bit different," she said. "Miss Pin is very different, you'll find. Live and let live, that's my motto."

The third flight of stairs seemed steeper than ever. Ben groaned. "My legs will be worn out, climbing."

"He's not used to stairs," Mary explained. "Our bungalow didn't have stairs."

"He'll get used to them," Aunt Mabel said. "I daresay there'll be a lot of things you'll all have to get used to. Here we are now. This is your room."

She switched on the light. The attic was long and low and bare-looking, with little, pointed, uncurtained windows. There was very little furniture in it, but the three beds looked neat and inviting and against one wall stood an enormous rocking horse with a saddle and stirrups, painted all over with bright, red spots.

Ben screamed with delight and climbed on to its back.

"I thought you might like it," Aunt Mabel said. "It's only an old thing - been up here for years."

"But it looks new," John said. "Quite, quite new."

"Oh - I painted it up a bit," Aunt Mabel said. She sounded embarrassed.

Ben hurled himself off the horse and leapt at her, twining his small stout legs round her, hanging round her neck. "Oh you are kind," he said.

Aunt Mabel let him kiss her, but she didn't look as if she enjoyed it much. Then she untangled his legs and arms and set him firmly down on the floor. Ben said, as if something had just struck him, "Have you got any children, Aunt Mabel?"

Aunt Mabel looked at him. There was a very odd expression on her face. "No," she said. Then the blood came up into her cheeks and she looked very red and cross. "Get straight into bed," she said. "No romping about. You can turn out your own light. I've got quite enough to do without traipsing up and down stairs. Good night."

When she had gone they undressed in silence. Ben and Mary got into bed and John pulled a chair up to one of the pointed windows. He wrestled with the rusty catch and pushed it open. The cold wind rushed in like icy breath, and they could hear the roaring, slithering sound of the sea crashing down on a pebble beach.

"This bed's horrible," Ben said. "All lumps. And it's cold. Shut the window, John."

"Not for a minute. I like it."

Mary thought that this was the first night of her life that she had gone to bed without someone kissing her good night. Even Mrs Epsom had touched her cheek with her lips when she tucked her up. She lay, thinking about this, and listening to the sea. It sounded very wild and lonely and strange; there was so much of it, she thought, between England and Africa. And Dad was thousands and thousands of miles away, on the other side.

Her eyelids felt heavy and she closed them. As she drifted into sleep, she could hear the sea and John's voice, droning on and on, half talking to her, half talking to himself.

"If I lean out, I can see the garden. And a high wall and the big garden next door. I should think its all overgrown and tangly. The house next door juts out much more than this house - it's like a huge dark shoulder that you can't see past. It's funny to think of such a big house being shut up for years and years except for just a little bit, in the summer. I wonder what it's like inside? All dusty and dark, I should think, with lots of rooms that no one's been into for years. On the other side of this wall there's an attic full of things no one ever sees. It would be a lovely place to hide and have a secret. Mary - that's what we'll call it. Mary."

But Mary was asleep. So was Ben - fast asleep on his front with his bottom sticking up in the air. John looked at them both and then turned back to the window. He whispered to himself, "I shall call it the House of Secrets."