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."