A Song for Summer

BOOK JACKET INFORMATION

In a fragile world on the brink of World War II, lovely young Englishwoman Ellen Carr takes a job as a housemother at an unorthodox boarding school in Vienna that specializes in music, drama, and dance.

Ellen simply wants to cook beautiful food in the homeland of her surrogate grandmother, who had enchanted her with stories of growing up in the countryside of Austria.

What she finds when she reaches the Hallendorf School in Vienna is a world that is magically unconventional--and completely out of control. The children are delightful, but wild; the teachers are beleaguered and at their wits' end; and the buildings are a shambles. In short, the whole place is in desperate need of Ellen's attention.

Ellen seems to have been born to nurture all of Hallendorf; soon everyone from Leon the lonely young musical prodigy to harassed headmaster Mr. Bennet to Marek the mysterious groundsman depends on Ellen for--well, everything. And in providing all of them with whatever they need, especially Marek, for whom she develops a special attachment, Ellen is happier than she's ever been.

But what happens when the menace of Hitler's reign reaches the idyllic world of the Hallendorf School gives this romantic, intelligent tale a combination of charm and power that only the very best storytellers can achieve.

Eva Ibbotson was born into a literary family in Vienna and came to England as a small child before World War II. She has written numerous award-winning novels for both children and adults, including A Countess Below Stairs and The Morning Gift. She currently lives in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England.

PRAISE FOR EVA IBBOTSON

"Eva Ibbotson is such a good writer that her characters break the bonds of the romantic novel."

--The Washington Post Book World

Also by Eva Ibbotson

The Morning Gift Madensky Square A Company of Swans A Glove Shop in Vienna Magic Flutes A Countess Below Stairs

For my family, with love and gratitude

A SONG FOR SUMMER

Part One

In a way they were born to be aunts. Emancipated, eccentric and brave, the Norchester sisters lived in a tall grey house in Bloomsbury, within a stone's throw of the British Museum.

It is a district known for its intellectuals. Blue plaques adorn many of the houses, paying tributes to the dead dons and scholars who once inhabited them and even the professors and librarians who were still alive walked through the quiet London squares with the abstracted look of those whose minds are on higher things.

No. Three Gowan Terrace, the home of Charlotte, Phyllis and Annie Norchester, belonged firmly in this tradition. It was a three-storey house of amazing discomfort. The furniture was dark and disregarded; the bedrooms contained only narrow beds, desks, and outsize typewriters; in the drawing room the chairs were arranged in rows to face a large table and a notice board. Yet in its own way the house was a shrine. For the sisters, now middle-aged, had belonged to that stalwart band of women who had turned their back on feminine frippery, and devoted their whole beings to the securing of votes for women.

Charlotte, the oldest, had been for six weeks on hunger strike in Holloway Prison; Phyllis had spent more time chained to the railing of the hated women's gallery in the Houses of Parliament than any other suffragette; and Annie, the youngest, had knocked off the helmets of no less than seven policemen before being dragged away, kicking and protesting, to join her sister in prison.

It had been a glorious time. Victory had come in 1918 when the heroic work of women in the Great War could no longer be gainsaid. But though women had had the vote now for some twenty years, the sisters were faithful to the cause. The curtains --in the suffragette colours of purple, green and white--might be frayed and dusty but they would never be removed. The picture of their leader, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, still hung in the

dining room, though she herself had been dead for many years and was now a statue on Victoria Embankment. Rubbing themselves down with the frayed, rough towels in the bathroom with its cake of carbolic soap and rusty geyser reminded them of those heady days being hosed down by brutal wardresses in prison; the boiled fish served to them by the elderly cook general scarcely differed from the food they had thrown out of the windows of their cells as they began their hunger strike. And the suffragette motto, They Must Give Us Freedom Or They Must Give Us Death was still written in large letters on a poster in the hall.

But if they played the "Do you remember?"' game as they sat in their Jaeger dressing gowns drinking their cocoa, Charlotte and Phyllis and Annie never forgot how much was still owed to women even though the vote was won.

Charlotte had qualified as a doctor and was now Senior Registrar at the Bloomsbury Hospital for Women--a brisk and busy person who wore her stethoscope as society women wore their pearls. Phyllis was the Principal of a Teacher Training College and Annie was the only female Professor of Applied Mycology, not only in the University of London, but in the whole of Britain.

They might thus have rested on their laurels, but they did not. Every week there were meetings in the ice-cold drawing room: meetings to proclaim the need for more women in Parliament, in the universities, on the committee of the League of Nations. Lecturers came to discourse on the evils of female circumcision in Bechuanaland, on the shamefully low intake of women in the legal profession, on the scandalous discrimination against girls in Higher Mathematics. Leaflets were circulated, articles written, meetings addressed and as the Twenties moved into the Thirties and the canker of Fascism arose in Germany and Italy and Spain, women were urged to declare themselves against Hitler with his dread doctrine of Kinder, Kirche und K@uche which threatened to put them back into the Middle Ages.

But it was during this decade that something disquieting began to be felt in Gowan Terrace, a development as unexpected as it was difficult

to deal with, and it concerned Charlotte's only daughter, Ellen.

None of the Norchester sisters had intended to marry but in the year 1913 a brave and beautiful woman named Emily Davison threw herself under the King's horse in the Derby to draw attention to the suffragette cause, and was killed. It was at her funeral that Charlotte found herself standing next to a good-looking gentleman who, when she faltered (for she had loved Emily), took her arm and led her from the open grave. His name was Alan Carr, he was a solicitor and sympathetic to the movement. They married and a year later their child was born.

It was, fortunately, a girl, whom they named Ellen, and Alan had time to dote on her and spoil her before he was killed at Ypres. The baby was enchanting: plump and dimpled with blonde curls and big brown eyes--the kind of person found in paintings leaning out of heaven and bestowing laurel leaves or garlands on deserving mortals down below.

What mattered, however, was that she was clever. Every possible kind of intelligence test proclaimed that all was very well and her mother, Dr Carr, and her aunts, Phyllis and Annie, spared no effort to stimulate the little creature's mind. This girl at least should not struggle for her opportunities. Oxford or Cambridge were a certainty, followed by a higher degree and then who knew ... an ambassadorship, a seat in the cabinet-- nothing was out of Ellen's reach.

So they did not, at first, feel in the least alarmed. All little girls picked daisies and arranged them in paste jars, usually in inconvenient places, and Dr Carr, bidden imperiously by her daughter to smell them, duly did so though the scent of daisies is not easily perceived by someone accustomed to the strong odours of lysol and chloroform. It was natural for little girls to bake buns and Ellen, perched on a stool beside the usually morose cook general with her curls tied in a handkerchief, was a sight that her mother and her aunts could appreciate. Children made little gardens and planted love-in-a-mist and forget-me-nots, and for Ellen to claim a patch of earth in the sooty square of ground behind the house which all the sisters were far too busy to cultivate, was natural. But children's gardens are generally outgrown and Ellen's little patch extended until

she had cultivated a whole flower bed and then she found cuttings of honeysuckle and clematis and trained them to climb up to the first-floor windows.

Then again there was the question of the maids. It was of course all right for children to help servants: servants after all were a kind of underclass and should have been liberated except that it wasn't easy to see how to run a house without them. But it soon became clear that Ellen enjoyed making beds and polishing the grate and setting fires. They would find her folding sheets and putting her nose voluptuously against the starched linen. Once when the maid was ill they came across her with her school uniform hitched up, scrubbing the floor, and she said: "Look, isn't it beautiful, the way the light catches the soap bubbles!"

Did she perhaps do altogether too much looking? The sisters had read their Blake; they knew it was desirable to see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. But the world in a scrubbing brush?

The world in a bowl of fruit?

"Perhaps she's going to be a painter?"' suggested Aunt Phyllis.

A great woman painter, the first female President of the Royal Academy? It was a possibility.

But Ellen didn't want to paint apples. She wanted to smell them, turn them in her hands, and eat them.

Other members of the sisterhood were called in, honorary aunts to the child, and consulted: Aunt Delia, an inky lady who ran the Left

Book Club Shop in Gower Street, and the headmistress of Ellen's school, a full-bosomed and confident person whose bottle-green girls were the most academically motivated in London.

"She is clever, isn't she?"' Dr Carr demanded. "You wouldn't lie to me, Lydia, after all we've been through together."

And Lydia, who had shared a cell with Charlotte after they threw a brick through the windows of No. 10

Downing Street, said:

"I tell you she is very bright indeed. Her last exam results were excellent."

But at the end of the following term Ellen came to her and asked if she could take cookery lessons in the Sixth Form.

"Cookery! But my dear, that's just for the girls

who aren't going to university."

"I don't want to go to university," said Ellen. "I want to go to a Domestic Science College. A proper one where they teach you to sew and to cook and clean. I want," she said, opening her soft brown eyes in a look of entreaty, "to use my hands." And she spread them in the air, as pianists spread their fingers over an invisible keyboard, as if cooking was equivalent to the playing of a Chopin @etude.

In facing this crisis, Ellen's mother and her aunts knew whom to blame. A woman who was the embodiment of everything they disliked in their sex: an abject doormat, a domestic slave, a person without a mind or will of her own--an Austrian peasant who kept house for Ellen's grandfather and whom Ellen, since the age of six, had inexplicably adored.

The grandfather in question did not come from the Norchester side of the family. He was Alan Carr's father; a scholar engaged in a great work, the compilation of a glossary of Greek fishes, which seemed unlikely to be completed before he died. He had travelled to Vienna shortly after the end of the war to consult some manuscripts in the Hofburg library and had taken lodgings in an inn in Nussdorf where Henny, the landlady's daughter, had looked after him. She was a quiet, fair girl, gentle and deft, who both admired and pitied the serious Professor, for he had lost a son in the war and a wife soon afterwards with cancer.

When he returned to Britain he asked her if she would come and keep house for him and she agreed.

No house was ever so "kept" as Walnut

Tree Cottage in Wimbledon. Henny cooked the Professor's meals and washed his clothes and polished his furniture but she did much, much more. She found the pieces of paper with their Greek hieroglyphics which he had dropped on to the floor; she warmed his slippers; she cultivated the little London garden in which, inexplicably, there was no sign of a walnut tree.

"Well, you see, he is a very clever man and I like to make him Comfortable," was the only defence she could put up against the shocked comments of Ellen's family.

After she had been with him for three years the Professor said he thought they should be married.

Henny refused. She was not of his world, she said;

it would not be suitable. She had shared his bed from the start, understanding that this was as important to gentlemen as the proper preparation of their food and the certainty of hot water for their baths, but when visitors came she retreated to the kitchen which alone she had claimed for herself and turned into a replica of the country kitchen in the Austrian mountains where she had grown up.

Ellen was six years old when she was first taken to Wimbledon. Wandering away from the drawing room where literature was being discussed, she found Henny with a cullender in front of her, shelling peas.