One Young Fool in Dorset (7 page)

I had saved my pocket money and visited the pet
shop.

“Can I help you, love?” asked the lady behind the
counter.

“I’d like a collar and lead, please,” I said.

“What size would you like? What breed of dog?”

“Um, it’s not exactly a dog.”

“Oh, you’d like a ferret harness?”

“No, a collar and lead, please. For a rabbit.”

“Sorry, speak up, love, did you say a rabbit?”

“Yes, please.”

“Well, if you’re sure… What colour would you
like?”

“Red, please.”

I ended up with a cat collar, complete with a bell,
and a lead attached. I can’t tell you how many times I drew that
collar and lead out of the paper bag and admired them.

Everything was ready and I thought I might burst
with excitement.

Our house
with the new workshop

At last came the day when my father arrived home
with a cardboard box. Something was scrabbling around in it,
something with claws.

“
Ach,
open it,” said my mother.

I lifted the flaps, and there, pressed into a corner
was a white ball of fluff, a baby rabbit.

“Ohhhh…” I exhaled, already in love with the little
thing.

I reached into the box and lifted her out, admiring
her pink floppy ears and deep red eyes.

“What are you going to call her?”

“Twinkletoes.”

“Not Snowy, like you said?”

“Well, her long name is Princess Snowy Twinkletoes
the First.”

“Well, take Princess Snowy Twinkletoes to her new
enclosure, see if she likes it.”

Princess Snowy did like it. She particularly liked
the honeysuckle plants my mother had painstakingly planted. She
didn’t eat them, she just hopped along the row snipping them off at
ground level with her razor teeth, ensuring they would never grow
again. My mother was furious.

“I wouldn’t mind so much if she ate them!” she
fumed.

“She’s just a baby,” I said protectively. “She’s
probably teething.”

But my mother never succeeded in growing honeysuckle
around Princess Snowy’s enclosure, and Snowy thrived. She grew
bigger, and bigger.

Soon she was big enough to wear the collar and lead,
and she came everywhere with me. It took a long time to go anywhere
because she would hop this way and that, nibbling grass. People
would stare at us, but I didn’t care.

My rabbit was constantly hungry and soon grew to be
a very large rabbit. And she developed a kick like a kangaroo. If
she didn’t want to be cuddled, which was all the time, a well-aimed
kick in my stomach took all my breath away.

“I don’t know why she’s so unfriendly,” I
complained.

“
Ach,
perhaps she needs rabbit company,” said
my mother. “We’ll take her over to the Hale’s house today. I know
the girls have a nice girl rabbit. Perhaps they’ll be friends and
it’ll be nice for them both.”

The Hale family lived on the opposite side of
Wareham. To reach their huge, beautiful Tudor house, Ivy had to
buck and fart her way through woods for quite some distance.
Sometimes we glimpsed red squirrels as these woods were one of
their last habitats before their bullying cousins, the grey
squirrels, chased them off.

The house had been in the family for generations,
and was breathtaking, with long oak-panelled corridors decorated
with ancestral paintings. I wasn’t much interested in the interior
so I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember being shown an
ordinary-looking wardrobe in one of the bedrooms.

“Well, open it,” Heather Hale said.

I did. It seemed normal enough to me. She leaned in
and touched something, and the back wall slid sideways. I gaped at
her.

“What is it?”

“A secret passage, of course,” she said airily.

“Where does it go?”

“Not sure really.”

“Have you ever been down it?”

“Nope. My brother and his friends did once, but it’s
all spidery and some of it’s fallen in. Mummy says it’s
dangerous.”

A secret passage! I was just discovering Enid Blyton
and her
Famous Five
books, and
The Mystery of
series.
I’d also read
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardobe
. I was in
raptures.

Being Tudor, the house must have been built between
1485 and 1603, but I confess my knowledge of history is too poor to
explain the purpose of the secret passage. If I was to hazard a
guess, I’d say it was built for smugglers to hide their contraband,
or escape from the law, as Dorset has a rich history of smuggling.
Even more likely, it might have been a ‘priest hole’, a hiding
place for priests, built into many English Catholic houses when
Catholics were persecuted by law in England, from the beginning of
the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558.

But pirates, priest holes and secret passages were
the last things on my mind that day. Princess Snowy Twinkletoes the
First was on her leash and I led the way to the rabbit run where
Heather’s Miss Bunny sat on her hind legs daintily washing her
face.

Princess Snowy suddenly saw Miss Bunny and stood
stock still, staring, her nose twitching. She tensed, and made a
beeline for Miss Bunny, bounding so fast that I had to run to keep
up. The signs were good; it looked as though Princess Snowy was
keen to play. Miss Bunny hopped to the front of her run and stood
on her back legs, nose whiffling, front paws on the wire. Miss
Bunny was much smaller than Snowy, but definitely interested in her
new playmate. Princess Snowy was almost rigid with excitement as
they touched noses through the wire mesh.

“Look!” I said, clasping my hands under my chin in
delight. “Look how excited Snowy is, she can’t wait to go in and
play with Miss Bunny.”

“I think they are going to be best friends,” said
Mrs Hale, smiling.

“
Ach,
put Snowy into the run and we can watch
them play,” said my mother.

Did we say
play?
Wrong word, wrong
description. The instant that Princess Snowy’s fluffy feet hit the
ground, she was galloping after Miss Bunny. Miss Bunny, a rather
alarmed expression on her face, lolloped away from her pursuer. But
Princess Snowy was on a mission and soon caught up. Miss Bunny
froze as Snowy gripped her round the midriff, and pumped. My mouth
dropped open.

“Oh!” said Mrs Hale.

“Golly!” said Heather.

“
Ach,
” said my mother.

“Oh look,” I said, “Princess Snowy Twinkletoes and
Miss Bunny are playing a lovely game together!”

“Hmm…” said my mother.

“Oh, look, they’re playing that game
again!
”
I said, as Miss Bunny broke free, chased by Snowy Twinkletoes.

“I think we may have misunderstood Princess Snowy
Twinkletoes,” said Mrs Hale grimly.

“
Ach,
I’m terribly sorry...” said my mother
as Snowy climbed aboard Miss Bunny again. And again. And again.

Now there was no denying the fact that Snowy was a
lusty buck rabbit, and not a female at all. And if we weren’t
willing to accept that, proof came 31 days later when Miss Bunny
(now Mrs Bunny) gave birth to eleven kits. Snowy was confined to
barracks, apart from walks on his leash, and allowed no more play
dates.

The following winter took everybody by surprise.
Many claim that Dorset is the warmest county in England as it is
situated so far south and has more than its fair share of sunshine
hours. However, even Dorset didn’t escape the winter of 1962 -1963,
soon to be called the Big Freeze.

Temperatures plummeted and were recorded as being
the lowest since 1739. Astonishingly, lakes and rivers began to
freeze over. Then on 26th December, Boxing Day, the snow arrived.
The freezing temperatures and fierce winds created snowdrifts some
20 feet deep. Ordinary, maybe, for some parts of the world, but for
England, freakish.

“
Ach,
I knew it was worth keeping my skis!”
chortled my mother, and ordered my father to fetch them down from
the attic.

Being Austrian, she was very much at home on skis,
and I think she was secretly pleased not to drive Ivy for a while.
She happily skied into Wareham to pick up bread and other
necessities.

If late December was cold, January was even colder.
The sea froze for a mile out from the shore at Herne Bay in
Kent, and the upper reaches of the Thames began to freeze over,
thick enough for people to skate on.

To me, Dorset became a fairytale setting of
pristine, sparkling snow and silver icicles. Jack Frost painted his
patterns on my bedroom window, and the world outside was blindingly
white and silent.

Snowy Twinkletoes was moved into the garage for a
while, but not before I’d set him down in the snow to see what he
thought of it. Not much. He flicked the snow off his paws at every
hop. I was surprised to see that he wasn’t as white as I thought he
was; against the virgin snow he looked quite yellow.

At the end of the Christmas holidays, school started
again. Because of the weather, the trains had been cancelled, and a
special bus was laid on. The bus set off valiantly but scarcely
travelled a mile before it turned back, unable to negotiate the
snowdrifts blocking the road. We were forced to stay at home and my
happiness was complete.

That bitter winter dragged on for three long months.
We went out very little, but that didn’t bother me. I’ve always
been happy in my own company, a dreamer. I was perfectly content in
my room, weaving stories in my head, making things or reading. As
my reading progressed, I developed an insatiable appetite for Enid
Blyton, but I also remember a book called
A Tale of Two
Horses
, and another,
Rascal the True Story of a Pet
Raccoon
. I devoured whatever books I could lay my hands on, and
never had enough.

But that was all about to change. New neighbours
moved into the house two doors down from us. I was about to make
lifelong friends.

6 Things That Go Bump

“
D
o our new neighbours have any children?” I
asked.

“
Ach,
I believe they have one girl, two years
younger than you.”

I was walking past their house one day, and being
curious, turned my head hoping for a glimpse of the new people. A
lady was working in the front garden.

“Hello!” she said, straightening up from her task.
“Aren’t you Victoria from number 24?”

“Yes, I am,” I answered shyly.

“Well, Victoria, I’m very pleased to meet you,” she
said, shaking my hand. “Come in and meet Annabel. She’s making
plaster of Paris models, perhaps you’d like to make some too?”

I followed her up the drive.

Plaster of Paris models? Now, that sounded like
fun…

Annabel had curly hair and round, red cheeks and was
even shyer than me. But after she’d explained the art of plaster of
Paris modelling, and how one mixed the plaster into a paste and
poured it into the rubber moulds, we were friends.

We set the models in rows to dry, then pulled off
the moulds and hand-painted the features of the little hedgehogs
and mice we’d made. Time flew past and we both forgot to be shy.
Annabel’s mother came in and admired our industry.

“I’ve just a baked a big chocolate cake, would you
like to stay to tea?” she asked.

Chocolate cake? Would I! My mother rarely baked as
she was far more interested in the plants in the garden. I couldn’t
believe my luck.

“Well, you’d better pop home and check that it’s
okay with your mother,” said Annabel’s mother. “And why don’t you
call me Auntie Jean?”

I did pop home and was back in a trice. We sat down
at the big table in the kitchen; Annabel, Auntie Jean, Uncle Frank,
and me. The chocolate cake was delicious and we drank cups of tea
out of china teacups and saucers decorated with flowers. I was in
heaven. This was the first of many, many teas I would be invited to
over the years. As Annabel and I grew up, her house became as
important to me as my own.

Annabel’s house was huge, bigger than ours, and the
garden was wonderful. The lawn was so big that Uncle Frank would
sit on his mower to cut the grass, but the shrubs provided Annabel
and me with dens to hide in and read comics like
June and School
Friend
,
Bunty
and
Mandy
. Often Tibby, their grey
and white cat, would join us, stretching out luxuriously to have
his tummy rubbed or his chin scratched.

The garden had a huge buddleia bush that attracted
hundreds of butterflies all summer long. Annabel and I caught them
in butterfly nets and trapped them in the sun parlour, only to let
them go again, watching them float out of the windows, back to the
blue flowers of the buddleia bush.

Annabel’s house had so many attractions. There were
unused rooms to play in, and places to explore. There were huge
polished tables, perfect for making dens beneath when the weather
was bad. Auntie Jean never interfered, and never scolded us for
making a mess, instead bringing us trays of cookies and milk to eat
in our dens. I adored her.