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I climbed down. I was trembling. My grandmother enfolded me in her arms. ‘I've seen a witch,’ I said.
‘Come inside,’ she said. ‘You'll be all right with me.’
She led me into the house and gave me a cup of hot cocoa with lots of sugar in it. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.
I told her.
By the time I had finished, it was my grandmother who was trembling. Her face was ashy grey and I saw her glance down at that hand of hers that didn't have a thumb. ‘You know what this means,’ she said. ‘It means that there is one of them in our district. From now on I'm not letting you walk alone to school.’
‘Do you think she could be after me specially?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I doubt that. One child is as good as any other to those creatures.’
It is hardly surprising that after that I became a very witch-conscious little boy. If I happened to be alone on the road and saw a woman approaching who was wearing gloves, I would quickly skip across to the other side. And as the weather remained pretty cold during the whole of that month, nearly everybody was wearing gloves. Curiously enough though, I never saw the woman with the green snake again.
That was my first witch. But it wasn't my last.
Summer Holidays
The Easter holidays came and went, and the Summer Term began at school. My grandmother and I had already planned to take our summer holiday in Norway and we talked about almost nothing else every evening. She had booked a cabin for each of us on the boat from Newcastle to Oslo at the earliest possible moment after my school broke up, and from Oslo she was going to take me to a place she knew down on the south coast near Arendal where she had spent her own summer holidays as a child nearly eighty years ago.
‘All day long,’ she said, ‘my brother and I were out in the rowing-boat. The whole coast is dotted with tiny islands and there's nobody on them. We used to explore them and dive into the sea off the lovely smooth granite rocks, and sometimes on the way out we would drop the anchor and fish for cod and whiting, and if we caught anything we would build a fire on an island and fry the fish in a pan for our lunch. There is no finer fish in the world than absolutely fresh cod.’
‘What did you use for bait, Grandmamma, when you went fishing?’
‘Mussels,’ she said. ‘Everyone uses mussels for bait in Norway. And if we didn't catch any fish, we would boil the mussels in a saucepan and eat those.’
‘Were they good?’
‘Delicious,’ she said. ‘Cook them in sea-water and they are tender and salty.’
‘What else did you do, Grandmamma?’
‘We used to row out and wave to the shrimp-boats on their way home, and they would stop and give us a handful of shrimps each. The shrimps were still warm from having been just cooked, and we would sit in the rowing-boat peeling them and gobbling them up. The head was the best part.’
‘The head?’ I said.
‘You squeeze the head between your teeth and suck out the inside. It's marvellous. You and I will do all those things this summer, my darling,’ she said.
‘Grandmamma,’ I said, ‘I can't wait. I simply can't wait to go.’
‘Nor can I,’ she said.
When there were only three weeks of the Summer Term left, an awful thing happened. My grandmother got pneumonia. She became very ill, and a trained nurse moved into the house to look after her. The doctor explained to me that pneumonia is not normally a dangerous illness nowadays because of penicillin, but when a person is more than eighty years old, as my grandmother was, then it is very dangerous indeed. He said he didn't even dare to move her to hospital in her condition, so she stayed in her bedroom and I hung about outside the door while oxygen cylinders and all sorts of other frightening things were taken in to her.
‘Can I go in and see her?’ I asked.
‘No, dear,’ the nurse said. ‘Not at the moment.’
A fat and jolly lady called Mrs Spring, who used to come and clean our house every day, also moved in and slept in the house. Mrs Spring looked after me and cooked my meals. I liked her very much, but she wasn't a patch on my grandmother for telling stories.
One evening, about ten days later, the doctor came downstairs and said to me, ‘You can go in and see her now, but only for a short time. She's been asking for you.’
I flew up the stairs and burst into my grandmother's room and threw myself into her arms.
‘Hey there,’ the nurse said. ‘Be careful with her.’
‘Will you be all right now, Grandmamma?’ I asked.
