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I crouched behind it and peered through the crack between two of the folding sections. I could see the entire length and width of the Ballroom without anyone seeing me.
‘Well, ladies, I am sure you will be quite comfortable in here,’ Mr Stringer's voice was saying. Then in through the double-doors he marched, black tail-coat and all, spreading his arms wide as he ushered in a great flock of ladies. ‘If there is anything we can do for you, do not hesitate to let me know,’ he went on. ‘Tea will be served for all of you on the Sunshine Terrace after you have concluded your meeting.’ With that, he bowed and scraped himself out of the room as a vast herd of ladies from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children came streaming in. They wore pretty clothes and all of them had hats on their heads.
The Meeting
Now that the Manager had gone, I was not particularly alarmed. What better than to be imprisoned in a room full of these splendid ladies? If I ever got talking to them, I might even suggest that they come and do a bit of cruelty-to-children preventing at my school. We could certainly use them there.
In they came, talking their heads off. They began milling round and choosing their seats, and there was a whole lot of stuff like, ‘Come and sit next to me, Millie dear,’ and ‘Oh, hel-lo, Beatrice! I haven't seen you since the last meeting! Wh
at an adorable dress you have on!’
I decided to stay where I was and let them get on with their meeting while I got on with my mouse-training, but I watched them for a while longer through the crack in the screen, waiting for them to settle down. How many were there? I guessed about two hundred. The back rows filled up first. They all seemed to want to sit as far back from the platform as possible.
There was a lady wearing a tiny green hat in the middle of the back row who kept scratching the nape of her neck. She couldn't leave it alone. It fascinated me the way her fingers kept scratching away at the hair on the back of her neck. Had she known somebody was watching her from behind, I'm sure she would have been embarrassed. I wondered if she had dandruff. All of a sudden, I noticed that the lady next to her was doing the same thing!
And the next one!
And the next!
The whole lot of them were doing it. They were all scratching away like mad at the hair on the backs of their necks!
Did they have fleas in their hair?
More likely it was nits.
A boy at school called Ashton had had nits in his hair last term and the matron had made him dip his whole head in turpentine. It killed the nits all right, but it nearly killed Ashton as well. Half the skin came away from his scalp.
I began to be fascinated by these hair-scratching ladies. It is always funny when you catch someone doing something coarse and she thinks no one is looking. Nose-picking, for example, or scratching her bottom. Hair-scratching is very nearly as unattractive, especially if it goes on and on.
I decided it had to be nits.
Then the most astonishing thing happened. I saw one lady pushing her fingers up underneath the hair on her head, and the hair, the entire head of hair, lifted upwards all in one piece, and the hand slid underneath the hair and went on scratching!
She was wearing a wig! She was also wearing gloves! I glanced swiftly around at the rest of the now seated audience. Every one of them was wearing gloves!
My blood turned to ice. I began to shake all over. I glanced frantically behind me for a back door to escape through. There wasn't one.
Should I leap out from behind the screen and make a dash for the double-doors?
Those double-doors were already closed and I could see a woman standing in front of them. She was bending forward and fixing some sort of a metal chain round the two door-handles.
Keep still, I told myself. No one has seen you yet. There's no reason in the world why they should come and look behind the screen. But one false move, one cough, one sneeze, one nose-blow, one little sound of any sort and it won't be just one witch that gets you. It'll be two hundred!
At that point, I think I fainted. The whole thing was altogether too much for a small boy to cope with. But I don't believe I was out for more than a few seconds, and when I came to, I was lying on the carpet and I was still, thank heavens, behind the screen. There was absolute silence all around me.
Rather shakily, I got to my knees and peered once again through the crack in the screen.
Frizzled Like a Fritter
All the women, or rather the witches, were now sitting motionless in their chairs and staring as though hypnotized at somebody who had suddenly appeared on the platform. That somebody was another woman.
The first thing I noticed about this woman was her size. She was tiny, probably no more than four and a half feet tall. She looked quite young, I guessed about twenty-five or six, and she was very pretty. She had on a rather stylish long black dress that reached right to the ground and she wore black gloves that came up to her elbows. Unlike the others, she wasn't wearing a hat.
She didn't look to me like a witch at all, but she couldn't possibly not be one, otherwise what on earth was she doing up there on the platform? And why, for heaven's sake, were all the other witches gazing at her with such a mixture of adoration, awe and fear?
Very slowly, the young lady on the platform raised her hands to her face. I saw her gloved fingers unhooking something behind her ears, and then… then she caught hold of her cheeks and lifted her face clean away! The whole of that pretty face came away in her hands!
It was a mask!
