The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories (4 page)

When the storm burst, Mr. and Mrs. Armitage were inside the house.

"I hope the children have the sense to shelter somewhere,” said Mrs. Armitage. Her husband looked out at the weather and gave a yelp of dismay.

"All my young peas and beans! They'll be blown as flat as pancakes!” he cried in agony, and rushed out into the garden. But as he went out, the wind dropped and the sun shone again. Mr. Armitage walked over the lawn, his eyes starting in horror from his head. For all about the garden were one hundred unicorns!

He went back into the house in a state of collapse and told his wife. “My garden will be trampled to pieces,” he moaned. “How will we ever get rid of them?"

"Perhaps Mark and Harriet will have some ideas,” suggested Mrs. Armitage. But Mark and Harriet were nowhere to be found. Mrs. Epis was having hysterics in the kitchen. “It's not decent,” was all she could say. She had come upon the unicorns unexpectedly, as she was hanging some teacloths on the line.

Agnes, oddly enough, was the one who had a practical idea.

"If you please, sir,” she said, “I think my dad wouldn't mind three or four of those to use as plough horses. Someone told me that once you've got them trained, they're very cheap to feed."

So her father, Mr. Monks, came along, looked over the herd, and picked out five likely ones as farm horses. “And thank you kindly,” he said.

"You don't know anyone else who'd be glad of a few, do you?” asked Mr. Armitage hopefully. “As you can see, we've got rather more than we know what to do with."

"I wouldn't be surprised but what old Farmer Meads could take some in. I'll ask him,” Mr. Monks volunteered. “And there's old Gilbert the carter, and I believe as how someone said the milkman was looking for a new pony."

"Do ask them all,” said Mr. Armitage desperately. “And look—stick this up on the village notice-board as you go past.” He hastily scribbled a notice which he handed to Mr. Monks:

Unicorns given away. Quiet to ride or drive.

The rest of the day the Armitages were fully occupied in giving away unicorns to all applicants. “It's worse than trying to get rid of a family of kittens,” said Mrs. Armitage. “And if they don't turn out well, we shall have to move away from the village. Oh, there's the artist who lives up on Pennington Hill. I'm sure he'd like a unicorn to carry his paints around for him."

All day there was no sign of Mark or Harriet, and the parents began to worry. “If it were Monday, now, it would be all right,” they said, “but where can they be?"

Late in the evening, after they had disposed of the last unicorn to the baker's boy, and he had gone rejoicing along to Mr. Ellis (who was nearly at his wits’ end by this time) to have it shod, Mark and Harriet trailed in, looking exhausted but content.

"Where
have
you been? And what
have
you done to your clothes?” Mrs. Armitage asked them.

"It wasn't our fault,” Harriet said drowsily. “We were bewitched. We were blown over the sea, and we fell in. We would have been drowned, only a submarine rose up under us and took us into Brighton."

"And why didn't you come straight off, pray?"

"Well, we had to earn some money for our bus fares. They won't take unicorn gold in Brighton, I don't know why. So we organized a show with Candleberry on the beach and earned an awful lot. And then we had a huge tea, and Mark caught the bus, and I followed along by the side on Candleberry. He's terribly fast. He's asleep in the greenhouse now. We thought that would be a good place for him. What's the matter with the garden? It looks trampled."

Harriet's voice was trailing away with sleep.

"You two,” said Mrs. Armitage, “are going straight to bed."

"But we
always
stay up to supper on Mondays,” complained Mark in the middle of a vast yawn.

"Yes,” said his father, “but today, as it happens, is Tuesday."

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Oh, bother,” said Mrs. Armitage, looking over her coffee-cup at the little heap of sixpences on the sideboard, “the children have forgotten to take their lunch money to school. You could go that way to the office and leave it, couldn't you, darling?"

The house still reverberated from the slam of the front door, but the children were out of sight, as Mr. Armitage gloomily ascertained.

"I hate going to that place,” he said. “Miss Croot makes me feel so small, and all the little tots look at me."

"Nonsense, dear. And anyway, why shouldn't they?” Mrs. Armitage returned in a marked manner to the
Stitch Woman and Home Beautifier's Journal,
so her husband, with the sigh of a martyr, put on his hat, tucked
The Times
and his umbrella under his arm, and picked up the money. He dropped a kiss on his wife's brow, and in his turn went out, but without slamming the door, into the October day. Instead of going down the cobbled hill towards his office, he turned left up the little passageway which led to Mrs. Croot's kindergarden, which Mark and Harriet attended. It was a small studio building standing beside a large garden which lay behind the Armitage garden; Harriet and Mark often wished they could go to school by climbing over the fence. Fortunately, the children were not allowed to play in the studio garden, or, as the Armitage parents often said to each other, shuddering, they would hear their children's voices all day long instead of only morning and evening.

Mr. Armitage tapped on the studio door but nobody answered his knock. There was a dead hush inside, and he mentally took his hat off to Miss Croot for her disciplinary powers. Becoming impatient at length, however, he went in, through the lobby where the boots and raincoats lived. The inner doorway was closed, and when he went through it, he stood still in astonishment.

The studio room was quite small, but the little pink and blue and green desks had been shoved back against the walls to make more space. The children were all sitting cross-legged on the floor, quiet as mice, in a ring round the old-fashioned green porcelain stove with its black chimney-pipe which stood on a kind of iron step in the middle of the room. There was a jam cauldron simmering in the middle of the stove, and Miss Croot, an exceedingly tall lady with teeth like fence-posts and a great many bangles, was stirring the cauldron and dropping in all sorts of odds and ends.

Mr. Armitage distinctly heard her recite:

"Eye of newt and toe of frog..."

And then he said: “Ahem,” and, stepping forward, gave her the little stack of warm sixpences which he had been holding in his hand all this time.

"My children forgot their lunch money,” he remarked.

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Er,” Miss Croot gratefully if absently replied. “
How
kind. I do like to get it on Mondays. Now a pinch of vervain, Pamela, from the tin on my desk please."

A smug little girl with a fringe brought her the pinch.

"I hope, ma'am, that
that
isn't the children's lunch,” said Mr. Armitage, gazing distastefully into the brew. He saw his own children looking at him pityingly from the other side of the circle, plainly hoping that he wasn't going to disgrace them.

"Oh dear, no,” replied Miss Croot vaguely. “This is just our usual transformation mixture. There, it's just going to boil.” She dropped in one of the sixpences and it instantly became a pink moth and fluttered across to the window.

"Well, I must be on my way,” muttered Mr. Armitage. “Close in here, isn't it."

He stepped carefully back through the seated children to the doorway, noticing as he did so some very odd-looking maps on the walls, a tray of sand marked in hexagons and pentagons, a stack of miniature broomsticks, coloured beads arranged on the floor in concentric circles, and a lot of little Plasticine dolls, very realistically made.

At intervals throughout the day, Mr. Armitage thought rather uneasily about Miss Croot's kindergarden, and when he was drinking his sherry that evening, he mentioned the matter to his wife.

"Where are the children now, by the way?” he said.

"In the garden, sweeping leaves with their brooms. They made the brooms themselves, with raffia."

In fact he could see Mark and Harriet hopping about in the autumn dusk. They had become bored with sweeping and were riding on the brooms like horses. As Mr. Armitage watched, Mark shouted “Abracadabra,” and his broomstick lifted itself into the air, carried him a few yards, and then turned over, throwing him into the dahlias.

"Oh, jolly good,” exclaimed Harriet. “Are you hurt? Watch me now.” Her broomstick carried her into the fuchsia bush, where it stuck, and she had some trouble getting down.

"Well, I shouldn't worry about it too much,” she answered comfortably, picking up her tatting. “I think it's much better for them to get that sort of thing out of their systems when they're small. And then Miss Croot is such a near neighbor; we don't want to offend her. Just think how tiresome it was when the Bradmans lived there and kept dropping all their snails over the fence. At least the children play quietly and keep themselves amused nowadays, and that's
such
a blessing."

Next evening, however, the children were being far from quiet.

Mr. Armitage, in his study, could hear raucous shouts and recriminations going on between Mark and Harriet and the Shepherd children, ancient enemies of theirs in the garden on the other side.

"Sucks to you!"

"Double sucks, with brass knobs on."

"This is a gun, I've shot you dead. Bang!"

"This is a magic wand, I've turned you into a—"

"
Will
you stop that hideous row,” exclaimed Mr. Armitage, bursting out of his French window. A deathly hush fell in the garden. He realized almost at once, though, that the silence was due not so much to his intervention as the fact that where little Richard, Geoffrey, and Moira Shepherd had been, there were now three sheep, which Harriet and Mark were regarding with triumphant satisfaction.

"Did you do that?” said Mr. Armitage sharply to his children.

"Well—yes."

"Change them back at once."

"We don't know how."

"Geoffrey—Moira—your mother says it's bedtime.” Mr. Shepherd came out of his greenhouse with a pair of secateurs.

"I say, Shepherd, I'm terribly sorry—my children have changed yours into sheep. And now they say they don't know how to change them back."

"Oh, don't apologize, old chap. As a matter of fact, I think it's a pretty good show. Some peace and quiet will be a wonderful change, and I shan't have to mow the lawn.” He shouted indoors with the liveliest pleasure,

"I say, Minnie! Our kids have been turned into sheep, so you won't have to put them to bed. Dig out a long frock and we'll go to the Harvest Ball."

A shriek of delight greeted his words.

"All the same, it was a disgraceful thing to do,” said Mr. Armitage severely, escorting his children indoors. “How long will it last?"

"Oh, only till midnight—like Cinderella's coach, you know,” replied Harriet carelessly.

"It would be rather fun if
we
went to the Harvest Ball,” remarked Mr. Armitage, in whom the sight of the carefree Shepherd parents had awakened unaccustomed longings. “Agnes could look after the children, couldn't she?"

"Yes, but I've nothing fit to wear!” exclaimed his wife. “Why didn't you think of it sooner?"

"Well, dash it all, can't the kids fix you up with something? Not that I approve of this business, in fact I'm going to put a stop to it, but in the meantime..."

Harriet and Mark were delighted to oblige and soon provided their mother with a very palatial crinoline of silver lamé.

"Doesn't look very warm,” commented her husband. “Remember the Assembly Rooms are always as cold as the tomb. Better wear something wooly underneath."

Mrs. Armitage created a sensation at the ball, and was so sought-after that her husband hardly saw her the whole evening. All of a sudden, as he was enjoying a quiet game of whist with the McAlisters, a terrible thought struck him.

"What's the time, Charles?"

"Just on twelve, old man. Time we were toddling. I say, what's up?"

Mr. Armitage had fled from the table and was frantically searching the ballroom for his wife. At last he saw her, right across on the other side.

"Mary!” he shouted. “You must come home at once."

"Why? What? Is it the children...?” She was threading her way towards him when the clock began to strike. Mr. Armitage started and shut his eyes. A roar of applause broke out, and he opened his eyes to see his wife looking down at herself in surprise. She was wearing a scarlet silk ski-suit. Everyone crowded around her, patting her on the back, and saying that it was the neatest trick they'd seen since the pantomime, and how had she done it? She was given a prize of a hundred cigarettes and a bridge marker. “I had the ski-suit on underneath,” she explained on the way home. “So as to keep warm, you see. There was plenty of room for it under the crinoline. And what a mercy I did...."

"All this has got to stop,” pronounced Mr. Armitage next morning. “It's Guy Fawkes in a couple of weeks, and can't you imagine what it'll be like? Children flying around on broomsticks and being hit by rockets, and outsize fireworks made by methods that I'd rather not go into—it just won't do, I tell you."