The Witches

She was apparently a great expert on these creatures and she made it very clear to me that her witch stories, unlike most of the others, were not imaginary tales. They were all true. They were the gospel truth. They were history. Everything she was telling me about witches had actually happened and I had better believe it. What was worse, what was far, far worse, was that witches were still with us. They were all around us and I had better believe that, too.

“Are you really being truthful, Grandmamma? Really and truly truthful?”

“My darling,” she said, “you won’t last long in this world if you don’t know how to spot a witch when you see one.”

My grandmother was tremendously old and wrinkled, with a massive wide body which was smothered in grey lace. She sat there majestic in her armchair, filling every inch of it. Not even a mouse could have squeezed in to sit beside her. I myself, just over seven years old, was crouched on the floor at her feet, wearing pyjamas, dressing-gown, and slippers.

[…]

My grandmother was the only grandmother I ever met who smoked cigars. She lit one now, a long black cigar that smelt of burning rubber.

“It isn’t the dirt that the witch is smelling. It is you. The smell that drives a witch mad actually comes right out of your own skin. […] The point is this. When you haven’t washed for a week and your skin is all covered with dirt, then quite obviously the stink-waves cannot come oozing out nearly so strongly.”

“I shall never have a bath again,” I said.

“Just don’t have one too often,” my grandmother said. “Once a month is quite enough for a sensible child.”

It was moments like this that I loved my grandmother more than ever.

“Why can’t we stay here in Norway? You would hate to live anywhere else! You told me you would!”

“I know,” she said. “But there are a lot of complications with money and with the house that you wouldn’t understand. Also, it said in the will that although all your family is Norwegian, you were born in England and you have started your education there and he wants you to continue going to English schools.”

“Oh Grandmamma!” I cried. “You don’t want to go and live in our English house, I know you don’t!”

“Of course I don’t,” she said. “But I am afraid I must. The will said that your mother felt the same way about it, and it is important to respect the wishes of the parents.”

There was no way out of it. We had to go to England, and my grandmother started making arrangements at once.

Then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a woman standing immediately below me. She was looking up at me and smiling in the most peculiar way. […]

I noticed she was wearing a small black hat and she had black gloves on her hands and the gloves came nearly up to her elbows.

Gloves! She was wearing gloves!

I froze all over.

“I have a present for you,” she said […]

I didn’t answer.

“Come down out of that tree, little boy,” she said “and I shall give you the most exciting present you’ve ever had.” […]

Without taking her eyes from my face, she very slowly put one of those gloved hands into her purse and drew out a small green snake. She held it up for me to see.

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 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.”

I taught them to climb up the back of my neck onto the top of my head. I did this by putting cake crumbs in my hair.

On the very first morning after our arrival, the chambermaid was making my bed when one of my mice poked its head out from under the sheets. The maid let out a shriek that brought a dozen people running to see who was being murdered. I was reported to the Manager. There followed an unpleasant scene in the Manager’s office with the Manager, my grandmother, and me.

The Manager, whose name was Mr. Stringer, was a bristly man in a black tail-coat. “I cannot permit mice in my hotel, madam,” he said to my grandmother.

The trick I was going to teach them today was tight-rope walking. It is not all that difficult to train an intelligent mouse to be an expert tight-rope walker provided you know exactly how to go about it. First, you must have a piece of string. I had that. Then you must have some good cake. […]

Now here’s what you do. You stretch the string tight between your two hands, but you start by keeping it very short, only about three inches. You put the mouse on your right hand and a little piece of cake on your left hand. The mouse is therefore only three inches away from the cake. […] He only has to take two steps along the string to reach this tasty morsel. He ventures forward, one paw on the string, then the other. If the mouse has a good sense of balance […] he will get across easily.

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 twenty-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?

“A mouse!” cried the witches. “What a frumptious thought!”

“Classrooms vill all be svorrrming vith mice!” shouted The Grand High Witch. “Chaos and pandemonium vill be rrreigning in every school in Inkland! Teachers vill be hopping up and down! Vimmen teachers vill be standing on desks and holding up skirts and yelling ‘Help, help, help!’”

“They will! They will!” cried the audience.

“And vot,” shouted The Grand High Witch, “is happening next in every school?”

“Tell us!” they cried. “Tell us, O Brainy One!”

The Grand High Witch stretched her stringy neck forward and grinned at the audience, showing two rows of pointed teeth, slightly blue. She raised her voice louder than ever and shouted, “Mouse-trrraps is coming out!”

What’s so wonderful about being a little boy anyway? Why is that necessarily any better than being a mouse? I know that mice get hunted and they sometimes get poisoned or caught in traps. But little boys sometimes get killed, too. Little boys can be run over by motor-cars or they can die of some awful illness. Little boys have to go to school. Mice don’t. Mice don’t have to pass any exams. Mice don’t have to worry about money. Mice, as far as I can see, have only two enemies, humans and cats. My grandmother is a human, but I know for certain she will always love me whoever I am. And she never, thank goodness, keeps a cat. When mice grow up, they don’t ever have to go to war and fight against other mice. Mice, I felt pretty certain, all like each other. People don’t.

“Your biggest problem at the moment is your parents. How are they going to take this? Will they treat you with sympathy and kindness?”

Bruno considered this for a moment. “I think,” he said, “that my father is going to be a bit put out.”

“And your mother?”

“She’s terrified of mice,” said Bruno.

“Then you’ve got a problem, haven’t you?”

“Why only me?” he said. “What about you?”

“My grandmother will understand perfectly,” I said. “She knows all about witches.”

My grandmother had come forward now in her armchair so that she was sitting right on the edge of it. Both her hands were cupped over the gold knob of the stick she always used when walking, and she was staring at me with eyes as bright as two stars.

Then I told her how The Grand High Witch had shot out the fiery white-hot sparks and how they had turned one of the other witches into a puff of smoke.

“I’ve heard about that!” my grandmother cried out excitedly. “But I never quite believed it! You are the first non-witch ever to see it happening! It is the Grand High Witch’s most famous punishment. It is known as ‘getting fried,’ and all the other witches are petrified of having it done to them!”

“Oh, hello,” came my grandmother’s voice. “I just dropped my knitting over the balcony by mistake. But it’s all right. I’ve got hold of one end of it. I can pull it up by myself, thank you all the same.” I marvelled at the coolness of her voice.

“Who vur you talking to just now?” snapped The Grand High Witch. “Who vur you telling to hurry up and come out qvickly?”

“I was talking to my little grandson,” I heard my grandmother saying. “He’s been in the bathroom for hours and it’s time he came out. He sits in there reading books and he forgets completely where he is. Do you have any children, my dear?”

“I do not!” shouted The Grand High Witch, as she came quickly back into the bedroom, slamming the balcony door behind her.

“I’ll talk where I dashed well want to, madam,” Mr Jenkins said. “Come on now, out with it! If Bruno has broken a window or smashed your spectacles, I‘ll pay for the damage, but I’m not budging out of this seat!”

[…]

“Where is Bruno, anyway?” Mr Jenkins said. “Tell him to come here and see me.”

“He’s here already,” my grandmother said. “He’s in my handbag.” She patted the big floppy leather bag with her walking-stick.

“What the heck d’you mean he’s in your handbag?” Mr Jenkins shouted.

“Are you trying to be funny?” Mrs. Jenkins said, very prim.

“There’s nothing funny about this,” my grandmother said. “Your son has suffered a rather unfortunate mishap.”

“He’s always suffering mishaps,” Mr Jenkins said. “He suffers from overeating and then he suffers from wind. You should hear him after supper. He sounds like a brass band!”

“Bruno is a mouse,” my grandmother said, calm as ever.

“He most certainly is not a mouse!” shouted Mr Jenkins.

“Oh yes I am!” Bruno said, poking his head up out of the handbag.

Mr Jenkins leapt about three feet into the air.

“Hello, Dad” Bruno said. He had a silly sort of mousy grin on his face.

Mr Jenkins’s mouth dropped open so wide I could see the gold fillings in his back teeth.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” Bruno went on. “It’s not as bad as all that. Just so long as the cat doesn’t get me.”

[…]

“B-b-but B-B-Bruno!” stammered Mr Jenkins again. “H-how did this happen?” The poor man had no wind left in his sails at all.

“Witches,” my grandmother said. “The witches did it.”

“I can’t have a mouse for a son!” shrieked Mr Jenkins.

You could hear Mrs Jenkins’s shrill voice all over the room. “Herbert!” it was screaming. “Herbert, get me out of here! There’s mice everywhere! They’ll go up my skirts!” […]

My grandmother advanced upon them and thrust Bruno into Mr Jenkins’s hand. “Here’s your little boy,” she said. “He needs to go on a diet.”

“Hi, Dad!” Bruno said. “Hi, Mum!”

Mrs Jenkins screamed even louder. My grandmother, with me in her hand, turned and marched out of the room. She went straight across the hotel lobby and out through the front entrance into the open air.

Outside it was a lovely warm evening and I could hear the waves breaking on the beach just across the road from the hotel.

“A mouse-person will almost certainly live for three times as long as an ordinary mouse,” my grandmother said. “About nine years.”

“Good!” I cried. “That’s great! It’s the best news I’ve ever had!”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, surprised.

“Because I would never want to live longer than you,” I said. “I couldn’t stand being looked after by anybody else.”

[…]

“How old are you, Grandmamma?” I asked.

“I’m eighty-six,” she said.

“Will you live another eight or nine years?”

“I might,” she said, “with a bit of luck.”

“You’ve got to,” I said. “Because by then I’ll be a very old mouse and you’ll be a very old grandmother and soon after that we’ll both die together.”

“That would be perfect,” she said.

“So we have work to do, you and I!” she cried out. “We have a great task ahead of us! Thank heavens you’re a mouse! A mouse can go anywhere! All I’ll have to do is put you down somewhere near The Grand High Witch’s Castle and you will very easily be able to get inside it and creep around looking and listening to your heart’s content!”

“I will! I will!” I answered. “No one will ever see me! Moving about in a big Castle will be child’s play compared with going into a crowded kitchen full of cooks and waiters!”

“You could spend days in there if necessary!” my grandmother cried. In her excitement, she was waving her stick all over the place, and suddenly she knocked over a tall and very beautiful vase […] “Forget it,” she said. “It’s only a Ming.”