Not Just a Witch
Authors: Eva Ibbotson
Eva Ibbotson writes for both adults and children. Born in Vienna, she now lives in the north of England. She has a daughter and three sons, now grown up, who showed her that children like to read about ghosts, wizards and witches ‘because they are just like people but madder and more interesting’. She has written seven other ghostly adventures for children.
Which Witch?
was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal and
The Secret of Platform, 13
was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. Her novel
Journey to the River Sea
was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award.
‘A fast, funny tale with a stinging bite!’
Books for Keeps
‘Horribly funny’
Susan Hill,
Sunday Times
Also by Eva Ibbotson
Which Witch?
The Haunting of Hiram
The Great Ghost Rescue
The Secret of Platform 13
Dial a Ghost
Monster Mission
Journey to the River Sea
The Star of Kazan
The Beasts of Clawstone Castle
For older readers
The Secret Countess
A Song for Summer
Witch
Eva Ibbotson
MACMILLAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS
for
Bertie, Freddie, Theo
and Octavia
First published 1989 by Macmillan Children’s Books
This edition published 2001 by Macmillan Children’s Books
This electronic edition published 2008 by Macmillan Children’s Books
a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-330-47773-4 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-47772-7 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-330-47774-1 in Mobipocket format
Copyright © Eva Ibbotson 1989
The right of Eva Ibbotson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Chapter One
When people quarrel it is bad, but when witches quarrel it is terrible.
Heckie was an animal witch. This didn’t mean of course that she was a witch who was an animal; it meant that she did animal magic. Her full name was Hecate Tenbury-Smith and she had started when she was still a child, turning the boring noses of her mother’s friends into interesting whiskery snouts or covering the cold ears of traffic wardens with thick black fur. She was a kind girl and only wanted to be helpful, but when she gave the swimming bath attendant red spots and a fishy tail so that he could pretend to be a trout if he wanted to, her parents sent her away to a well-known school for witches.
It was a school for making
good
witches. The motto the girls wore on their blazers said WITCHES AGAINST WICKEDNESS and the headmistress was choosy about whom she took.
Heckie was very happy there. She made a lot of friends, but her best friend was a stone witch called Dora Mayberry. Dora wasn’t
made
of stone, but she could turn anything
into
stone. When Dora was still in her high chair, she had looked at a raspberry jelly out of her round little eyes and it turned into something you couldn’t cut up even with a carving knife. And when she started turning the toothpaste solid in its tube and filling the fridge with statues of pork chops, she too was sent away to school.
It takes thirty years to train a witch and during all that time, Heckie and Dora were friends. Heckie was tall and thin with frizzy hair, pop eyes and teeth which stuck out, giving her an eager look. Dora was squat and solid and had muscles like a footballer because it is heavy work dealing in stone. They shared their secrets and got each other out of scrapes, and at night in the dormitory they talked about how they were going to use their magic to make the world a better place.
By this time Heckie could change any person into whatever animal she pleased by touching him with her Knuckle of Power (though for the best results she liked to use her Toe of Transformation also) and Dora could turn anybody into stone by squinting at him out of her small round eyes. And then, when they had been friends for thirty years, Heckie and Dora quarrelled.
It happened at the Graduation Party where all the witches were to get their diplomas and get ready to go out into the world. The party, of course, was very special, and both Heckie and Dora went separately to the hat shop kept by a milliner witch and ordered hats.
Obviously a witch on the most important day of her life is not going to turn up in a straw hat trimmed with daisies or a bonnet threaded with sky-blue lace. Heckie thought for a long time and then she ordered a hat made of living snakes.
The snakes were mixed. The crown of the hat was made of Ribbon Snakes most delicately woven; edging the brim were King Snakes striped in red and black and a single Black Mamba, coiled in the shape of a bow, hung low over Heckie’s forehead.
Heckie tried it on and it looked lovely. The snakes hissed and spat and shimmered; the flickering tongues made the hat marvellously alive. Snake hats are not only beautiful, they are useful: when you take them off you just put them in a tank and feed them a few dead mice and a boiled egg or two and they last for years.
The day of the party came. Heckie put on her batskin robe, fixed a bunch of black whiskers on to her chin – and lowered the hat carefully on to her curls. Then she set off across the lawn to the tent where the refreshments were.
But what should happen then? Coming towards her was her friend Dora – and she was wearing exactly the same hat!
It wasn’t roughly the same. It was exactly the same. The same Ribbon Snakes heaving and hissing on the crown; the same King Snakes writhing round the brim; the same poisonous Mamba tied into a bow!
The two witches stopped dead and glared at each other and the other witches stood round to see what would happen.
‘How dare you copy my hat?’ cried Heckie. She was really dreadfully upset. How could Dora, who was her best friend, hurt her like this?
But Dora was just as upset. ‘How dare
you
copy
my
hat?’ she roared, sticking out her jaw.
‘I chose this hat first. I am an animal witch. It is my
right
to wear a hat of living snakes.’
‘Oh, really? I suppose you’ve heard of my great-great-great-grandmother who was a Gorgon and had serpents growing from her scalp? It is
my
right to wear living snakes.’
But showing off about your relatives never works. Heckie only became angrier. ‘The only thing you’ve got a right to wear on your head is a bucket,’ she shrieked.
This was how the quarrel started, but soon the witches were throwing all sorts of insults at each other. They brought up old grudges: the time Dora had turned Heckie’s hot-water bottle to cement so that Heckie woke up with her stomach completely squashed. The time Heckie borrowed three warts from Dora’s make-up box and got cocoa on them . . .
From shouting at each other, the witches went on to tug at each other’s hats. Dora tugged a Ribbon Snake out of Heckie’s brim and hung it on a laurel bush. Heckie pulled at the end of Dora’s Black Mamba and undid the bow. And all the time they screamed at each other as though they were spoilt little brats, not respectable middle-aged witches.
Ten minutes later both their hats were in ruins and a friendship which had lasted all their schooldays was over.
The witches had planned to go and live close together in the same town. They were each going to buy a business where they could earn their living like ordinary ladies, but all their spare time would be spent in Doing Good.
Now Heckie went by herself to the town of Wellbridge, but Dora went off to a different town.
It was without her best friend, therefore, that Heckie began to try and make the world a better place.
It was a boy called Daniel who found out that a witch had come to live in Wellbridge.
He found out the night he went to babysit for Mr and Mrs Boothroyd at The Towers. Mr Boothroyd owned a factory on the edge of the town which made bath plugs and he was very rich. Unfortunately he was also very mean and so was his wife. As for his baby, which was called Basil, it was quite the most unpleasant baby you could imagine. Most babies have
something
about them which is all right. The ones that look like shrivelled chimpanzees often have nice fingernails; the ones that look like half-baked buns often smile very sweetly. But Basil was an out and out disaster. When Basil wasn’t screaming he was kicking; when he wasn’t kicking he was throwing up his food and when he wasn’t doing that he was holding his breath and turning blue.
Daniel was really too young to babysit and so was Sumi who was his friend. But Sumi, whose parents had come over from India to run the grocery shop in the street behind Daniel’s house, was so sensible and so used to minding her three little brothers that the Boothroyds knew she would be fit to look after Basil while they went to the Town Hall to have dinner with the Lord Mayor. What’s more, they knew they would have to pay her much less than they would have to pay a grown-up for looking after their son.
And Sumi had suggested that Daniel came along. ‘I’ll ask you your spellings,’ she said, because she knew how cross Daniel’s parents got when he didn’t do brilliantly at school.
Daniel’s parents were professors. Both of them. His father was called Professor Trent and if only Daniel had been dead and buried in some interesting tomb somewhere, the Professor would have been delighted with him. He was an archaeologist who studied ancient tribes and in particular their burial customs and he was incredibly clever. But Daniel wasn’t mummified or covered in clay so the Professor didn’t have much time for him. Daniel’s mother (who was also called Professor Trent) was a philosopher who had written no less than seven books on The Meaning of Meaning and she too was terribly clever and found it hard to understand that her son was just an ordinary boy who sometimes got his sums wrong and liked to play football.
The house they lived in was tall and grey and rather dismal, and looked out across the river to the university where both the professors worked, and to the zoo. As often as not when Daniel came home from school there was nobody there, just notes propped against the teapot telling him what to unfreeze for supper and not to forget to do his piano practice.
When you know you are a disappointment to your parents, your schoolfriends become very important. Fortunately Daniel had plenty of these. There was Joe whose father was a keeper in the Wellbridge Zoo, and Henry whose mother worked as a chambermaid in the Queen’s Hotel. And there was Sumi who was so gentle and so clever and never showed off even though she knew the answers to everything. And because it was Sumi who asked him, he went along to babysit at The Towers.