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  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Granny the Pag

  Nina Bawden grew up in different parts of Britain; in London, in Norfolk, in Shropshire, and in South Wales where she was evacuated during the war. She worked on farms in the holidays and, when she graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, she began to write. She has written seventeen novels for children and twenty-one for adults, most of which are still in print. She has four children and nine grandchildren and lives, with her husband, Austen Kark, in London in the winter and Greece in the summer. She likes friends and parties and swimming and travelling, often in quite dangerous parts of the world. In 1995 she went to Buckingham Palace where she was given a CBE by the Queen.

  Other books by Nina Bawden

  CARRIE’S WAR

  THE FINDING

  A HANDFUL OF THIEVES

  HUMBUG

  KEEPING HENRY

  KEPT IN THE DARK

  ON THE RUN

  THE OUTSIDE CHILD

  THE PEPPERMINT PIG

  THE REAL PLATO JONES

  REBEL ON A ROCK

  THE ROBBERS

  THE RUNAWAY SUMMER

  THE SECRET PASSAGE

  SQUIB

  THE WHITE HORSE GANG

  THE WITCH’S DAUGHTER

  Nina Bawden

  Granny the Pag

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1995

  Published in Puffin Books 1997

  11

  Copyright © Nina Bawden, 1995

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193905-6

  There are a lot of people whose help I would like to acknowledge, judges, solicitors, barristers, guardians-ad-litem, and numerous court officials who have been generous with their time and advice, but who may not wish to be recognised. But I think I may acknowledge my debt to my grand-daughter, Ottilie Kark, who once, long, long ago, was uncertain how to spell PIG.

  NINA BAWDEN

  Chapter One

  Other people’s grandmothers are soft and powdery and gentle and kind. Like Tom and Rosie’s grandmother. But my Granny is a Pag.

  Rosie is my best friend and Tom is her brother. Their grandmother lives in a house not far from our school and we usually stop there on our way to the station before we catch the train home. There is always a vase of flowers in the exact middle of their grandmother’s window and when she opens the door she always says, ‘Oh, what a lovely surprise,’ as if this is the first time she’s seen us for about nine hundred years. Perhaps it’s silly of her to pretend she wasn’t expecting us when she has a tray with three mugs and a plate of biscuits ready and waiting, but it feels nice, all the same.

  Granny the Pag never comes to the door. I have my own house key and as I come in she just shouts from wherever she is, ‘Who goes there!’ And when I answer, she says, ‘Pass, friend.’ If Rosie and Tom are with me and I ask if we can have a coke, instead of saying, as their grandmother would, ‘Darling, don’t you think milk would be nicer, or fresh lemonade?’ the Pag says, ‘Go ahead, rot your teeth, see if I care.’

  Tom and Rosie live next door and are used to her, and because they are my friends, I don’t think they would say anything behind my back. But I wouldn’t want anyone else to come home with me. The house isn’t dirty because we have someone to clean it – a different person about every month or so, no one can stand it much longer – but there are a lot of cats, nine last time I counted, and four dogs, all rather old. And, worst of all, the Pag smokes and everything smells of it, curtains, carpets, dogs and cats – as well as my hair!

  ‘It’s a dirty and disgusting habit,’ I tell her. ‘Look at you, ash all down your front, and a yellow moustache and brown teeth, and what’s more you’ll die of it if you’re not careful. Green slime will fill up your lungs and you’ll die.’

  Sometimes, if it’s a cold day, she opens a window then, and makes me sit right beside it, but mostly she just laughs until she starts coughing. ‘I’m not aiming to live to a hundred. You wouldn’t want me to, either. You might have to look after me and that would be a penance for both of us.’

  At least she doesn’t smoke when she comes to school to the prize-giving, or the Christmas play. I tell her she needn’t come if she really can’t bear it, but she has decided it is her duty to stand in for my parents on every occasion of that sort, and so she sits there, usually in the very front row, looking grim.

  Weird, too. Rosie’s grandmother wears pretty, soft clothes, woolly and silky, in pale colours. She keeps her glasses on a gold chain round her neck, there are tiny gold studs in her ears, and she always smells nice, like violet soap. But when she isn’t dressed in her jeans or her motor bike leathers, Granny the Pag wears dusty black skirts that trail on the ground, and she has a horrible fur jacket that she brings out for special occasions. I tell her it’s wrong to kill animals just to keep warm or look smart but she says, ‘Whichever old wolf this pelt belonged to died so long ago I don’t think you need trouble to mourn it. But if it really upsets you, I’ll wear the black wool and the Brooch.’

  Which puts me on the spot. The black wool is one thing – you can’t see where the moths have been at it unless you. look closely – but the Brooch is a different kind of embarrassment altogether. Proper grandmothers have proper jewellery, pearls and delicate rings; the sort of things that they can leave to their grand-daughters. The Brooch is enormous, about the size of my clenched fist, a huge chunk of gold covered in birds and flowers made out of diamonds. It belonged to the Pag’s grandmother who lived in Russia hundreds of years ago and must have been very rich, unless that kind of thing was much cheaper then. The Pag wears it to hide stains on her sweaters, or to hold her clothes together when a button is lost, or a zip broken. She says it has a good, strong pin.

  My mother says to her, ‘My precious darling, you really must not wear that great vulgar gew-gaw all the time, you’ll get mugged, my angel.’ (My mother calls everyone darling or precious, usually because she has forgotten their names, though she must remember her mother’s.) But the Pag just shrugs and says, ‘I doubt anyone would think it was real. Not if they took a good look at the rest of me.’

  When I was five or six I used to boast at school that my grandmother’s family came from Russia and that this big brooch was given to them by the Tsar. Now I am older (thirteen next birthday) it seems dreadful to wear something so valuable when people are starving in Africa and sleeping on the streets in New York and London. We did a project on Poverty in the Third World last term. And because I finished befor
e anyone else I did an extra essay on Poverty in the West.

  And, of course, some people might say that if the Pag sold the Brooch, she could afford to buy herself some decent clothes instead of going around looking like a bag-lady, or a Raggedy-Ann. I expect that is what the girls in my class say behind my back. Along with a lot of other things about my mother and father: how Tie has had false hair woven over the bald patch on top of his head and how she has had (or needs) a new face-lift.

  Before I start the story, I had better explain who I am. My name is Catriona Natasha Brooke. The Natasha comes from my mother, and the Brooke from my father. I suppose I am lucky it was that way around: the Pag’s family name, which was my mother’s before she married my father, is very long and almost unpronounceable. Catriona is a Scottish name because my parents were on tour in Scotland when I was born. The Pag says my mother gave birth to me in the twenty-minute interval in the middle of the play, in the leading lady’s dressing room. (My mother wasn’t the leading lady, she was only playing the maid, but I was an emergency.)

  Some of the teachers at school call me Catriona. Most other people call me Cat, except the Pag sometimes, when she is being very serious, or my mother, if she speaks to me on the telephone. When she has run out of names like sweetheart and dearest and jewel she calls me ‘Nat-arrr-sha,’ rolling her r’s as if she has something tickling her tongue.

  I don’t know what my parents called me when I was very young. I do know there was a stage before we got to the darlings and angels when I was known as The Kid. ‘Where’s the Kid?’ ‘Anyone seen the Kid?’ Usually with a rude adjective in front of Kid.

  That was before the Pag took me over, when I was still being trailed around with my mother and father and the rest of the theatre company, sleeping in the hamper that belonged to the wardrobe mistress, and being wrapped in a shawl and carried on stage whenever the play called for a baby. I suppose I got too big to be useful in that way. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a big old armchair, picking at the stuffing that was oozing out of holes in the seat, and the Pag and I were glaring at each other, eye-ball to eye-ball. I had never seen anyone who looked so tall and so thin. She had a big sharp nose and big sharp eyes that were a very light, piercing, ice-blue, and her fingers were like scarecrows’, long and twiggy. I must have seen a scarecrow somewhere, perhaps in a picture book. And I must have been scared because I started to bawl and thump my feet up and down in the chair. Then this terrifying scarecrow knelt down in front of me and said, ‘Hush, hush, little Cat, don’t grieve so, it tears my heart out to see you…’

  She can’t really have said that. So un-Pag-like! But it is what I remember. And she wasn’t a Pag then, of course.

  I couldn’t spell, that was how it happened. I could read, but no one had taught me to listen to how the words sounded before I wrote them down.

  I was unhappy. I can’t remember missing my mother and father but I remember that I was frightened. And I was angry with this tall, twig-like person I was supposed to call ‘Granny’. So I shouted at her. I threw my mug of milk at the kitchen wall. I spat out my carrots. She took me shopping and I threw myself on the ground in the middle of Woolworth’s and screamed and kicked my heels until a circle of people with red faces stood around, looking down at me, muttering. She gave me a bowl of ice-cream for tea and I mashed it and smashed it until it ran in white streams down the edge of the table, puddling on the floor where the cats licked it. Then I ran up to my room, stomping my feet hard on each stair. I banged my bedroom door open and banged it shut, then opened it so I could slam it again. I wanted to do something to make her sorry. I tore a piece of paper out of my notebook and wrote ‘Granny is a Pig’ and opened the door again and stuck it on the outside with sellotape.

  Only I didn’t write ‘Granny is a Pig.’

  I couldn’t spell ‘Pig’.

  I wrote ‘Granny is a Pag.’

  I heard her coming. She tapped on the door. Then she made a funny noise. I thought, she’s seen my notice, she’s angry. I wondered what she would do. Would she kill me? But when I opened the door, she was sitting on the top stair, laughing and laughing. Tears were running down her cheeks.

  The Pag is a doctor. Years and years ago, she worked in a hospital in Poland. Then the war came and the hospital was bombed. She rescued as many patients as she could but the hospital was destroyed, so she caught the last train out of the capital of Poland, which is Warsaw, and then the last plane out of somewhere else, and got to England where she married my grandfather. He had escaped from Poland, too. He was a scientist, and he had a job ready for him in America, but he died very quickly and suddenly a month before my mother was born, and the Pag got a job at a London hospital and bought a house in the suburbs which is where we live now. She is retired from the hospital but she still sees some of her old patients privately. She doesn’t charge them. She says none of them have any money.

  Most of the people who come to see her are old (as well as being old patients) and some of them are peculiar. One lady has to have the windows closed and the curtains drawn before she comes into the house in case someone – she doesn’t say who – might look through the windows and see her. There is a man who talks to himself, listening to himself in between, and laughing as if his second self, the self other people can’t hear, has said something unexpectedly funny. Another man smiles all the time but only with his mouth; his eyes look straight ahead, not at you but through you. That is really unnerving.

  Although I am a little afraid of the smiling man, I am used to these people. But it is another good reason for not bringing people home. I can just hear some of the girls in my class putting it about that Cat Brooke lives in a madhouse! Girls are much meaner than boys in that sort of way. Luckily, apart from Rosie and Tom, no one else from school lives in this part of town, and Rosie and Tom understand about patients because their mother is a doctor, too. She has a surgery built on the back of the house and sometimes she sends the Pag one of her patients who doesn’t need medicine, just someone to talk to.

  I don’t want to be a doctor. (I don’t want to go into the theatre, either.) But if I did take up medicine, I would be a proper doctor. I said to the Pag once, ‘The people who come to see you, they never go away, they just keep on coming. Rosie’s mother, she hands out medicine and bandages, and her patients get better.’

  ‘I’m not very handy with bandages,’ the Pag said. ‘And I hate the sight of blood. Besides, if I didn’t look after my people, no one else would. Most of them are never going to get any better, but sometimes they feel better for a little while after talking to me.’ She looked at me, head on one side, blue eyes sharp and bright. ‘What is it really, Cat?’

  She makes me jump when she says things like that. She always knows when there is something that I’m not saying. What I had really been thinking was that most of the patients who went to the surgery next door were normal, sensible people who just happened to be ill at that moment. If the Pag’s patients were like Rosie’s mother’s – instead of grubby and weird like old Flossie who looks as if she sleeps in a hedge, or plain dotty like Mr Wilberforce Frisbee who dances up the drive busily conducting an invisible orchestra – the Pag might smarten herself up, look a little bit more ordinary and respectable, a little bit more like a real grandmother. Nobody of her age should have long grey hair flying wild half-way down her back, no one as old as she is should be allowed on a motor-bike. It’s not safe. There should be a law against it.

  Chapter Two

  It had been all right in the Primary School. I had known the Pag was a more noticeable sort of person than other parents or grandparents. I knew that people looked at her in a special way when she came into the playground to fetch me, and that sometimes they smiled secretly at each other when her back was turned. But I didn’t mind because of something my teacher had said.

  My teacher’s name was Hilda, and she was very pretty, with straight, shiny hair, so fair it was almost silvery. It fell on both sides of her face when she b
ent down and everyone in our class tried to touch it, to see what it felt like. I suppose we were all in love with her, the way little kids are often in love with their teacher when they first go to school.

  Every Monday we had a Bring and Tell lesson – we had to bring a piece of news to school and tell it to the rest of the class. Each week the news had to be about something different: Pets, or Weather, or Holidays. One Monday the news was to be about families. The first people to put up their hands told the rest of the class what their mother or their father had done that weekend. Rosie’s Dad had taken her and Tom to the Science Museum on Saturday and mended the rabbit hutch on Sunday and cooked lunch for everyone while Rosie’s Mum weeded the garden. I didn’t put up my hand but Hilda looked at me in the end and I had to say something.

  I said, ‘I live with my granny.’

  Several people giggled behind me. Hilda looked at them fiercely. Then she said, smiling at me, ‘I know, dear, but your granny is your family.’

  I looked at my desk and clenched my mouth tight. On Sunday, the Pag and I had been out on the bike for what she called a real old zoom on the motorway. It was the most exciting thing in the world to be riding pillion, cuddled tight against the Pag’s back, my arms locked round her waist, the big powerful bike roaring and swooping and tilting beneath me, and the wind blowing into me and filling my chest. But it wasn’t the sort of thing the others had told about and I didn’t want to be different.

  Hilda said, in a kind voice, ‘I know your mum and your dad are famous people, Cat. Lots of people have seen them on television. But your granny is a wonderful person in a way you will understand better when you are older.’

  She had got it all muddled. She thought I was ashamed because I didn’t live with my mother and father. But it didn’t matter. She had said the Pag was ‘wonderful’. And I could tell by the way she said ‘famous’ that she didn’t think so much of my mother and father.