Great Meadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

on. But he wasn’t very keen, he said, but was being polite anyway, so it didn’t matter.
    â€˜What would you do,’ I said, ‘if you actually saw one? A witch. What then?’
    â€˜What would I do?’
    â€˜Yes. If suddenly, just coming out of that wood there, hoppity, skippity, an old black witch came?’
    He laughed, but it sounded like a bit of a sniff really. ‘Always presupposing that I believed in them, which I don’t, I’d say, “Good-day,” and that’s all.’
    He really made you feel quite rotten, all those words, he was terribly stuck-up and Londony. I quite went off him when he spoke like that, but otherwise he was all right, I suppose.
    â€˜I expect it’s because you live in London, and don’t believe in things like that. Of course I don’t suppose you could have witches in a city really, but you can in the country. We’ve got lots here in Sussex. They do spells, you know, and sometimes they kidnap children and sell them to the gypsies. Mrs Fluke, who’s lived here all her life, had a spell put on her by this witch to stop her chilblains. And it worked. So there. She told me.’
    â€˜I think someone’s pulling your leg,’ he said, and ran on up the hill to show that he could. Without getting out of breath. Only, when I got up to him he was. And quite red in the face too, which served him right.
    Where he was standing there was a little break of twisty elder bushes, all bent by the winds, and just below, the track from the village faded away into scrubby grass and chalk ruts, and there, all by itself looking very creepy and forlorn, was the caravan. But there were no cats anywhere and it looked, from where we were, very closed up. The little tin chimney with the pointy top was all rusty and the pink and blue paint was grey now, and all peeling off.
    â€˜That’s it,’ I said in a whisper because it seemed a whisper sort of place, like church or a museum. Because she was dead, I suppose.
    â€˜It’s a caravan,’ said Brian Thing. ‘How ever did they get it up here, I wonder?’
    â€˜I suppose with a horse, but years ago, because the shafts are all broken, look.’
    And they were, just lying rotten in the grass.
    â€˜Where’s the cauldron then?’ he said with a twisty smile.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But there’s an old milk churn over there.’
    â€˜Witches always have cauldrons, to do their spells round. They boil up toads and newts and things and make a brew. And curse people. Didn’t you know?’ He was smiling in a very sarcastic manner so I was just about to say, ‘Well . . . let’s go back now . . .’, when there was a very strange thing. The closed shutter slowly, slowly, creaked open. We looked at it. I didn’t breathe. Then the other one did. And there was no noise, just the creak and then stillness. And there was no wind so it wasn’t that. Then suddenly there was a dreadful little ‘bonk! bonk! bonk!’ noise. It was quite clear. And it was coming from the tin chimney stack. From
inside
it. And just as I was going to start back into the elder bushes there was a terrific noise of ghostly rattling and the pointy tin lid flew off, right up in the air. So I just turned and ran, and Brian Thing came with me, and his face was quite white now – only, his ears were red. And just as we pushed into the bushes there was a terrible noise from the caravan. ‘Wooooo! Wooooo!’ it went, very high and wavery, like an owl but louder, ‘Woooo! Woooo!’ And Brian Thing said, ‘Hells bells,’ to himself and was running far ahead of me when there was a most fearful explosion. And I just turned quickly enough to see an old iron stove come sailing out from where the front door of the caravan must have been, and it exploded, sort of, in the grass. And I was so astonished that I tripped over a twisty root and as