The Pinhoe Egg

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Book: Read The Pinhoe Egg for Free Online
Authors: Diana Wynne Jones
dressed.
    â€œWon’t get dressed, eh?” Dad said.
    â€œWorse than that!” said Great-Aunt Clarice. “Look.”
    The ladies crowded aside to give Dad and Marianne a view of the bed. Dad said, “My God!” and Marianne did not blame him.
    Gammer had grown herself into the bed. She had sunk into the mattress, deep into it, and rooted herself, with little hairy nightdress-colored rootlets sticking out all round her. Her long toe-nails twined like transparent yellow creepers into the bars at the end of the bed. At the other end, her hair and her ears were impossibly grown intothe pillow. Out of it her face stared, bony, defiant, and smug.
    â€œMother!” said Marianne’s dad.
    â€œThought you could get the better of me, didn’t you?” Gammer said. “I’m not going.”
    Marianne had almost never seen her father lose his temper, but he did then. His round amiable face went crimson and shiny. “Yes, you are going,” he said. “You’re moving to Dinah and Isaac’s whatever tricks you play. Leave her be,” he said to the aunts. “She’ll get tired of this in the end. Let’s get all the furniture moved out first.”
    This was easier said than done. No one had realized quite how much furniture there was. A house the size of Woods House, that was big enough to have held a family with seven children once, can hold massive quantities of furniture. And Woods House did. Joss Callow had to go and fetch Uncle Cedric’s hay wain and then borrow the Reverend Pinhoe’s old horse to pull it, because the farm cart was just not enough and they would have been at it all day. Great-Uncle Edgar prudently left at this point in case someone suggested they use his fine, spruce carriage too; but Great-Uncle Lester nobly stayed and offered to take the smaller items in hiscar. Even so, all three vehicles had to make several trips to the big barn out on the Hopton Road, while a crowd of younger Pinhoes rushed out there on bikes and broomsticks to unload the furniture, stack it safely, and surround it in their best spells of preservation. At the same time, so many things turned up that people thought Gammer would need in her new home, that Dolly the donkey was going backward and forward nonstop between Woods House and the Dell, with the cart loaded and creaking behind her.
    â€œIt’s so nice to have things that you’re used to around you in a strange place!” Great-Aunt Sue said. Marianne privately thought this was rather sentimental of Aunt Sue, since most of the stuff was things she had never once seen Gammer use.
    â€œAnd we haven’t touched the attics yet!” Uncle Charles groaned, while they waited for the donkey cart to come back again.
    Everyone else had forgotten the attics. “Leave them till after lunch,” Dad said hastily. “Or we could leave them for the new owner. There’s nothing but junk up there.”
    â€œI had a toy fort once that must be up there,” Uncle Simeon said wistfully.
    But he was ignored, as he mostly was, because Uncle Richard brought the donkey cart back with a small Pinhoe girl who had a message from Mum. Evidently Mum was getting impatient to know what had become of Gammer.
    â€œThey’re all ready,” small Nicola announced. “They sprung clent.”
    â€œThey what ?” said all the aunts.
    â€œThey washed the floor and they dried and they polished and the carpet just fits,” Nicola explained. “And they washed the windows and did the walls and put the new curtains up and started on all the furniture and the pictures and the stuffed trout and Stafford and Conway Callow teased a goat and it butted them and—”
    â€œOh, they spring cleaned,” said Aunt Polly. “Now I understand.”
    â€œThank you, Nicola. Run back and tell them Gammer’s just coming,” Dad said.
    But Nicola was determined to finish her narrative first.

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