Aunt Nellie was the first to come. There seemed nothing particularly ominous about her arrival since she appeared toward the end of the summer term, wearing dark glasses as the result of a visit to an oculist in the nearby town of Bristol. Branny had seen Aunt Nellie only once before and connected her pleasantly with strawberries and cream for tea on the lawn and a “silver penny” on her departure for India. In the dim past, an amorous purser on a P and O liner had called her a “dashed pretty woman” and the epithet had stuck, although it had long since lost any semblance of accuracy.
Aunt Nellie was discovered in the drawing room just before lunch one day. Branny’s mother said:
“Come in, darling, and say how d’you do to your pretty aunt.”
Branny stared at Aunt Nellie solemnly. She said, giggling:
“Not pretty with these awful glasses on, Constance. There, I’ll take them off.”
Branny was still unimpressed. He saw a massive woman with fluffy pinkish hair, a great deal of jewelry, light bloodshot eyes, and a high color. Since he was in love with a small, dark woman with large eyes and ivory cheeks, he had every reason to remain unimpressed. When his aunt had removed the glasses, he said gravely:
“You aren’t so very pretty even now, are you?”
Aunt Nellie laughed again and said: “Now is that a gallant thing for a little pukka sahib to say?”
And being a woman, she never forgave him.
There was no silver penny this time — and no departure.
Aunt Nellie was currently without occupation or domicile. She had made the war an excuse to get away from India where she had left a dyspeptic colonel husband to his curries and concubines. Abandoning India, however, had not made her abandon its vocabulary. Everything around Oaklawn School became pukka or not pukka. Lunch became tiffin. Mrs. Foster was a memsahib, and Aunt Nellie drove the servants almost crazy by addressing them as ayahs and giving capricious orders in bastard Hindustani. Also, owing to the demands of her elaborate toilet, she spent an indecent amount of time in the bathroom.
But at first Aunt Nellie’s visit was rather a joke to Branny. Her garrulous intrusion upon his private teas with his mother was tiresome, but she brought compensatory delights. For example, he discovered the joys of exploring her bedroom and made the younger pupils goggle incredulously at the report of his discoveries there. Once, thinking Aunt Nellie safely in the bathroom, he had bedizened himself with her cosmetics, wrapped himself in her satin peignoir, and attaching a pinkish false front to his head, had run down to the second form classroom to the hysterical delight of a bevy of little girls.
But he had paid dearly for this short-lived accolade. Aunt Nellie was lying in wait for him behind the bathroom door as he sneaked upstairs. She swooped out, a bald, outraged condor, and seized him. Snatching her property, she shook Branny till his teeth chattered, slapped his painted face several times, and banged his head against the bathroom wall so hard that Mrs. Foster, attracted by her beloved’s outcries, hovered ineffectually, screaming:
“Pas sa tête, Nellie. Pas sa tête.”
Nor did Branny’s punishment end there. For a whole week Aunt Nellie refused implacably to eat at the same table with him and he was obliged for seven days to forego his teas with his mother and to partake once again of thick slices of bread without even jam at the “kids” table in the school diningroom.
These tribulations, however, did not greatly disturb Branny for Aunt Nellie, despite the length of her stay, was a visitor and must, surely, depart in time. Soon he and his mother would be alone again and life would reassume its untarnished bloom.
He wrote Aunt Nellie a polite little note of apology which was frigidly accepted. In due course the teas were resumed.
It was on the second evening of his rehabilitation that Branny began to suspect Aunt Nellie was not a visitor after all. Over the teacups his aunt and his mother were discussing the French Mademoiselle who had been recalled by a telegram to her native Paris.
“It’s about time, Constance,” remarked Aunt Nellie, “that I started to do my war bit, n’est ce pas?”
And sure enough, when it came to the period for French next morning, there was Aunt Nellie to give the lesson, Aunt Nellie insisting on a far-too-French French accent from her pupils and making herself ridiculous by singing little French songs which no one understood.
From that day on Aunt Nellie gave up Hindustani and interlarded every sentence with a French word or phrase and embellished them with pretty Gallic gestures.
But Anglo-Indian or Anglo-French, she seemed to have become a permanency.
As the summer term drew to a close Branny continually begged his mother to deny this dreadful possibility but she put him off by references to the school’s goodwill which were meaningless to him.
The blow really fell about the middle of the summer holidays. For several days his mother had been busy with correspondence. The zeppelin raids over London had started and parents were rushing their children from the east to safer schools in the west. It had been necessary to have a new stock of prospectuses printed.
Idly Branny picked up one of these as he stood by his mother waiting for her to finish a letter. The front page riveted his attention. Under the heading:
in place of the familiar Principals, Mr. and Mrs. George H. Foster, he read:
Principals: Mrs. George H. Foster
Mrs. John Delaney
Miss Hilda Foster
Mrs. John Delaney was Aunt Nellie. Under other circumstances, that would have been sufficiently terrible. But Miss Hilda Foster was Aunt Hilda, the fabulous, almost mythical Aunt Hilda of whom the very memory was panic.
And she was coming here to Oaklawn to be joint headmistress with Aunt Nellie and his mother. The idea was beyond contemplation.
“But, mummy,” he wailed, “she can’t come here. This is your school. It was yours and daddy’s.”
Mrs. Foster kissed him a trifle wistfully and explained that his father had wished and willed things so.
“You’ll see, Branny,” she concluded, “with your aunts here we’ll have more time together. Time for walks in the country, picnics.”
But Branny felt desolation like a stone in the pit of his stomach. He locked himself in the lavatory and cried until he was violently sick.
Aunt Hilda arrived with the first days of September, about two weeks before the beginning of the winter term. She was even more terrifying than Branny’s memory of her.
Having been paid companion to a difficult lady of title, she had waited for her death and its consequent small annuity before descending on Oaklawn. She immediately showed that there is no female tyrant so absolute as one who has herself been under tyranny.
In appearance she was almost the exact opposite of Aunt Nellie. There was no false front about Aunt Hilda, either actual or metaphorical. A short, heavy woman, she wore her grayish hair back uncompromisingly from her forehead. Her manner was as uncompromising as a steam shovel. She creaked like one, too, as she moved heavily about, clucking at the inefficiencies of the establishment. She clucked over the school accounts, the tradesmen’s bills. She clucked over the laxity of the domestics, and several of Branny’s friends among the kitchen staff — especially those on whom he could rely for snatches of food at illicit hours — were sent away in tears. Aunt Hilda clucked disapprovingly over Mrs. Foster too, whisking away all her sister-in-law’s faint protests with an abrupt:
“Nonsense, Constance.”
When the more important things in the establishment had been clucked into a state of dull efficiency, Aunt Hilda turned her attention to Branny, who, she decided, was a shockingly coddled child. First of all she banished him once again to the fear-inhabited attic bedroom. Having neither the strength of will nor the command of vocabulary to defy her sister-in-law, Mrs. Foster tried at least to soften this blow for her son by providing him with a night-light. But Aunt Hilda snapped: