Storr Marianne Dreams

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31328-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

'I could get in,' Marianne thought, 'if there was a person inside the house. There has got to be a person. I can't get in unless there is somebody there.' A powerful and haunting classic about a girl haunted by her own dreams. Ill and bored with having to stay in bed, Marianne picks up a pencil and starts doodling - a house, a garden, a boy at the window. That night she has an extraordinary dream. She is transported into her own picture, and as she explores further she soon realises she is not alone. The boy at the window is called Mark, and his every movement is guarded by the menacing stone watchers that surround the solitary house. Together, in their dreams, Marianne and Mark must save themselves . . . The perfect gift for children aged 8+, this well-loved classic will delight a new generation of readers of the Faber Children's Classics list.

Catherine Storr was born in London in 1913. She practised medicine for fifteen years, but never forgot her ambition to be a writer. She wrote her first children's books for her three daughters and many became classics. Marianne Dreams was also made into a film, The Paper House, in 1990. She died in 2001.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Storr, Catherine

Leseproben

- 2 -

The First Dream

Marianne had never been ill for more than a few days at a time; now she was horrified and fascinated to find the days becoming weeks, and the weeks adding up incredibly, so that it was almost a month before she felt like her real self enough to begin to worry about when she was to be allowed to get up. It was, in fact, exactly three weeks and two days after she had begun to be ill, when she sat up in bed waiting for her doctor to come and tell her that she could get up. She was feeling almost well again, and ready to amuse herself with something new; and it was on this day that she found the pencil.

It was in her great-grandmother’s old polished mahogany workbox, which now belonged to Marianne’s mother. It wasn’t used as a regular everyday workbox for darning or mending or dressmaking, but was brought out occasionally for Marianne to look at and tidy up – generally when she was ill and tired of her own toys and books, and needing some extra amusement. The workbox was charming, and Marianne loved it. It had a tray lined with green satin and fitted with little tools with mother-of-pearl handles, for all sorts of elaborate, out-of-date needlework; little satin-covered boxes with mother-of-pearl knobs on the lids, and a space underneath the tray, in which were all sorts of treasures that Marianne’s great-grandmother and grandmother and mother had somehow collected. There were buttons of every kind, ivory lace bobbins, mother-of-pearl counters, an odd chessman or two, short lengths of ribbons, buckles, sequins, beads. Among them, this particular time, Marianne found the pencil.

She knew at once, as you do with some pencils, that it would be a nice one to use. It was stumpy, but long enough to hold comfortably; it had been sharpened with a knife, not a pencil sharpener, and Marianne could see that it would write clearly and blackly, without either scratching, or annoyingly breaking its point all the time. It was one of those pencils that are simply asking to be written or drawn with, and Marianne picked it out of the surrounding workbox muddle, seized her newish drawing book, and drew.

She drew, as she nearly always did, a house. A house with four windows and a front door. The walls were not quite straight, because she wasn’t ruling the lines, and the chimney was a little large. Over the chimney she drew a faint scribble of smoke.

‘It is a nice pencil,’ Marianne thought. ‘I’ll ask Mother if I can keep it. She practically never uses anything out of the workbox, and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.’

She drew a fence round the house, and a path leading from the front door to a gate. She put some flowers inside the fence, and all around she drew long scribbly grass, which she hoped would be waist-high at least. In the grass outside the fence she drew a few large rough-looking stones or lumps of rock, like those she had seen on the moors in Cornwall.

Marianne was no child prodigy at drawing. Like so many of us, she had often had ideas that if she had a particular set of coloured pencils, this tiny paintbox, or that very thick black pencil, she would suddenly find herself able to reproduce on paper the pictures she could see so clearly in her mind’s eye. But somehow the magic never worked; and though this pencil had seemed to hold out the same sort of promise, her house looked as much like a shaky doll’s house, and her grass as little like anything growing, as ever.

She was contemplating the result and feeling the usual pangs of disappointment at her own performance, when she heard her mother come up the stairs, talking to someone. Marianne knew it must be the doctor.

‘Good,’ she thought. ‘Now he’ll say I can get up and go back to school. I’m frightfully bored with being here all the time.’

But when the doctor had examined her, and asked all the usual sort of questions that doctors do ask, he didn’t say she could get up and go back to school. In fact he still looked rather grave.

‘Now, young lady,’ he said, ‘I don’t know if this is going to be good news or bad news, but I’m afraid you won’t be going back to school this term. You’ve got to stay in bed for at least another six weeks, possibly more. I’ll come and see you fairly often and I’ll tell you when you can get up, but until then, it’s bed all the time.’

Marianne stared at him. She had never imagined anything like this. The three weeks she had already spent in bed had seemed endless and the idea of another six weeks, perhaps more, was terrible.

‘But I must go back to school,’ she protested. ‘I’m acting in the school play at the end of term!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dr Burton. ‘But you can’t get up even for that.’

‘But six weeks is a terribly long time,’ said Marianne, ‘I can’t stay in bed for six weeks and not do anything.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve got to,’ Dr Burton said gravely. ‘If you don’t, you might make yourself ill in a way that would last the rest of your life, and we don’t want that to happen.’

‘I don’t care,’ Marianne said, nearly crying, ‘I’d rather be ill for the rest of my life than have to stay in bed any more now.’ She knew it was silly, and that she didn’t really mean it, but she was too upset to mind.

‘Well, I care,’ said the doctor, ‘I don’t want to have to look after you as an invalid for another sixty years. I know it’s upsetting and miserable, but it’s got to be done. Now, cheer up. I’m going to come and see you very often, and your friends can come and visit you whenever you like; you’re not infectious. You’ll find it isn’t anything like as bad as you expected. Goodbye.’

Although Marianne said goodbye in a rather choked voice, she didn’t actually cry till Dr Burton had gone downstairs. But when she was sure he was out of earshot, she hid her face in the pillow and burst into tears. Her mother found her, a minute or two later, with a very red face and a very damp pillow.

‘Poor love,’ her mother said, sitting down on the side of the bed. ‘I’m afraid you’re very disappointed. But never mind, we’ll think of all sorts of things to do, and the time will go very quickly, you’ll see. I’m going to take out a subscription to the library especially for you, so you can have as many books as you want, and I’m arranging for someone, a sort of governess, to come and see you every day and give you a few lessons.’

‘Mother!’ Marianne said, so shocked that she quite stopped crying. ‘Not lessons, when I’m ill!’

‘Yes, darling, you’ll enjoy reading to yourself and all the other things you do more if you don’t do them all the time; and you’ll find it’s much easier when you go back to school if you’ve kept up a bit at home. Now, let me clear up your bed; it’s rather a mess, isn’t it? Did you tidy up my workbox? Was there anything interesting in it?’

‘Yes, quite. I didn’t finish,’ Marianne said listlessly. She looked at the pencil lying on her bedside table, but without the interest she had felt before.

‘I found that pencil,’ she said, pointing. ‘Can I have it, Mother? It’s not silver or anything.’

‘In my workbox? Yes, I should think so,’ her mother replied. ‘I don’t remember seeing it before. Is that what you drew with it? It looks a nice house.’

‘It isn’t very,’ Marianne said, rather crossly. ‘I’m tired, Mother. I want to lie down.’

‘Yes, do, my pet. Go to sleep till teatime and you’ll feel twice the woman. I’ve made jelly for tea.’

Marianne felt that no jelly could possibly comfort her, but she just managed not to say so. She lay down in a tight, uncomfortable ball, and wondered if she would sleep because she was so tired, or would lie awake and cry because she was so miserable; in fact, she was asleep before the door had shut.

Marianne dreamed.

She was in a great open stretch of country, flat like a prairie, covered, as far as she could see, with the long dry grass in which she was standing more than knee deep. There were no roads, no paths, no hills and no valleys. Only the prairie stretched before her on all sides till it met the grey encircling sky. Here and there it was dotted with great stones or rocks, which rose just above the level of the tall grass, like heads peering from all directions.

Marianne stood and looked. There seemed to be nothing to do and nowhere to go. Wherever she looked she saw nothing but grass and stones and sky, the same on every side of her. Yet something, a nagging uneasiness which she could not account for, drove her to start walking; and because at one point on the skyline she thought she could see something like a faint trickle of smoke, she walked towards that.

The ground under her feet was rutted and uneven, and the grass harsh and prickling. She could not move fast, and it seemed that she had walked a long way before she saw that she had been right about the faint line in the sky. It was a wavering stream of smoke, rising in the windless air from the chimney of a house.

It was a curious-looking house, with leaning walls, its windows and door blank and shut. It rose unexpectedly straight from the prairie: a low uneven fence separated its small plot from the surrounding ground, though the coarse grass was the same within and without. There were some large pale yellow flowers about, which Marianne could not recognise, growing a foot or two high; they seemed to be as much outside the fence as in, and certainly did not constitute a garden. Nothing moved except the thread of smoke rising from...