“What is a will?” I asked her.
“It is something you write before you die,” she said. “And in it you say who is going to have your money and your property. But most important of all, it says who is going to look after your child if both the mother and father are dead.”
A fearful panic took hold of me. “It did say you, Grandmamma?” I cried. “I don’t have to go to somebody else, do I?”
“No,” she said. “Your father would never have done that. He has asked me to take care of you for as long as I live, but he has also asked that I take you back to your own house in England. He wants us to stay there.”
“But why?” I said. “Why can’t we stay here in Norway? You would hate to live anywhere else! You told me you would!”
“I know,” she said. “But there are a lot of complications with money and with the house that you wouldn’t understand. Also, it said in the will that although all your family is Norwegian, you were born in England and you have started your education there and he wants you to continue going to English schools.”
“Oh Grandmamma!” I cried. “You don’t want to go and live in our English house, I know you don’t!”
“Of course I don’t,” she said. “But I am afraid I must. The will said that your mother felt the same way about it, and it is important to respect the wishes of the parents.”
There was no way out of it. We had to go to England, and my grandmother started making arrangements at once. “Your next school term begins in a few days,” she said, “so we don’t have any time to waste.”
On the evening before we left for England, my grandmother got on to her favourite subject once again. “There are not as many witches in England as there are in Norway,” she said.
“I’m sure I won’t meet one,” I said.
“I sincerely hope you won’t,” she said, “because those English witches are probably the most vicious in the whole world.”
As she sat there smoking her foul cigar and talking away, I kept looking at the hand with the missing thumb. I couldn’t help it. I was fascinated by it and I kept wondering what awful thing had happened that time when she had met a witch. It must have been something absolutely appalling and gruesome otherwise she would have told me about it. Maybe the thumb had been twisted off. Or perhaps she had been forced to jam her thumb down the spout of a boiling kettle until it was steamed away. Or did someone pull it out of her hand like a tooth? I couldn’t help trying to guess.
“Tell me what those English witches do, Grandmamma,” I said.
“Well,” she said, sucking away at her stinking cigar, “their favourite ruse is to mix up a powder that will turn a child into some creature or other that all grown-ups hate.”
“What sort of a creature, Grandmamma?”
“Often it’s a slug,” she said. “A slug is one of their favourites. Then the grown-ups step on the slug and squish it without knowing it’s a child.”
“That’s perfectly beastly!” I cried.
“Or it might be a flea,” my grandmother said. “They might turn you into a flea, and without realising what she was doing your own mother would get out the flea-powder and then it’s goodbye you.”
“You’re making me nervous, Grandmamma. I don’t think I want to go back to England.”
“I’ve known English witches”, she went on, “who have turned children into pheasants and then sneaked the pheasants up into the woods the very day before the pheasant-shooting season opened.”
“Owch,” I said. “So they get shot?
“Of course they get shot,” she said. “And then they get plucked and roasted and eaten for supper.”
I pictured myself as a pheasant flying frantically over the men with the guns, swerving and dipping as the guns exploded below me.
“Yes,” my grandmother said, “it gives the English witches great pleasure to stand back and watch the grown-ups doing away with their own children.”