The Plantation - Di Morrissey [119]
Bette tapped her head. ‘Up here, where no one can take them away. When we leave here and go home I’ll put them on paper for you. And I’ll make Lumpy the most beautiful bright blue colour you’ve ever seen.’
Philip looked at his faded, ragged soft toy which had been stitched up, yet again, and nodded. ‘All right. Lumpy got sick. But he’s better now.’
Bette ruffled his hair. ‘I’m pleased.’ But as they walked into their hut to wait for Marjorie and Evelyn, Bette was more worried than ever by Philip’s appearance. Not only was he thinner, but he also had a pale yellow tinge to his skin and eyes which meant that he was suffering from jaundice. Somehow she had to get better food for him and quinine. How she dreaded going back to work for the imperious mean Hannah.
It was when she discovered the theft of some of her hoarded rice, that Bette had another idea.
‘It’s rats, I know it,’ she said sadly to Marjorie. ‘Little sods got into the container by eating through it. I knew I should have tried to get a tin to store the rice in.’
‘They must be hungry too,’ said Marjorie.
‘Mmmm. I think I might have an idea,’ said Bette. ‘I’ll have to use the last of the rice for a trap.’
‘You can’t outsmart a rat,’ said Evelyn.
But Bette became fixated by the idea of trapping the rodents that scurried around the camp. She scratched a design in the dust and then had Marjorie and Philip hunt for the materials to make it. About a week or so later, she had a box roughly made from wood with wire mesh, some netting, a bit of a bicycle spring, and a kind of tin slide for a trap door. She oiled the slide with grease from the kitchen and set the bait.
‘He’ll get down and get trapped and the little door thing should close. A simple mouse trap device,’ she explained proudly.
The others looked doubtful, but agreed to set the trap and see if anything happened.
Philip could barely sleep for the excitement. ‘Will we hear him go into the trap? And then what are we going to do with him?’ he asked.
‘We’ll see,’ said Bette. She wasn’t about to tell Philip that anything caught in the trap would be eaten. She shut her eyes. God, had it really come to this? Looking forward to eating a rat?
Philip was up early the next morning. He raced to check the trap and came back disappointed.
‘Never mind, maybe tomorrow,’ said Bette. ‘Now off you go with Marjorie. She’s going to take you weaving.’
‘What’s that?’ he asked dubiously.
‘You’ll see. Maybe you can help her,’ smiled Bette.
Marjorie and some of the older children were very keen to make surprise presents for their mothers for Christmas. Marjorie had spent hours unravelling old jute and hessian bags, stripping and joining lengths of fabric from worn-out clothes, strips of dried bamboo and any other material that could be wound around a carved shuttle and a loom made from a precious piece of cardboard with notches along each end. Weaving had been a keen hobby for Gloria, the former matron, so she had shown Marjorie how to do string threads then weave over and under them to produce an interestingly textured woven surface. The woven cloth was to be sewn up at one end to form a kind of handbag, with the straps to be made from braided strips. It was a long and laborious task, but one done with enthusiasm.
The next morning Evelyn, who’d woken very early, shook Bette.
‘I think there’s something in your trap. It’s moving and banging about, I don’t dare look. There’s nobody up there yet. What will I do?’
Bette slid from bed, leaving Philip still sleeping. ‘Don’t make any noise.’ She quickly checked the trap and found it certainly contained something.
‘Come on,’ she whispered to Evelyn. ‘Let’s take this to the kitchen and hope that there’s no one about.’
The two of them walked calmly to the cook house, and Bette took down one of the kitchen knives.
‘Are you going to kill it with that?’
‘I’m not going to use my bare hands.’
Gingerly she started to open the trap, but she quickly stepped back in alarm. ‘God!’
‘What’s in there?’ asked Evelyn.
‘Stand back.’ Bette turned the whole contraption upside down. There was