Monster Mission

They had started to repair the house, and planted a garden, and then one day they had found an oiled seabird washed up on a rock … Only it turned out not to be an oiled seabird. It was oiled all right, but it was something quite different - and after that they realized that they had been called to the Island by a Higher Power and that they had found their life’s work.

But one of the sisters, Betty, had not cared for the Island. She hated the wind and the rain and the fish scales in her tea and the eider ducklings nesting in her bedroom slippers and she had gone away and got married to a tax inspector in Newcastle upon Tyne and now she lived in a house with three kinds of toilet freshener in the loo, and sprays to make her armpits smell nice, and not a fish scale in sight.

But the point was that she had two children. They were horrible, but they were children. She called the boy Boo-Boo and the girl Little One (though they had proper names of course). But horrible though they were, they were children and because of this her sisters had become aunts since all you have to do to become an aunt is have nephews and nieces.

Which is why now the sisters looked so surprised and said: ‘But we are

aunts.’

‘Not that kind,’ said Etta impatiently. ‘I mean the kind that live in an office or an agency and call themselves things like Useful Aunts or Universal Aunts or Aunts Inc. - the kind that parents pay to take their children to school and to the dentist, or to sit with them when they are ill.’

‘Why don’t the parents do it themselves?’ asked Myrtle.

‘Because they’re too busy. People used to have real aunts and grandmothers and cousins to do it all, but now families are too small and real aunts go to dances and have boyfriends,’ said Etta, snorting.

Coral nodded her head. She was the arty one, a large plump person who fed the chickens in a feather boa and interesting jewellery, and at night by the light of the moon she danced the tango.

‘It’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘You would be able to pick and choose the children - you don’t want to end up with a Boo-Boo or a Little One.’

‘Yes, but if the parents are truly fond of the children we shouldn’t do it,’ said Myrtle, pushing back her long grey hair.

‘Well of course not,’ said Etta. ‘We don’t want a hue and cry.’

‘But if the children are nice the parents would be fond of them,’ said Myrtle. ‘And if they aren’t we don’t want them either.’

Etta sniffed. ‘You’d be surprised. There are children all over the place whose parents don’t know how lucky they are.’

They went on talking for a long time but no one could think of anything better than Etta’s plan - not if the position of the Island was to be kept secret, and there was nothing more important than that.

There was one more aunt who would have been useful - not the one with the three kinds of toilet freshener, who was no use for anything - but Aunt Dorothy, who was next in age to Etta and would have been just the sort of person to have on a kidnapping expedition. But Dorothy was in prison in Hong Kong. She had gone out there to stop a restaurant owner from serving pangolin steaks - pangolins are beautiful creatures and are getting rare and should never be eaten - and Dorothy had got annoyed and hit the restaurant owner on the head with his own wok, and they had put her in prison. She was due out in a month but in the meantime only the three of them could go on the mission and they weren’t at all sure about Myrtle because she was not very good out in the world and when she was away she always pined for Herbert.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay behind, Myrtle?’ said Coral now. But Myrtle had decided to be brave and said she thought that she should come along and do her bit.

‘Only we won’t say anything to Daddy,’ said Etta. ‘After all, kidnapping is a crime and he might worry.’

Captain Harper lived upstairs in a big bed with a telescope, looking out to sea. They had mostly given up telling him things. For one thing, he was stone deaf so that explaining anything took a very long time, and for another, as soon as he saw anybody he started telling them stories about what life had been like when he was a boy. They were good stories but every single aunt had heard them about three hundred times so they didn’t hang around if they could help it.