The Ogre of Oglefort

CHAPTER 14 The Hag Finds Her Dribble

But it was not only the unusual animals that were to be found in the ogre’s enchanted gardens. After they had worked steadily all week, the Hag said she thought they should have Sunday off and explore the surrounding countryside.

When they had crossed the drawbridge they all went their separate ways. The troll went off toward the line of trees in the distance; the children followed the stream which fed the lake to see where it led; the wizard wandered along the hedgerows looking for interesting plants for his potions. But the Hag went east, to where the flat ground stretched toward the sea.

She walked on, watching the cloud shadows scudding across the fields. She was worrying about Ivo. He seemed to have settled in to life in the ogre’s castle as though he had been born to it, but of course they couldn’t stay here forever. The ogre would get better, and if the worst happened and he didn’t, then his relatives would come and take over. And she simply could not face taking Ivo back to the Riverdene Home. Would they let her adopt him? Almost certainly not. They were more likely to put her in prison for having abducted him.

She had been so busy worrying that she had not looked carefully enough at the ground. Now she found that she was walking on marshy land. Her shoes were beginning to sink into the soil and make a squelchy noise.

The Hag became alert and excited. She looked down at the plants: bog myrtle and cotton grass and bog asphodel — she knew them all. Now the ground was getting wetter and wetter; the squelchy noise made by her shoes was getting louder. Then a frog plopped up in front of her and disappeared into a puddle. A puddle that was almost a pool. She knew it all so well, the way a puddle could become a pool and a pool become a puddle. She knew the dragonflies that hovered over them, the water boatmen scurrying about on the surface. She looked up at the sky, which was reflected in the still water, and saw the swarm of midges which hovered above her head. Now, as she made her way between a clump of bulrushes, the water was almost over the top of her shoes. Almost, but not quite. Because she was not walking in a lake or a drain or a ditch. She would not sink completely — there would always be enough soil to hold her weight.

The Hag made her way to a boulder sticking out over the surrounding marsh and sat down. She was suddenly overcome with joy. As she sat there quietly she could feel the wetness seep up her stockings and reach her knickers… then the bottom of her vest… and she closed her eyes, blissfully remembering.

“Oh thank you, God,” said the Hag. “Thank you.”

Here in this far-off place she had found what she had never hoped to see again.

A Dribble.

It was not only the Hag who had found her heart’s desire. The troll, making his way to the distant line of trees, had found a forest as rich and varied as the woods of his homeland.

“There’s a lot of work to be done there, of course,” he said when he and the Hag met again on the bridge on their way back. “The trees need thinning out, old wood has to be cut away — but it’s a real forest, not silly rows of Christmas trees waiting to be felled. If only my brother were still alive… There’s an oak there that must be five hundred years old.” He shook his head sadly. Here was man’s work, work for a lifetime, not wheeling trolleys up and down hospital corridors. “Well it can’t be helped,” he went on. “We’ve got a few weeks, so we’d better make the most of them.”

Dr. Brainsweller was in the garden, picking interesting herbs which might be useful for magic potions, and thinking about his childhood. It seemed to him that he had not really had much of a childhood at all. When he was a little boy he had wanted to be like other children — he did not feel called to wizardry and magic in any way — but his mother had put him in for every single wizardry competition and had got him the best tutors in the dark arts that she could find.

But now, as he bent down and gathered up a bunch of dandelion leaves, he couldn’t help thinking that it had not really been worthwhile. In his workshop at Whipple Road he had tried to make gold from ordinary metal, and all that had happened was that he had burned a hole in the ceiling. He had tried to make an elixir which would make people live forever, and it had only given the people he tried it on a stomachache. And anyway, thought the wizard, bending down to pick a bunch of chives, was it really a good idea that people should live forever and get creaking bones and have to have hearing aids in their ears which whistled and honked?

And he had to admit that he had been a failure as a warrior. When they charged into the Great Hall, meaning to slay the ogre, he had been muttering every spell he could think of for destroying things — the smiting spell, the thrusting spell, the spell to make a man drop dead — and it hadn’t seemed to make the slightest difference.

Was he doing the right thing with his life? Not that it mattered — there wasn’t anything else he could do.

He had come on a patch of spring onions behind the broken greenhouse, and though he had never used spring onions in a potion before, he thought they looked rather nice. Then he plucked a young shoot from a vine and found a radish under a broken cloche.

The radish with its bright red coloring cheered up his little bunch, and he returned to the kitchen to try and see what he could do. Since he no longer had a workshop he had taken over a corner of the kitchen, and he went there now and fetched a wooden bowl and started to mix up what he had found.

He was turning the leaves over and over when he realized that it had happened again. There was a sound like the soughing of the wind, and then as the mist cleared, he saw it. His mother’s face was looking down on him — and her expression was one of horror.

“Bri-Bri, what are you doing?” she began. “You’re supposed to be a wizard.”

And then this odd thing happened again. Two very large spiders came hurrying across the ceiling, and as they did so their webs swung out from a rafter and completely covered Mrs. Brainsweller’s face in a mass of cobwebby lace. She could be heard getting fainter and fainter and then she gave up, and her long worried face and spectacles disappeared.

The wizard looked up, meaning to thank the spiders, but they had already scuttled away, leaving the webs hanging on the rafter.

When the Hag returned she found Dr. Brainsweller staring down at a bowl full of mixed leaves and looking very shaken.

“What is it, Brian?” she asked him. “You look upset.”

The wizard explained, and the Hag, who was feeling uplifted after her time in the Dribble, did her best to comfort him.

“She’s just worried about you,” she said. “Mothers are like that.”

The wizard sighed. “I’m afraid I’m a disappointment to her.” He looked down at the contents of the bowl, which he was stirring absently. “You can’t blame her for being worried. I mean, it doesn’t look much like a magic potion, does it?” he said sadly.

The Hag looked. She looked again. She fetched a bottle of olive oil from the larder and a bottle of vinegar. She fetched a fork.…

Her face was shining. “No,” she said. “You’re right. You haven’t made a magic potion, Brian, but you have made something much, much better. You have made a salad!”

And from that day, the wizard did more and more of the cooking. He learned to make excellent soup from the vegetables in the garden — because after all soup is not so different from a magic potion; it is all about stirring and mixing — and sometimes a little muttering — and he tried out other recipes. He took great pride in the job and was happy for the first time in his life, and Mrs. Brainsweller stopped appearing to him because the kind spiders always blotted her out with their webs, and gradually she gave up and left her son alone.

So the wizard was happy and so was the troll — and the Hag was in a state of bliss because she knew that the Dribble was there even on days when she couldn’t get to it.

As for the children, they couldn’t imagine a better life than the one they now had.