Tennis Shoes

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Tennis Shoes

Noel Streatfeild

CHAPTER I

HOW THEY GOT THE TENNIS HOUSE

The Heaths lived at Tulse Hill. Their father was a doctor. He had not meant to be a doctor. He would have liked to have been a soldier; but in an accident he was shot through the leg. Unfortunately his leg was very badly hurt and he walked lame ever afterwards. Obviously soldiers have to have both their legs working properly, so he became a doctor instead. He was not the rich sort of doctor people go to see in Harley Street, paying five guineas a visit; but the sort that looks after large families. Dr. Heath quite understood about large families, having four children of his own.

Mrs. Heath was just the right sort of wife for a doctor. She always remembered what had been the matter with the patients, and asked after them when she met them out, and sent round flowers, and lent books when they were ill, and sometimes, when they were convalescent and had no garden, suggested they would get well quicker if they came and sat in hers. She had been very pretty when Dr. Heath married her, but being busy, and running in and out in all weathers, had made her skin rather rough, and anxious times over money had turned some of her hair grey. It did not matter about these things, because neither Dr. Heath nor the children would have anything about her different; they all thought her perfect as she was.

The four Heath children were called Jim, Susan, Nicolette, and David. Jim and Susan were twins. All the children had different shades of red hair. They got this from their father and their grandfather who were red-headed. Grandfather was not red any more except in one little patch in his left eyebrow. Jim's hair was really only just red, many people would have called it sandy. Susan was the beauty of the family. Her hair was the lovely shade of red; it was long, and it curled. At parties and things like that it was combed out and worn loose, and people admired it, which she hated because she was shy. Ordinary days she wore it in two plaits. She was rather tall for her age and thin, and had reddish-brown eyes and a pink-and-white complexion. Nicolette, who was always called Nicky because Nicolette really is a mouthful when you are speaking in a hurry, had not nearly as nice hair as Susan's. It was a very orange red and it was straight. She wore it short, cut in a fringe. As soon as she was old enough to notice people at all she wished she looked like Susan. It seemed hardly fair that Susan should have both things, prettiness and curls. Prettiness she could have done without at a pinch, but she did grudge the curls. Curls are so easy to keep tidy. David had the sort of hair which made it absolutely certain that wherever he went in life he would be called ‘Ginger.' Sometimes he was called Rogers after the film star. This sounded like a compliment but it was not meant as one, and he never thought it was. From the time he could speak at all well he had a passion for long words. He would spend hours looking them out in a dictionary. Sometimes he used the words in the right places, but not always.

Annie was the cook-general. Once, soon after Dr. and Mrs. Heath were married, a travelling circus left an acrobat behind in a hospital. She was the daughter of a trapeze artist. She had spent almost all her life in pink tights, jumping off into the air from one trapeze, catching her father by the ankles as she went, turning a somersault, and landing on another trapeze. Then one day, when she was twenty-one, she missed her father's ankles, fell into the net at an awkward angle, and broke her left arm in about eight places. Dr. Heath was one of the people who helped to put it together again. He got fond of Annie while this was happening, and so he was the person chosen to tell her that her arm would always be stiff, she could never be a trapeze artist any more. Annie had stared at him in horror.

‘Then what will I do, sir? I couldn't fancy a shooting-gallery at a fair or anything like that. Dad won't want me travelling along of him if I can't work in the act.'

‘Well, can you cook?' Dr. Heath asked her.

‘Cook!' She put an immense amount of expression into the word. ‘If you had lived in a caravan and had to cook for eight on a small stove, you would say you could cook.'

‘Well, then,' he suggested, ‘we have no cook. How about you coming to us?'

So Annie came to the house on Tulse Hill. She was rather a rough-and-ready cook and never got away from a fondness for suggesting: ‘How about a bit of tripe and onions?' People in the circus had liked tripe and onions. On the other hand, people in the circus had raged at her if they thought the food bad; so it was very easy to tell her something not very complimentary without hurting her feelings. This is not a usual feature in cooks and Mrs. Heath found it very endearing.

Annie never quite gave up thinking of herself as a trapeze artist. She generally announced the meals were ready by saying:

‘Whoop, whoop, coming over.'

There was one other person in the Heath household and that was Miss Pinn. Lucy Pinn had been trained to be a governess. While she was still training, but before she had ever had a situation, her mother, who was a, widow, got ill and asked her to come home. For eleven years she stayed at home nursing her mother. In the end her mother died, but not before what money there was had been spent trying to get her well. It was not a very cheerful state of affairs for Lucy Pinn. No money, no work, and not a very good chance of getting work because as she had never had a situation she had never had a reference, and people are very tiresome about wanting references. Dr. Heath had looked after Mrs. Pinn and during the eleven years he had come to have a great respect for Lucy. It happened that when Mrs. Pinn died the house at Tulse Hill was desperately in need of someone else to look after it besides Annie, and he saw that here was a lovely way out for everybody. Miss Pinn should live with them, teach the children, and do anything else that turned up.

As a matter of fact, in the end she did no teaching at all. When the twins were eight, Susan was sent to St. Clair's College and Jim to a preparatory school at Eastbourne. Susan was so happy at St. Clair's that Nicky was sent to the kindergarten there before she was seven. David was only four at this time, so he did not need much teaching. The result was that Miss Pinn spent all her time doing ‘anything else that turned up.' She did everything about the house that Annie did not do, which really was almost everything except the cooking. Sometimes, when Annie had what she called one of her ‘sick 'eadicks,' which she said made her feel as though she was swinging on a trapeze upside-down with her stomach in her mouth, she did the cooking too. She spent all her spare time sewing. She looked very odd herself, for she considered that she was not worth dressing. Her skirts were generally longer behind than in front, and she usually had a bow meant to be under her chin and actually under one ear. This lack of interest in her own clothes seemed to make her fonder of other people's. She spent hours poring over paper patterns in
Weldon's
and
Harper's Bazaar
or copying designs out of
Vogue
, in order that Susan and Nicolette should look smart. The only hours that she was smart herself were when she was letting in the patients. For this she wore a white coat which covered her up all over and made her look as though she were a nurse. By the time she had been in the house at Tulse Hill a month, she had dropped being Miss Pinn and was just Pinny to everybody, except Annie, who called her ‘that Miss Pinn.'

The house at Tulse Hill was long and thin and Victorian. It had a porch and a flight of steps leading to the front gate. Annie said she would rather spend her days being the back end of a horse in the circus ring than clean those steps, but she did clean them every morning just the same. When Dr. and Mrs. Heath had first gone to live in the house Mrs. Heath had been in despair over it.

‘Oh, Edward!' she said, for that was Dr. Heath's name. ‘It's much too big for us. Three floors, and all that garden to keep up.'

Of course the house stopped feeling too big when the four children arrived, but it was always a difficult house to keep in order when there was not a great deal of money to spend. It seemed to need such a lot of carpet and so many curtains. Of course, carpets and curtains being expensive, the same ones went on year after year, except when they were taken up, or taken down, to be cleaned each spring. But they were a constant anxiety, and both Pinny and Mrs. Heath spent a lot of time on their knees darning holes, and a lot of time with their arms above their heads mending frayed borders.

When the twins were quite tiny Mrs. Heath had looked after them herself and tried to do everything else as well, except the cooking and letting in the patients, which she left to Annie. This had worked fairly well until Nicky arrived. When she was born the twins were two and a bit, and it was almost impossible to keep an eye on them, wash and dress a baby, and do the work of a big house. Of course it ended in disaster. Jim got through the little gate at the top of the stairs and rolled down to the bottom and cut his head open and had to have four stitches put in. Annie got so confused with trying to help as well as do the cooking and the patients, that she went to the front door with a big bit of dough in her hand, which she left stuck on the door-handle. The dough came off on rather a grand patient as she was going out, and she was cross and went to another doctor. Nicky was left lying in her cot so long by herself that she got bored, rolled over, and stuck a safety-pin into her behind, which hurt so she cried until she almost had convulsions. In fact, the house was in a shocking muddle. Dr. Heath said they must have more help, and more help they had. They had Flossie, Maud, Elsie, Sybil, Doris, and a handy-boy called Fred. None of them stayed more than a few weeks, for none of them could get on with Annie. Annie said they were a poor lot of trash, who did not know a trapeze act from a conjuring trick. She said she was not having suchlike in the ‘big top,' which was what she called her kitchen. It was no good Mrs. Heath pointing out that a servant did not really need to know how to turn somersaults in the air, and whatever she called it the kitchen was only a kitchen and not a circus tent, for Annie's only answer was: ‘It's them or me.' Even if Pinny had been one-half as nice as she was, she could not have failed to have been a success, for when she came to the house it settled down.