Christmas Lavender in the Wardrobe
The CBB -> St Clare's House

#1: Christmas Lavender in the Wardrobe Author: CBBSecret Santa PostPosted: Wed Dec 21, 2005 11:06 pm


Santa here had a little trouble logging in as himself, maybe he ate too many vegetarian pork pies, and the CBB chimney was too small. Anyhoo, here we find ourselves (munch munch on left-out biccies) in NIKKIE'S bedroom. Santa would like very much to thank his most helpful little elf, Kate, who works in Santa's beta-ing room. It's right next to the board-games and train-sets room.
To business! Ho ho ho, Nikkie, I reached deep into my sack and found this wrapped in shiny silver paper. It has your name on it!
(All dialogue is EBD’s own)


Nikkie walked upstairs with a thumping headache. Her little children had been asleep for the last two hours and the house was tidy once more. She let herself into her bedroom, looking forward to the solace that a cup of tea, her slippers and her favourite book would bring. Her cup clinked on the tiny bedroom table as she looked for the book. Her eyebrows knit together. She was sure she had left Harry on her coverlet. Oh well, maybe she had left him downstairs. It was the latest release, and she had been so busy with her eldest little girl being ill that she hadn’t had time to read much more than the first three chapters. She was anxious to know that Dumbledore would survive.

Downstairs she hunted to no avail. This frustration was only adding to her headache. Then, quite suddenly, she saw the corner of the curtain lift slightly, and a small white paper note slide towards her on the floor. Startled, she slipper-shuffled to the space on the floor that the note now occupied, bent down, and unfurled it with her fingertips, for it was a very tiny note.

YOUR BOOK IS IN THE WARDROBE

‘Ho ho ho’, she rolled her eyes to herself. ‘This must be my husband having a laugh. And I thought he had gone to get my little darling’s birthday present along with the last of the Christmas shopping.’ Nikkie sighed before taking herself back upstairs, this time to the spare room, where the big old wardrobe that had belonged to her great-grandfather had stood since it was left to her. It was still full of rows and rows of old, fur coats that Nikkie had been meaning to drop into Oxfam for, oh, months now.
She twisted the little gold knob and pulled the ring toward her to open the door of the wardrobe. Pulling her red fleecy dressing-gown a little closer around her, for she felt a bit of an icy chill now, she lamented the fact that she hadn’t even had a chance to have a sip of tea yet. She pushed her hand into the darkness and felt around the floor of the closet. Nothing but a few ancient moth-balls. They rolled out onto the carpet of the spare room as she stepped in, thinking to find Harry on a high shelf. The coats got in the way, but she pushed and pushed further in... until...

Nikkie gaped. She had reached the back of the wardrobe, or rather, where the back of the wardrobe should have been. Instead she found herself in a world of white. She whipped back around and was comforted by the fact that she could still see a crack back into the wardrobe. Slowly she turned around and took in the fact that everything was not quite as white as she had thought on first glance. The sky was yellowish, which Nikkie knew from her Chalet School books was a tiding of snow. The trees were laden with small mountains of the stuff and the ground was covered. She inhaled crisp clear air, and knew that she was not in England anymore. Her nostrils flared as she realised what had happened. Though she had not read the book herself for many months, she had taken the children to see it in the cinema only last week. Nikkie read the signs and knew herself to be correct. She was in Narnia.

The next thing, of course, was to look for that faun. Nikkie shook her head as she tried to remember his name. Someone cute had played him in the film, but that was the extent of her recollection. She wondered if he would be as cute in real life. In real life?! What was she thinking? She must get back to the children – if one of them woke up, they would be frightened. But then, she remembered that time spent in Narnia counted as nothing in the real world. With another sigh, Nikkie decided to stop deciding what was real and what was not. She pulled up a fleecy cherry-coloured hood, dug her toes further into the big novelty slippers that made her feet look like giant’s claws, and made up her mind to find the lamp-post.

After walking for ten minutes into that silent, white-washed world, Nikkie came to a halt. She was tired, the headache had returned, and she was afraid of getting lost. A thick fog had started to descend. What if she were to have Edmund’s luck, instead of Lucy’s, and find the White Witch instead of the faun? Then all such thoughts were driven from her, as she heard the soft mush, mush, mush of approaching footsteps. Clarion voices carried easily through the thin air. Nikkie slipped behind a great tree trunk and listened eagerly.

“Has Joy Bird apologised yet?”
“Not a word. I’m not going to speak to her till she does, either. To talk of Auntie Madge like that! She must have been mad!”
“Oh, quite loopy. What are you going, Primrose? Will Steve and Teddy let us snowball, d’you think?”
“Why not? There’s no one to see what we do.”
“No; but it’s rather a narrow path. Won’t they be afraid we’ll tumble if we ramp about?”
“Oh, bother you! I s’pose we’d best wait till we’ve got leave. Here, Bride; you run and ask, will you? I’d do it, but Steve was rather sarky about my last lot of prep, and I don’t know if she’s forgotten yet. You got full marks, so she might say yes to you. Anne, you weren’t bad, either. You go with Bride.”

With a gasp, Nikkie recognised the words. The voices and their accents weren’t quite as she had imagined them, but she remembered this conversation alright. She pinched her arm violently to test whether or not she was dreaming. As she watched the blue bruise appear slowly, it became apparent that she wasn’t. She looked around her again, but with a closer examination this time. This wasn’t Narnia! If she squinted, she could make out two great pillars at the front of a long drive. Why, this must be... all the factors pointed to it... she couldn’t be though, could she? How on earth had she found herself in Plas Howell?!

Nikkie dropped to the snowy ground with a bump. She didn’t care about her dressing-gown anymore. She bit her thumbnail as she tried to think this through. Bride. Primrose. And none of them speaking to Joy Bird. This could only be one book. But where was Lavender herself? The voices had disappeared at this stage and Nikkie was alone again. She thought hard. Lavender... Lavender... of course! But, oh dear! They must be nearly at the snowdrift now! Would Nikkie get there in time?

She picked up the fleecy belt that was given to trailing along the ground and shoved it into the pocket. She must get to that snowdrift in time and make sure that they found where Lavender was or else they might miss her and ... ! Nikkie shuddered to think of the outcome. If Lavender was not found, she would die. Bride would probably be blamed, as her sheepdog. And Joy Bird would carry around that guilt with her forever – that she had marched Lavender to her death. It was unlikely the Chalet School could reform a girl in that state. But Nikkie couldn’t let any of the girls or mistresses see her. If they did, Elinor herself would suspect something, and Nikkie didn’t want to be written out of the story before she found her way back to the wardrobe door!

Creeping along behind a row of trees, Nikkie stopped planning as she had begun to hear voices again.
“She went down that way, Miss Edwards.”
“Do you mean she fell?”
“No, she went.” Nikkie then heard lots of different voices calling out Lavender’s name loudly. She knew that any moment Miss Stevens would order Peggy Bettany to oversee taking all the girls to the far side of the drift, and she would have a far better chance of diving in and pulling the poor girl to safety then.

“Joy! What are you doing?”
“Lavender fell over, Miss Stevens. She’s somewhere in this drift, but I can’t find her.”
“Stay where you are, Joy. I’m coming down, and we’ll soon find her. Go on digging, though.”

Sure enough, in mere moments, the rest of the party was ordered away from the scene and Miss Stevens prepared to descend into the rift. Joy was already digging hard in one corner, but Nikkie knew that she was in the wrong place. Miss Stevens turned her back to lower herself carefully down. Nikkie saw her chance and seized it with both hands. She dived forward swiftly but silently. The snow was soft, especially around where the unconcious girl was buried. A few moments fast cleaving through the snow saw Nikkie triumphantly pulling on a scrap of brown-blazer-sleeve. She pulled hard and finally loosened enough of Lavender’s arm to lay it on the upper layers of snow. Then she slunk away back into the trees to see if her plan had been successful. She did not have long to wait.

She was too far away to hear the quiet words uttered by Miss Stevens to Joy, but she saw the girl draw off to one side and wait, and guessed that the mistress had sent her there. Miss Edwards came then to help Miss Stevens and they dug around the loosened arm for an anxious ten minutes. Nikkie wasn’t worried anymore for, as she recalled, EBD herself had stated that there would be an anxious ten minutes of digging. Soon Lavender lay full-length on the snow and Nikkie heard the words she was waiting for.

“Well?”
“All right, thank God! But she must be got out of this and taken home as soon as possible. Let me see. Isn’t there a path down the road a little further on? Then Mollie and Peggy must bring the girls along to it, and we must carry Lavender through the drifts. I believe there’s a hedge there, but we can get over it somehow. There’s sure to be traffic of some sort on the road now, and we must hold up a car or something, and get them to take her back to school as quickly as possible. Give Peggy a shout, and then I’ll tell her what to do. Joy must come with us. I don’t believe any of us can get up again.”

Nikkie sighed with relief. She looked down in disgust at her red fleecy dressing-gown, which was soaking wet and freezing now. Still, she couldn’t afford to cast it off. Goodness knows what wartime Wales would think of her funky slogan nightie! Creeping noiselessly in the direction from which she had come, and then running when she had gotten past where she knew the girls would be waiting, she reached the long streak of yellow light that was coming through the open wardrobe door. Thinking to herself that next time she came through it, she would think to actually take one of the coats with her, she stepped through. The dry warmth of the central heating hugged her as soon as she was fully through and she made haste to shrug off the wet clothes. At that moment, her husband arrived back with the last of the Christmas shopping.
“Hey hey!” he laughed. “Is this for my benefit?”
Nikkie snorted, then thought the better of it. “Darling, I’ve been in the bath all evening. Do give me a chance to get dry.”
Grinning, he retired downstairs to unpack the shopping bags. He called up that he had gotten a fancy-dress outfit as the birthday present – Nikkie would soon be the proud mother of a very fancy-looking six year old Hermione-in-her-ball-gown, and she smiled to herself at the idea. As Nikkie towel-dried her hair, she caught a glimpse of her own treasured, wartime-economy, gaily-jacketed, first edition of Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School and it seemed to her to twinkle a little more brightly than usual this evening.
“Hrmph!” she scolded it. “Twinkle all you like. But the Lavender I know has red ringlets, not light brown!”

THE END and MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

 


#2:  Author: RosyLocation: Gloucestershire-London-Aberystwyth PostPosted: Wed Dec 21, 2005 11:44 pm


Lucky Nikkie. Thankyou Santa

 


#3:  Author: LesleyLocation: Allhallows, Kent PostPosted: Thu Dec 22, 2005 5:14 am


Oh that was excellent - well done Nikkie - good thing you were there! Laughing

 


#4:  Author: KateLocation: Ireland PostPosted: Thu Dec 22, 2005 10:30 am


*gloats a little cos I never get to gloat*

Thanks Santa! Very Happy

 


#5:  Author: nikkieLocation: Cumbria PostPosted: Thu Dec 22, 2005 8:25 pm


Thanks Santa, you have certainly researched me!
Quite right I do love James McAvoy Razz

 


#6:  Author: Chalet_school_loverLocation: Gloucester PostPosted: Thu Dec 22, 2005 8:46 pm


That was great! Lucky Nikkie! Very Happy

 


#7:  Author: VikkiLocation: Sitting on an iceberg, freezing to death!!! PostPosted: Fri Dec 23, 2005 12:09 am


Lucky Nikkie, and well done Santa!

 


#8:  Author: ChairLocation: Rochester, Kent, England PostPosted: Fri Dec 23, 2005 2:17 pm


Thanks, Secret Santa. Nikkie is so lucky. I'm glad she got to go through the wardrobe and she was able to help rescue Lavender. It was always my dream when I was a little girl to go into Narnia through the wardrobe but now I guess I would rather go into the CS world through the wardrobe!

 


#9:  Author: RuthYLocation: Anyone's guess PostPosted: Fri Dec 23, 2005 9:52 pm


Lucky Nikkie

Excellent Santa.

Ruth

 




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