When the enchanted animals of Hexwood discover they soon won't be magical anymore, they have to concoct an unlikely plan to save their village and themselves.
'Last Christmas in Hexwood' is a seasonal story of witches, enchanted animals and a series of unlikely plans to save Christmas.
Chapter 3
Just to the west of where the Twitten crossed the stream called the Rill, it carved a ditch for itself through a spur of the high ground of the ledge. On either side of the path rose steep banks, overhung by a tunnel of trees, so that the walls of the ditch were a tangled mess of roots, and in between these roots were the houses that made up the high street of the village of Hexwood.
On the other side of the bridge over the Rill was a crossroads, and at that crossroads in the wood was a house, and in that house lived a witch. We need to be clear at this point that this was not some cackling storybook evil witch. This was a modern, generally quite cheerful witch who wasn’t even doing magic, or at least not anything that you would call magic. She was a sort of research witch, and she had procured a grant to experiment with a certain kind of very interesting mushroom. She was in Hexwood simply because she had identified it as a likely place for these mushrooms to flourish. She did cackle sometimes, it's true; but generally only because she had read something funny.
Anyway, she had been right about the mushrooms; they had flourished, and in doing so they had entered the ecology of the wood. And because they had certain properties -- as well as producing spores and glowing in the dark -- some of the animals that lived in Hexwood, the foxes and rabbits and badgers and mice and so on, had started talking. They had then, much to the witch’s delight, started wearing clothes, building houses and creating a little community for themselves.
What was fascinating was that this applied only to the mammals. The birds and insects were part of the same ecology, but they appeared entirely unaffected. This was definitely worth looking into. The witch was sure, now, that she was going to get more than a single paper out of this study. Maybe even a book. This was going to be big, once she published. This was very exciting indeed.
It was exciting for the animals, too. Not long ago they had grubbed for worms in the dirt or hunted each other through the thorny, panicked night, red in tooth and claw. But now they had waistcoats and penny post and hot running water. Surely that couldn’t have been them, doing all the running and hunting, the toothing and the clawing? They lived in a village.
And it was a proper village too. It had a pub, the Green Knight, run by Brock the Badger. It had a post office, run by Mrs Mouldywarp, the mole -- even though most of the animals lived in the village and not one of them knew anyone beyond the wood, and so they had no real need to send letters at all. In fact, although they could talk, most of them could neither read nor write; but nevertheless they would often queue all morning to dictate a letter to Mrs Mouldywarp, who would write, address and send it for them. All most of these letters said was: “I have queued all morning to send you this. I will pop round to see you get this later when Mr Mouldywarp delivers it. Yrs, sincerely, etc”. Then off the recipient would go to the post office in order to send a reply and everyone was jolly happy with themselves.
The village had shops too. There was Terry the Squirrel’s carpentry shop, Miss Sleekit the mouse dressmaker (such tiny stitches!) and the greengrocers run by Buck Rabbit.
This was where Urchin the Hedgehog was on the first of December, already stocking up on nuts for the winter season: because he had a list for Christmas preparations, and the tasks on the lists were sorted by date, and the task for the first of December was nuts, and so here he was.
Here also was Martin Ruckenau, the witch’s familiar. To be fair, she called him her ‘assistant’, but Martin preferred ‘familiar’ as being more traditional. Likewise, the witch would have preferred him to wear something practical, like the overalls she favoured; but Martin was a chimpanzee, and so wore a waistcoat covered in braid and sequins.
“It was good enough for my father, rest his soul, and he was only playing the barrel organ,” said Martin when the witch protested, yet again, at his gaudy get-up. “It’s an heirloom. Besides, the role of witch’s familiar calls for a certain flair, I have always believed, and this is mine.”
Martin was an extremely dignified ape with a long, solemn face and a straight-backed demeanour, and the waistcoat looked extremely silly on him; but the witch had learned, eventually, that it wasn’t worth arguing with him about it. He would just stand there, looking down his muzzle at her, quizzically disappointed. Besides, he was an excellent, loyal and dependable assistant - or rather, familiar - and she felt he had earned his little foibles.
And here he was now, in his spangly waistcoat, in Buck’s grocer’s, holding up the queue.
“Any spare boxes you have, Mr Rabbit,” said Martin. "Tea chests, palettes, baskets: they’d all be useful.”
“Chests and palettes and baskets, I have,” said Buck. “Spare? Not so much. Chests have tea in, over there; palettes, vegetables, over there; baskets, nuts, right here. In use, you see.”
“Nothing out back?” said Martin.
“Plenty out back,” said Buck.
“Aha!” said Martin.
“And all of them in use,” said Buck. “Buy a chest of tea, and you can keep the chest if you like.”
“And keep the tea, which defeats the object,” said Martin. “I need them empty, Mr Rabbit, to put things in, you see. Buying more things would just make the whole operation more difficult. We’re moving out, not storing up.”
“Ah,” said Buck. “Your mistake there is coming to a greengrocer. Storing up is what we’re for. You want Terry, he’ll make you some chests. Or little Miss Minutus, she weaves the baskets. Takes her a while, though, being so small.”
“Old Brock might have some barrels,” ventured a mouse in the queue behind Urchin.
“Old Brock might have some barrels” said Buck. “There you go, master Ruckenau, try the Green Knight, if you don’t mind your belongings smelling of beer. Now, what can I do for you, little Urchin?”
“Thank you very much, Mr Rabbit,” said Martin, tipping his hat to them. "And to you, Mrs Mouse, for actually being helpful. So refreshing. Good day.”
Urchin’s next stop was the Post Office, where he was hoping to buy some Christmas cards and also to book a time for Mrs Mouldywarp to write them all for him. It was while he was waiting in the queue there that he told the vole next to him what he had heard about the witch moving out. The news travelled up the queue all the way to Mrs Mouldywarp so that by the time he reached the counter, she told it to him all over again and he had to correct her on several points.
Similarly Buck mentioned it at the bar of the Green Knight and Brock confirmed it.
“Emptying my cellar, he is, though not of beer, you’ll be glad to hear,” said the Badger, pulling a pint for Reynard, who had just popped in on the off chance that Brock might be selling beer. He was, and so it seemed rude not to try some.
“What’s this, Brock, mate?” said a ferret from the other end of the bar. “Been raided, have you? Scallywags about?”
“No, no, Hob,” said the Badger, chuckling. “No funny business. This is that Martin Ruckenau, from the house across the way, like, borrowing barrels.”
“Witch is moving out,” said Buck. "They’re packing up.”
“Madame Befana is moving out?” said Reynard, pausing in his pint. "My goodness, that’s big news. I wonder where she’s going? I wonder who will take the house? It’s only Martin himself who’d be big enough to live in it and he’ll be going with her no doubt. Maybe we could sub-divide it. Put in more walls and floors. You could get a lot of families of us animals into that house. We could all live in it together, in separate… compartments, I suppose you’d call them.”
“Who’d want to live like that?” said Buck. “Ridiculous fox.”
“The witch moving out,” said Reynard, lost in thought. “And at Christmas, too. I wonder if she’s going before or after. We ought to do something to mark this. After all she’s done for us.”
The door to the bar opened and Mr Mouldywarp the postman stuck his head in.
“Have you fellows heard...” he began.
“The witch is moving out,” said Buck. "we’ve heard.”
“Well, well,” said Mouldywarp. "I’ll just go and make sure they’ve heard up at the big house.” And he was gone again.
“We’ll have to think about this,” said Reynard. “Any ideas?”
“Ideas are your department,” said Buck. “That, and the next round. Same again, Brock, please.”
Share this post