The Warlock of Wyberton Wood

“Well, he really exists and I know ‘cos I’ve seen him.” Penny Lytton was one of those children whom, secretly, the other children, if they dared to come out and say it, didn’t really like that much, and certainly not all the time, and yet somehow, maintained a veneer of surface popularity and attracted a following. She was the girl whom you just knew would be Mary in the Nativity Play, and who read the poem when the local MP came to open a new classroom at Brightsbridge Junior School. 

     But this was a different matter entirely from wearing a blue headscarf or reciting The Daffodils. Even those children who didn’t, or said they didn’t, believe in the Warlock of Wyberton Wood (who was always referred to as a Warlock and not a Wizard) were reluctantly impressed. Always assuming she was telling the truth about it, but say what you might about Penny, nobody had ever caught her out in a lie. 

     “What’s up, Meg?” Jack Holborn asked his older sister Meg when the two were trotting home from school. Meg was ten now, and that was double figures, so they were allowed to walk home from school themselves. Jack was a contradiction of a child. He’d spent a great deal of time in adult company when he was younger because he had a health problem. Happily, that was cured now and he was as robust as any other little boy. But Meg – who was a clever and quite mature child herself – often had the feeling that he was really the elder of the two. He also had a habit of appearing to know what you were thinking. Yet at the same time, he still talked to his teddy bear, and nobody had any intention of telling him not to.

     “It’s that Penny Litton,” she sighed. “She always has to be superior. Today she told us she’d met the Warlock of Wyberton Wood.”

     “She could be telling fibs,” Jack pointed out.

     “I know, and I want to think she is, but I can’t.”

     “Well, there’s nothing she can do that we can’t! Let’s go and look right now!”

     They both paused, weighing up the import and implications of such a thing. They had told Mum and Dad they would go to the library after school. Mum, who was a nurse, was on the afternoon shift at the hospital, and Dad generally worked from home, but for once he was giving a lecture at a local college. Normally Sylvia next door would have looked after them, but she was visiting her sister, who wasn’t very well.

     So they had been told it would be fine for them to go to the library, and they could come home a little bit before Mum or Dad was due home, but not much. “Which is silly, ‘cos we could start a fire in five minutes as easily as we could in two hours,” Jack had observed (though not in front of Mum and Dad, of course). Meg did a double take, but told herself she should have learnt not to be shocked by such things. It was just Jack’s way. He would no more start a fire than he would voluntarily eat broccoli, and anyway, there were no matches in the house.

     “We’ll be in bother if we get found out,” Meg pointed out. But her mind was working quickly, too. The regular children’s librarian was on leave and her stand-in, who was very nice but didn’t pay much attention, was only there for another couple of days. They would almost certainly not be found out, and anyway, they could pop in for a couple of minutes when they got back from the woods, so they weren’t telling fibs.

     It wasn’t a long walk to Wyberton Wood. Really, it was as good as in the town itself. Nor was it an especially large wood. On a clear day, in one of the spots where the trees weren’t as close together as in some of the others, you could see where it ended from where it started. But still, there were conifers with feathered green branches, that filtered the sunlight into patterns on the little sandy paths, and if you were in the right place you could almost blot out the noise of the traffic on the road that ran past the forest (not that it was the busiest of roads anyway) and just hear birdsong instead. Agile squirrels scampered up and down the trees and jumped from one tree to another.

     And in the middle of it there lived the Warlock of Wyberton Wood.

     There certainly was a little house there. That much was fact and not disputed. Meg had heard Mum say it was “Hardly romantic, just one of those pre-fabs.” She didn’t know what pre-fab meant, but guessed it might mean before something was fabulous and maybe, if you were lucky, you might just chance upon the little house when it had become fabulous. The trouble was, she already didn’t really believe that, so she didn’t ask Mum or look it up.

     Meg and Jack weren’t the kind of children who were always hugging and kissing each other, but it felt natural and right and good as they walked hand in hand into the wood. Eager, unafraid birds hopped around looking hopeful, and Jack said, “I wish now I’d saved that hummus salad Mum put in my lunch box instead of flushing it down the loo.”

     “They probably wouldn’t eat it,” his sister consoled him.

     “I don’t blame them.” 

     “The trees are thinning out,” Meg said, a couple of minutes later. They were. They had reached a little clearing in the wood, and the little house was there. “It – looks like one of those cabins they have on building sites,” Jack said, weighing it up. “Like a little square block.”

     There was no fence or hedge, nor even a little border of flowers around the little square house in the woods. Meg and Jack had agreed that they mustn’t trespass – after all, as they both knew, trespassers could be prosecuted. But it was hard to know how far you could go without trespassing. Of course you weren’t supposed to go into other people’s gardens, but where did the wood (or at any rate the clearing?) end and the garden begin?

     “It’s – quite ordinary, really,” Meg said, unable to hide her disappointment. “He even has some of those imitation animals like Grandma does.” Now Meg was not a precocious snob on the matter of garden ornamentation. She rather liked the resin meerkat and peacock in Grandma Susie’s garden. But Grandma Susie was a sensible woman who lived in a street of neat little semi-detached houses. You expected to find imitation animals somewhere like that. You didn’t expect to find them around the Warlock of Wyberton Wood’s little house. But he had a trio of little imitation rabbits and if that wasn’t bad enough, one of them was pale blue, and no rabbit was ever meant to be pale blue.

     “He’s coming out of the house!” Jack exclaimed. The door opened and the Warlock of Wyberton Wood came out. The children didn’t need to say a word to know that the same two thoughts had occurred to both of them. Penny didn’t need to be so superior now, because they had seen him too. But he was – well, disappointing. Oh, there was nothing threatening or nasty about him, and of course they didn’t want there to be, but he was just a plump little old man with trousers that were a bit too long for him, and he didn’t have a cloak or a wand or even a beard. He was humming to himself in a way that wasn’t so much out of tune as entirely without a tune. And he had seen them!

     “Afternoon, young ‘uns,” he said.

     “Good afternoon, sir,” said Meg. Their head teacher, Mr Sullivan, liked to make out he was very modern and informal, but he still seemed to like it when he was called sir. It wasn’t a guarantee to get you out of trouble, but it did no harm. They hoped the same show of respect would work here!

     “You like my garden, eh?” He chuckled. “You’re obviously nice kiddies, and thinking of something polite to say without telling fibs, so I’ll put you out of your agony. It’s nothing much to write home about. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a couple of tricks up my sleeve!”

     Jack looked decidedly interested at the word tricks, but Meg was inclined to think it might just be what Miss Mallory had called a turn of phrase like saying someone fought like a lion when of course it didn’t really mean they developed four claw-studded paws.

     He didn’t utter any special words, just nodded his head and said, “Come on, you lot. Show the young lady and gentlemen what you’re made of!”

     Now it was possible, just, if you tried hard enough to convince yourself, that you could mistake very still real rabbits for very realistic imitation ones. But one of those rabbits being blue rendered that impossible, as did the fact that they were performing a dance and singing far more harmoniously than the Warlock of Wyberton Wood. They watched in astonishment that never went away but mingled with delight, and joined in the dance. 

     “Now come on, young’uns,” the Warlock said, after a while. “You can come and see me another time, you know. And you’d best make sure you’ve time to spend a couple of minutes in the library, so you don’t make yourselves into fibbers!”

     So he could read minds, too!