Free The Secret Passage by Nina Bawden

she had sounded cross. She had had such a lonely, worrying life—it was even more worrying now she had three children to look after—that she had grown rather prickly and sharp-voiced without realising it. She was a stiff, rather shy sort of person and although she would have liked to be kinder and more loving to the children, she did not really know how to begin. As a result, her brisk, unaffectionate ways froze up even Mary’s kind heart and, as she sat, eating her toast, she began to think that it was all very well for Uncle Abe to say Aunt Mabel was nice and loving underneath . But it didn’t make her any easier to live with.
    After tea, Aunt Mabel went down to the shops to get fresh fish for Miss Pin’s supper. The only kind of fish Miss Pin liked was plaice, boned and steamed in butter. As soon as she was gone, Ben said in an excited voice, “I’ve got an idea.” He was very pink and his eyes shone. “It’s an idea how to make money.”
    Mary and John looked at each other. They remembered that it had been Ben who had asked Aunt Mabel if she was really poor, when they were in the train coming to Henstable. He had never mentioned it since, but that was like Ben. If he had a problem he didn’t talk about it, but turned it over and over in his mind until he had an answer to it. He said now, “we can collect cockles. I saw some men on the beach collecting cockles and they said they sold them to the fish shop. We could do that, then Aunt Mabel would have enough money to buy lots of bread-and-butter.”
    John said, “But you can’t collect enough cockles in a pail. Not enough to sell .”
    “You want a sack, like the men had. There are lots of sacks in the cellar.”
    Ben ran to a door at the far end of the kitchen, opened it, and disappeared. Mary and John followed. They had never been in the cellar and they peered cautiously down the flight of wooden stairs that led down into darkness. Ben’s voice floated up to them. “Put the light on. The switch is just inside the door.”
    John switched on the light and went down the stairs. The cellar was a low, rambling, pleasant place that smelt of dry wood and dust. There was a pile of coke for the Beast in one corner, a stack of wood in another and a bench against onewall with a saw and some nails on it. Under the bench, John found a pile of sacks; he and Mary began shaking them out and choosing the two best ones.
    Meanwhile, Ben roamed round the cellar. Set in the brick wall at one end, were two arched little doors—very low, as if they had been made for dwarves or children. Ben opened one of the doors and found a cubby hole with an earth floor and a wooden ceiling; a tiny room that would have made a splendid hide-away if it had not been full of packing cases and empty lemonade bottles. He wondered if there was another room behind the other door but when he tried to open it, it seemed to be locked or stuck.
    He called out to John and Mary, “Come and help. I think it’s locked,”
    “There are some keys here,” Mary said. There was a big bunch of keys hanging on a nail above the bench. She took them down and went over to the little door. John tried several keys before he found a small one that exactly fitted the lock. It was rusty and stiff; it took two hands and all his strength to turn the key, but it did turn and the door swung creakily open.
    There was a small room behind this door, just as there was behind the other one. At first, the only difference seemed to be that this room was empty and when the children peered in, the air inside felt colder than the air in the cellar. Then they saw that high up in the wall at the back was a small, square, dark hole. A chill little wind blew out of it and a queer smell—a mixture of earth and mice and shut-upness.
    “What is it?” Mary whispered.
    No one answered for a minute. Then Ben said in a low, awestruck voice, “It’s the Secret Passage.” There was a bright,mysterious look in his eyes. He said, very