I wonder if a cuckoo ever really did build a nest in it? she thought. No, Cris said cuckoos don’t build nests. Cuckoos don’t have nests. All they have is other birds’ nests.
She climbed up into the tree and looked down at the wide, spreading stretch of country below, beginning now to be hazy with the blue of evening. She remembered how she had first come to the tree and heard Cris, apparently talking to nobody.
It was right queer about Aswell. Once she met Tobit, Cris just forgot him. I wonder if he’s lonely too.
Half seriously, half not, she put out both hands and shut her eyes. She remembered Cris saying, ‘When we first start talking I can feel him put his hands in mine.’
‘Aswell?’ said Dido. ‘Is you there, poor old Aswell? Can you hear me?’
She waited.
And waited. But nothing happened, and presently she opened her eyes again.
Meanwhile, through the beech grove, across the saddle of down, along the yew-hung path, her friend Simon, sixth Duke of Battersea, came searching for her, following the direction Mr Firkin had given him.
About the Author
JOAN AIKEN comes from a family of writers; daughter of the American poet, Conrad Aiken, her sister Jane also writes novels.
Joan Aiken has written over a hundred books for young readers and adults. Her best-known books are those in the James III saga of which the classic The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was the first title, published in 1962 and awarded the Lewis Carroll prize. Both that and Black Hearts in Battersea have been filmed. Her books are internationally acclaimed and she has received the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the United States as well as the Guardian Award for Fiction in this country for The Whispering Mountain. More recently she has been decorated with the MBE for her services to children’s books.
She has children and grandchildren and lives in Sussex.
Also by Joan Aiken:
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence:
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Black Hearts in Battersea
Night Birds on Nantucket
The Stolen Lake
Limbo Lodge
The Cuckoo Tree
Dido and Pa
Is
Cold Shoulder Road
Midwinter Nightingale
The Witch of Clatteringshaws
(in preparation)
The Felix trilogy:
Go Saddle the Sea
Bridle the Wind
The Teeth of the Gale
The Whispering Mountain
(winner of the Guardian Award 1969)
Short Story Collections:
Ghostly Beasts
Young Fiction:
The St. Boan Trilogy
In Thunder’s Pocket
The Song of Mat and Ben
Bone and Dream
THE CUCKOO TREE
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 409 02459 0
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2012
Copyright © Joan Aiken, 1971
Illustrations copyright © Jonathan Cape, 1971
First Published in Great Britain
Red Fox 9780099456650 1971
The right of Joan Aiken to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.