Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson

years.
    The saintly hermit was smiling. She was totally happy; she enfolded them in her blessing.
    “Yes,” she said, in a deep and beautiful voice. “You have not been mistaken. What you have heard is most truly the Great Hum.”
    Minette and Fabio, who had been spellbound by the apparition, heard the sound of the most heartfelt sobbing beside them and turned their heads. All three of the aunts were crying. Tears streamed down Aunt Etta’s bony cheeks, tears made a path through Aunt Coral’s nourishing night cream, tears dropped on to Aunt Myrtle’s hands as she brought them to her face.
    “It is the Hum,” repeated Aunt Etta, in a choking voice.
    “It is the Hum,” nodded Aunt Coral.
    And Myrtle too said, “It is the Hum.”
    “What is—” began Fabio but Minette frowned him down. She felt that this was not the moment for questions.
    “So does that mean…?” faltered Aunt Etta, and the children looked at her, amazed. They did not know that this fierce woman could sound so shy and uncertain and humble.
    The hermit nodded. “Yes, my dears,” she said in her melodious voice. “It means that this place above all others has been chosen. You have been blessed.”
    The aunts rose slowly to their feet. They could still not quite believe what they had heard, yet the Hum now was everywhere, filling the sky, coming up from the earth.
    “So he is really coming? After a hundred years?”
    The holy woman nodded.
    The aunts did not ask when he was coming. They knew that one must not pry into mysteries, but accept them gratefully, and they were right.
    “I can say no more,” said the saint. “You must hold yourself in readiness.”
    And then she vanished and they were left alone with their miracle.
    “You heard what Ethelgonda said. We must hold ourselves in readiness. Readiness means cleaning. Readiness means tidying. Readiness means cooking and scrubbing and fettling. It always has and it always will,” said Aunt Etta.
    She was almost her old brisk bossy self as she sent the children to scour out the goat sty and swill down the floor of the mermaid shed and pick up the litter washed ashore.
    Almost, but not quite. None of the aunts were quite the same. Etta still hung her navy-blue knickers on the line each morning, but sometimes she patted her bun of hair like a young girl invited to a party. Coral’s clothes got wilder and wilder; she was painting a great underwater mural on the back of the house in all the colours of the rainbow, and the tunes that Myrtle played on her cello had become very powerful and loud.
    “If only Dorothy was here,” said Etta, who missed her sister badly. Hitting people on the head with their own woks was nothing to the excitement of what was to come.
    The Captain insisted on clean pyjamas every day so that he would not be caught short, and the old Sybil danced about in her cave in a frenzy of excitement. She still thought it was unwise to wash her face and hands but she decided bravely to wash her feet. This took a long time (mould had grown between her toes and mould can be interesting—the blue-green colours, the unusual shapes) but once one has heard the Great Hum life is never the same.
    The creatures, in their own way, were as excited, and now the aunts understood why it had been so difficult to get anyone to go away. They must have known that something special was going to happen, even if they did not know exactly what.
    Even the animals that never talked; even the herrings and the haddock and the flounders…even the lugworms buried in the sand seemed to be excited.
    “How can a lugworm be excited?” Minette wanted to know, but when Aunt Etta dug one up for her, she saw that it might be so.
    As for Art, he baked buns—hundreds and hundreds of buns which overflowed his cake tins and had to be stored in sealed bin bags in the larder. But the buns he baked were not ordinary buns, and nor were the omelettes they had for lunch and tea and supper ordinary omelettes.
    Because