Casson Family: Rose's Blog

  Rose’s Blog: Free Sampler

  Hilary McKay

  www.hodderchildrens.co.uk

  Also by Hilary McKay

  Binny for Short

  Binny in Secret

  The Casson Family

  Saffy’s Angel

  (Winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award)

  Indigo’s Star

  Permanent Rose

  Caddy Ever After

  Forever Rose

  Caddy’s World

  Wishing for Tomorrow

  (The sequel to A Little Princess)

  The Exiles

  (Winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize)

  The Exiles at Home

  (Winner of the Nestlé Smarties Prize)

  The Exiles at Home

  (Winner of the Nestlé Smarties Prize)

  The Exiles in Love

  Dog Friday

  Amber Cat

  Dolphin Luck

  For Younger Readers

  Charlie and the Cheese and Onion Crisps & Charlie and the Cat Flap

  Charlie and the Haunted Tent & Charlie and the Big Snow

  Charlie and the Rocket Boy & Charlie and the Great Escape

  Charlie and the Tooth Fairy & Charlie and the Big Birthday Bash

  Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Hilary McKay

  Introduction

  The World of the Casson Family

  Rose’s Blog

  Read on for a sneak peek of Binny for Short

  Copyright

  If you liked this, you’ll love …

  Introduction

  Hilary McKay’s Casson family was first brought to life in the Whitbread Award-winning Saffy’s Angel. Caddy, Saffy, Indigo and Rose live with their artist mother Eve and sometimes-there ‘proper’ artist father Bill. Yet out of all the family, it is Permanent Rose whom Hilary’s readers love the most. Fierce as a small tiger, Permanent Rose has her own way of seeing the world.

  After Forever Rose (the last of the books following the Casson family), the eponymous Rose continued to grow up. Hilary posted entries from a blog Rose was keeping on her website, chronicling the further adventures of the Cassons. The blog posts are available here as one collection for the first time.

  The World of the Casson Family

  by Rose Casson

  The first thing to say about the world of the Casson family is that I do not know who is in it.

  Our family has extended. However, it began with Mum and Dad, Caddy and Indigo and Saffy and me in a house that the Victorians built, thinking it would be comfortable (how wrong they were) half way down a long road, in a largish town in the middle of England.

  It looks like the most unmagical place in the world.

  It isn’t.

  Caddy

  Caddy’s real name is Cadmium Gold, but nobody calls her that. My friends say Caddy is pretty. I suppose she is. She moves very quickly and she has a sort of shine about her when she’s happy. She is often happy – it doesn’t take much.

  Caddy says that she likes animals better than people. I don’t really believe this is true, but she thinks it is. Animals do not have to be cute and furry for Caddy to like them. Spiders, worms … Once, right in the middle of a perfectly peaceful day she rushed downstairs and started talking about worms. Apparently they visit … (I nearly started telling you myself.) But if you want to know I’ll put it on Twitter. Say, and I’ll do it.

  The thing about Caddy is that she is kind. I used to think Caddy was kind because it was easier than fighting. Then for an experiment I tried being kind myself. I lasted about half a day. It’s not easy.

  Saffron

  is complicated …

  She’s my cousin as well as my sister because my parents adopted her before I was born, when her own mother (my mum’s sister) died. She didn’t discover this until she was eight and found her name was not on the colour chart with mine and Indigo’s and Caddy’s. She wasn’t too thrilled about that, according to Caddy. She turned intelligent (but maybe she would have done anyway) and waspish and independent and sleek and cool and gold.

  Saffron has a friend who is like her other half. She is called Sarah. I cannot imagine what Saffron would be like without Sarah, nor what Sarah would be like without Saffy.

  Sometimes, when I am painting, I put two colours together that apart you would hardly notice, but together they glow.

  Like the colours of a kingfisher, that blue and that orange.

  Indigo

  Indigo has smoke dark eyes, and brown hair and a very slow smile. He is tall and too thin and stubborn and brave and I think he is the only one of us who really thinks about what will happen next and if it does, whether it will be possible to survive.

  Indigo creates meals by saying, ‘That and that and that!’ Then in everything goes, with chillies. Grilled cheese appears on the top of everything except curry but including the birthday apple cake he made for his friend David.

  What else? He plays guitar but cannot sing. ‘Ooh dear,’ he says, listening to himself. It doesn’t stop him. He likes ice and rock and stones and fossils.

  Sometimes he detaches himself from us all. You see it in his eyes first. Then the way he suddenly lifts his head. And the next thing you know, he is off.

  Gone.

  Mummy

  (that’s Eve to the world)

  It’s not true that Mummy calls everyone darling to save her bothering to remember names.

  And if she seems scatty, she’s not; she’s juggling. She keeps multiple worries spinning in the air. They are:

  Saffy and Caddy and Indigo and me.

  Daddy.

  The needy people who besiege her constantly. What do they need? Sometimes no more than a bit of noticing. To be called darling, or asked a favour. Sometimes they need rescuing. Or forgiving (naming no names but giving hard stares at my father).

  Her other worries are:

  Paint that takes forever to dry (she is a garden shed artist, the sort that paints anything that pays: dead pets, local views, visions, hospital walls). (‘Not exactly art,’ says Daddy.)

  Food. How hard it is to remember to buy. How quickly it vanishes.

  Her car. Petrol. Oil. Water. Air in the tyres. Strange grating noises. Terrible smells. ‘It’s like keeping some exotic pet!’ cries Mummy.

  Her secrets.

  To make up for all these problems she has …

  A shed!

  Which contains …

  The pink sofa!!

  Mummy’s pink sofa is her greatest treat. It is escape and summer holidays, peace and luxury. It has worn out arms and feather cushions, paint splodges, a burnt hole in the back, a knitted patchwork blanket, an awful mangy sheepskin and an endless treasure trove of pencils, small coins, paint brushes, hair clips and teaspoons lost down the back.

  ‘Once it had little tassels,’ says Mummy. ‘Here and here,’ she touches the arms. ‘Never mind.’

  Daddy

  If you didn’t know him, if, for example, you read about him in a book, you’d think he was awful. ‘Samantha?’ you would ask. ‘And Saffy? Did …? Was …? Are you? THAT’S TERRIBLE!’

  If you’d never seen him smile. If you’d never had him rush home to save you from yourself. If you’d never wiped your teary, runny face on his jacket, watched him hang up his shirts (wooden hangers, 4 cm apart, colour coded, not touching), seen him search through the fridge …

  We drive him mad. He drives us mad. He has two lives, one much more glamorous than the other. We are the unglamorous life. The amazing thing is that he keeps coming back. He needn’t, but he does.

  Rose

  by everyone else

  Rose has inherited a great deal of artistic talent
, which she uses with reckless destruction on all that she encounters.

  Bill Casson, father

  I called her Permanent Rose. I knew she would stay. I can’t imagine the world without her. She is perfect (like all the children). That time she went to New York without telling me, and the shoplifting (if you could call it that), the differences she has with darling Bill and those reports from school, those things do not count.

  Eve Casson, mother

  Rosy Pose. Thank goodness she did what she did at my wedding. She was quite right. And absolutely wonderful with Buttercup (don’t call him that).

  Caddy

  Rose. Don’t get me started.

  Saffron

  I don’t know. Rose. I don’t know where you’d begin. Anyway, it’s private, what I think of Rose. She does OK.

  Indigo

  Rose’s Blog

  21 January 2008

  This year my friend Kiran gave me a diary for Christmas. It has roses on the cover and an INTERESTING FACT for every day.

  ‘Oh,’ said Kiran greedily. ‘I didn’t know that! I didn’t look inside. Lend it back to me, Rose!’

  No. I won’t. She would read the whole 365 INTERESTING FACTS in one go. I shall save them and give them out one by one, as prizes when people are wonderful.

  Kiran knows me quite well, so I do not think she will mind if I do not fill in my diary every day. I have decided only to record the very special days.

  Like today.

  Last night, while I was asleep, it snowed. When I looked out of my bedroom window our shabby January street had been transformed. It did not look like real life. It looked like a painting. All the muddled clutter of the everyday world had vanished. Only the lines that mattered were left, and the best shapes, and the grey-blue shadows.

  And it was Saturday, and still very early.

  So I got my friends Molly and Kiran out of bed and we rushed about saying, ‘Look at that roof! Look at those footprints! Look how it’s drifted against the windows!’ But the best place of all was the park. Especially the corner where the trees grow close together. They looked like magic trees painted on shadowy, sparkly paper.

  ‘They are perfect,’ I said.

  Kiran said, ‘As long as no one walks on the snow underneath.’

  Oh dear.

  It was still quite early in the day, but already the snow in the playground and on the paths round the pond was ruined and kicked and stained with footprints.

  ‘It might not snow like this again for years and years,’ said Molly. ‘Not with global warming. We might be grown up!’

  Then Kiran had a very good idea.

  We made six notices on Molly’s computer that she got for Christmas:

  PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON THE SNOW UNDER THE TREES

  And in case people wondered why, we added:

  It might not snow like this again for years and years

  Not with global warming.

  We might be grown up!

  We pinned our notices onto the bandstand and the gate to the playground and the wall of the little hut where you buy ice creams in summer and hot drinks in winter. All that day there were people in the park. Throwing snowballs and running down the paths with sledges.

  Reading our notices, chattering and calling, warming their hands round cups of coffee. Someone built a snowman in the middle of the bandstand. Kiran and Molly and I helped make a huge mountain at the bottom of the slide for the squealing toddlers to land in when they slid down.

  And you may not believe this, but it is true:

  NOBODY WALKED ON THE SNOW UNDER THE TREES!!!

  It stayed quite perfect, shadowy and glimmering, without a single footprint.

  All day.

  Thanks to Kiran and Molly’s brilliant notices. So I rewarded them both with an INTERESTING FACT and it is driving them mad. They find it impossible to believe. Molly is buried behind a pile of Natural History books. Kiran is Googling the night away.

  This is the INTERESTING FACT:

  All polar bears are left handed!

  (Just believe it).

  21st February 2008

  The Good News is No School this week because it is half term. Molly has gone to Winter Guide Camp. Molly’s mum, who is helping to run it, said Kiran and I could go too, if we liked, to help make up numbers.

  Because they are short of actual Guides.

  ‘Please come, please come, please come,’ begged Molly.

  ‘What?’ we said. ‘Camp? This weather? In a tent? Are you mad, Mollipop?’

  And we went on about slugs and snails and spiders, and the probable horrors of winter camp hygiene, and coldness and dampness.

  ‘Don’t do it, Mol!’ we said. ‘Come and stay with one of us instead. You know you will only get frozen/mildewed/attacked by wildlife/lost in the dark.’

  But Molly went.

  And ever since, she has been texting us about campfires and teepees and star watching and circus skills and how everyone was given a choice between a free harmonica or bongo drums or multicoloured recorder the moment they arrived. And about the weather, which has been fantastic, blue skies every day.

  Kiran and I have been ounging about.

  Ounging.

  That’s what Kiran’s mother called it.

  Ounging means hanging about, making sure everyone knows how bored you are in a slightly sad, slightly complaining, very annoying kind of way.

  When Kiran and I ounge at my house nobody takes any notice, so we mostly do it at Kiran’s. It drives her mother mad, and so she finds us jobs to keep us from under her feet. We are so bored we do them with only minimal moaning.

  So today it was shopping. All the bits Kiran’s mother cannot do in the supermarket. Eggs from the organic egg stall. Watch battery from the jeweler’s (who said come back in 15 minutes and what are we supposed to do for 15 minutes?). Worst of all, lamb chops from the three-fingered butcher.

  ‘I am not going in there,’ said Kiran. ‘It is terrible watching him with his axe.’

  So I had to go on my own, and Kiran was right, it was terrible. I am not surprised he has only got three fingers. Amazing that he has any at all, if you ask me.

  Then we got another text from Molly saying she was sitting in the sun cooling off from a very hot shower. Theatre tomorrow, said Molly, then Pizza Hut for supper and then back to the campsite by narrow boat.

  We stamped back to Kiran’s house saying, ‘Boiling hot shower? Theatre? Narrow boat?’

  And other things too.

  ‘Now what are you going to do?’ asked Kiran’s mother. ‘What about vacuuming the inside of my car?’

  So I locked myself into the bathroom and sent a private text, and now I am waiting for the reply.

  Is it too late?

  Is it too late?

  Is it too late?

  NO!

  Crash out the bathroom, run down the stairs, hug Kiran, rush about packing. Worry for two seconds about who will take us? Hundreds of volunteers! Our families are only too glad to get rid of us.

  Tonight we will be sleeping in goose down sleeping bags in a tent. For supper it is veggie spag bol and choc bananas. Molly says they are getting it ready now. They are putting in extra for Kiran and me.

  Interesting Fact

  The average yawn takes six seconds from start to finish.

  ‘Whoever discovered that,’ said Kiran, when I told her, ‘really needs to get a life.’

  16th March 2008

  I wrote so much about Caddy’s wedding-that-didn’t-happen that I think I should say very little about the one that took place yesterday.

  Except that during the part of the service when the vicar asks if anyone has any reason why this marriage should not go ahead the whole church burst out laughing. And I said, ‘No, no! Do it now! Get married quick!’

  So they did.

  10th April 2008

  Panic! Panic! Panic!

  I am panicking because I am eleven years old, and in Year 6 at school. If you live in England and are tha
t age and go to the sort of school I go to (which is the sort of school nearly everyone goes to) then you will very soon be facing a week of exams called SATS.

  At school they say ‘Oh we do not worry our students about these little exams.’ ‘Oh, we take the whole experience very calmly. In fact, the children hardly know anything unusual is happening.’ ‘Oh, actually, isn’t it amazing, the classes find being examined for hours and hours, day after day, (just when the weather has got lovely at last) GREAT FUN!’

  (Oh yes?)

  So I will politely not mention the letters that go home to parents saying, ‘Don’t dare let your children be ill in SATS week. Don’t even think of going on holiday. Please put off all out of school events to a more convenient time. And for goodness sake make sure they eat a good breakfast before they come to school, and go to bed early and bring bottles of water and brain stimulating snacks and lucky mascots (not more than three).

  We don’t want any fainting or nodding off or panic attacks.

  And in the terrible weeks leading up to SATS week, make sure homework is done, and revision sheets gone through, and spellings and tables are recited at every available opportunity.

  And don’t forget the extra SATS classes we are running after school.

  And, by the way, NO PRESSURE!’

  All this is bad enough.

  But I have a worse problem.

  And that is why I am panicking.

  I will write it down tomorrow.

  Today I am just explaining how I feel about SATS.

  I wonder if the Prime Minister would be interested.

  12th April 2008

  Panicking.

  SATS panicking.

  I asked Mr Spencer (our class teacher, not someone you would call a friendly person) ‘What is the use of these exams?’

  And he resisted the temptation to say, ‘They are to prove I am a Good Teacher and this is a Good School (and therefore deserves extra pupils and MORE MONEY).’