Page 51 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
‘Fiercely independent is the phrase. She loves that house so much. It would be a terrible wrench for her to leave it.’
‘Perhaps there’s somewhere in the village. If she was just in a property that was easier for her to look after and where there were people close by. There’s no need for her to go far, given she loves the Broad so much. Stef, would you talk to her about it?’
‘Me? Aaron, that doesn’t seem right. I hardly know her. Why should she take my advice rather than yours? You’re family.’
He sighed. ‘It was silly of me to think of it. It’s just she thinks I mollycoddle her.’
‘What’s mollycoddle mean?’ Livy put in.
‘It means overprotect, little Sharp Ears. Nothing gets past you, does it?’
Livy looked at him severely. ‘Mummy says you have to ask questions to learn things.’
‘Well, Mummy is right, but some things are for grown-ups to know about, not children.’
‘I know that, Daddy,’ she said, emphasizing each word.
Stef restrained a giggle. Aaron was right about his daughter acting up. Jess and Jack, on the other hand, were deeply involved in their crayoning, apparently unaware of the adults’ conversation. Thankfully, the three children seemed perfectly happy in each other’s company.
‘We ought to be getting back shortly,’ she said, wanting to find out how Pippa was.
‘If you’re around tomorrow, perhaps we could do something with the kids,’ Aaron said, his eyes pleading. ‘We must leave for London mid-afternoon, so the morning maybe.’
It must be difficult for him to entertain Livy on his own, Stef thought, and readily agreed. ‘I’ll do a bit of research,’ she said, ‘and check with my sister.’
Aaron nodded. ‘There’s something else,’ he added reluctantly. ‘Nancy wonders if you’re free for tea this afternoon. I promised I’d tell you.’
Stef smiled to think of what that cost him. ‘I could be. Will you be there, too, or may I bring my tape recorder?’
‘I—’ Aaron’s face creased in a frown.
‘We’re going shopping this afternoon,’ Livy butted in. ‘Aren’t we, Daddy?’
‘Only to the supermarket,’ Aaron said sternly. ‘I’m not made of money.’
Stef would take her tape recorder. The sooner she heard the rest of Nancy’s story, the better.
Twenty-Nine
‘Perhaps you know all about locusts.’ Nancy was in teaching mode, bright and focused on her subject. She looked much better, too, her hair swept up in its usual elegant style.
‘Not really,’ Stef said cautiously. ‘I mean, I know they’re a terrible blight. Otherwise… are they similar to crickets?’
‘They are related to crickets, yes. Locusts,’ Nancy continued, ‘are very large grasshoppers in the familyAcrididae. They are normally solitary, but have a swarming phase when in their millions they devastate crops, causing famine and human misery. Through my research, I came to know locusts very well indeed. Intimately, in fact. Am I lecturing you? I don’t mean to.’
‘Perhaps a little,’ Stef said, smiling. ‘But I don’t mind. It’s interesting.’
‘After my conversation with Professor Briggs at his Easter supper party, I sought his advice about a subject for doctoral research. It was he who directed my attention towardslocusts. He told me I’d be more likely to pick up grant money if I selected an area of study with practical implications. Locusts, he said, threatened global food supplies. They were a scourge, threatening the lives and livelihoods of rural populations worldwide. There could be little more useful to humanity than investigating how to control them.’
‘Wasn’t that the time when that awful insecticide DDT was starting to be used?’
‘DDT compounds had been in use for some years and were very successful in terms of killing pests. Now, of course, we know how devasting DDT was in other ways, because it killed all sorts of useful insects, too, and affected the birds that ate them, but we didn’t understand the extent of that back then. I certainly didn’t when I started my research. Anyway, the professor suggested that I might join efforts to test aspects of DDT’s efficacy, and so that’s what I did. I spent some weeks during that final summer term of my undergraduate studies reading up about them and thought his advice sound. He offered to be my supervisor and, despite my mixed feelings about him, I felt honoured that he’d picked me out. I filled in the forms and was thrilled when that grant came through. At last, I would be a scientist conducting useful research and someone would give me money to do it. The Agricultural Research Council, to be precise.’
‘Did you have to propose an exact aspect of the subject for your thesis?’ Stef prompted, scribbling a note to look up this grants body. She wanted to be clear about Nancy’s studies.
‘The aspect I chose was not one that had been extensively tested. It concerned the nature of some of the different duststhat chemical companies mixed in with the DDT to spray crops. You didn’t use pure DDT. Was one kind of dust or another more effective on locusts? That was my starting point. Some of the first term of my doctorate the following autumn was spent in libraries around London, reading up on research that had been carried out and talking to other scientists about it.’
‘Setting the parameters of your research?’
