Nurse Matilda goes to hospital - Christianna Brand

'Joanna had scraped up the uneaten rice pudding from all the plates and stuffed it into a spare pillow case. Louisa and Rebecca had collected the bunches of grapes which the patients' kind relatives had brought them, and were treading them into wine in the hospital hip-bath. Daniel had swapped round all the charts at the heads of the patients' beds which told what was wrong with them, and added a few suggestions of his own. Romilly had turned the Little Ones' cots upside down and made sort of wooden cages out of them; and the Little Ones were pretending to be in a zoo. All the other children were doing simply dreadful things too.'

The Brown children have feigned illness and been taken to hospital but with Nurse Matilda running the show they have little chance of keeping up their antics for long.