Author(s): Anne Fine

Fiction - middle

Anneli hates art - art lessons are awful and trips to galleries just make her squirm. Now she's got to try to find something precious in her attic to make some money to save the big house on the road, now a home for children with disabilities. It seems ridiculous, but when she looks, she finds a door leading through her attic and into a room in the next house. It's full, to Anneli's disgust, of paintings. But there she meets Mrs Pears who tells her about her brother Tom. He copied huge numbers of paintings by other artists, hoping to raise money to run away from his father who hated his painting. But he never used his running away fund - the war came, and he was killed, leaving his last painting to his sister Mrs Pears. Anneli is puzzled by the picture - it shows the big house, but with only six trees showing, instead of seven. She knows it's a clue, and finds the running away fund for Mrs Pears. And now they know how to make money to save the house - Anneli sits for her art class to recreate Tom's painting of Mrs Pears as a child, and the paintings are very successfully auctioned off to their parents.