A Silver Lining Read Online Free PDF Page B

then she was too ill to care what was being said.
    She turned the knob, taking care not to kick the rotten panel on the bottom of her door. It needed replacing, but the last time she had tackled Bobby Thomas about it he had told her in no uncertain terms that the rot was due to her neglect, and all tenants had a responsibility to keep their houses in good decorative order, which meant painting them at least once every two years. The price paint was, he might as well have suggested her financing the redecoration of the Town Hall.
    Keeping her coat on, she walked down the bare, cheerless passage. Pushing aside the curtain that hung in place of a door, she went into the kitchen. If there was any residue of Christmas warmth, she couldn’t feel it. The room was cold and uninviting. Her mother had economised again by not lighting the kitchen stove. The table had been cleared of their breakfast things, and a clean cloth laid; the floor swept, and the rag rug shaken. It had probably cost her mother a few knocks and all morning to complete the simple tasks, but she knew it was useless to remonstrate. Her mother would only deliver her standard martyred reply: ‘If you stop me doing what little I can, I may as well lie down in my box now. At least then I’ll no longer be a burden to you.’
    Her mother’s chair, the only chair in the house that boasted a cushion, was cold. She opened the door to the washhouse and called out, ‘Mam!’ There was no point in looking in the tiny parlour. The three-piece and piano her mother had bought with her father’s first year’s wages had long since been sold to pay pressing bills.
    She went into the back yard and opened the door to the ty bach. Another griping pain came and she fell in front of the thunder box.
    She retched, but there was nothing left in her stomach except bitter green bile. As she lay on the stone floor she heard her mother’s voice echoing over next door’s wall.
    She should have known. Betty Lane made a point of asking her mother over on days when their chimney failed to smoke. There was always an excuse –her mother was needed to unravel old sweaters for wool so that larger striped ones could be re-knitted for Betty’s eight growing children, or to tell stories to keep the little ones amused while Betty coped with the family wash or the baking.
    Alma was grateful because it meant her mother could sit in the warm, but that didn’t stop the intimation of charity from hurting.
    She returned to the house and walked up the stairs to her bedroom. The temperature was no warmer than outside. Condensation on the window had dripped into icicles that hung like stalactites from the sash. The water in the jug on the rickety chair she used as a washstand had frozen, and even the bowl she washed in was fringed with hard, beaded droplets.
    Her entire wardrobe of waistcoat and skirt, second white blouse and ‘best’ summer sprigged cotton dress hung from bent wire hangers hooked on to the curtain rail behind the old chintz curtains her mother had bought years ago from Wilf Horton.
    She laid her coat over the patchwork quilt that her mother had stitched eight years ago. It was the last thing she’d made before losing her sight, and Alma thought of it as a patchwork of her life.
    In the centre were the thin cotton pastel squares of her baby dresses, stitched double thickness for extra strength. Around them were six large pieces of rich red velvet, all that remained of the only party dress she could remember, which her mother had made from her own ‘best’ pre-marriage dance dress.
    Then came circles of navy cut from her school gymslips interspersed with the white of old sheets and blouses, and the green and gold striped silk lining from the only suit her father had ever owned. He had been killed in a pit accident when she was three years old, but the suit hadn’t been unpicked until four years ago; her mother couldn’t bring herself to take the shears to it before then. Alma had