A Song for Joey Read Online Free PDF

I was an
Italian princess, much more important than those kids.
I followed Gran's advice. As soon as the kids started taunting me, I glared at them
haughtily and swept elegantly (I thought) indoors. It felt good, because the more they
shouted, the better I knew I had beaten them.
-♪-♫-♪
    In the mind of a child, everything is normal. Looking back through the eyes of little
Belinda, the world looks simpler then than it is now. But that is because there were few
pressures on a five-year-old; life for adults was just as hard as at any other time.
    For anyone who did not live through those early postwar years, it is hard to understand
how very different life was then. Almost all the things we take for granted now were
either not yet invented or too expensive for ordinary folks.
    In nineteen fifty-one, for example, when I was five years old, television was yet to
become accessible to the masses; we relied on radio for entertainment and the latest news.
There were no automatic washing machines - we did our personal clothes in the big sink
in the kitchen, and sent the bed linen to the laundry - but we did have a vacuum cleaner, a
rather frightening beast that was as tall as me and made a dreadful noise when it was
switched on.
    Telephones were just beginning to become more common in ordinary homes, though
businesses had quickly recognised how useful they were, and Gran had owned one before
I was even born.
    Floors were rarely carpeted - more likely they had a covering of linoleum (which we
polished) with the odd rug dotted around. Central heating was for the wealthy, the rest of
us had open coal fires in each room and draughts from every door and window. Washing
dried on a line extended down the garden (if you had one), water was heated in a kettle on
the gas cooker.
    Little girls played with dolls or helped their Gran (or at least tried to); boys played
marbles, or football, or scrapped. We wore sturdy clothes, designed to last, and if
something became torn, we mended it. I had two dresses - while I wore one, the second
was in the wash.
    Boys wore short trousers of grey flannel, and leather shoes with scuffed toes. We didn't
feel deprived - you can't miss what you don't even know exists - and we didn't question
the way of things. If you had something, you assumed everyone had the same. I thought
everyone had a Gran to look after them, didn't know what it was like to have a mother and
father.
    Each year, on my birthday, Gran took me to my mum's grave, at the huge cemetery on
the other side of town, and we laid flowers and talked to her. She never answered me - I
don't know if Gran had any response. Gran also talked to God ... a lot. She used strange
words like 'thou' and 'thine'; I figured God must be foreign.
    On Sundays, we went to St John's Church, a short walk from The Nest . She left me with
Mrs Murdoch, a skinny, nervous woman with mousey brown hair and frumpy clothes.
Mrs Murdoch ran the Sunday School.
    Actually, I liked Sunday School. While I sat with crayons, drawing pictures of baby
Jesus and camels in the desert, I could hear the grown-ups singing and praying in the main
hall. We children had our own songs and prayers, and I joined in enthusiastically.
Whenever I think about it, I can vividly recall that little back room and the five or six
children with whom I shared it. I felt safe there.
-♪-♫-♪
    In the summer of 1951, however, at the age of five, I started to attend Infants School.
This was a different kind of place, with lessons and teachers, pencils and paints, a little
bottle of milk every morning, echoing voices in cold rooms, smells of unwashed bodies
and urine, dinners of boiled potatoes and cabbage and tapioca pudding.
    For the first time in my life, I was thrown into close contact with a whole lot of kids of
my own age, and I was not equipped. Apart from the small group at Sunday School, the
only children I had met before had shunned and taunted me, making me sullen and
withdrawn. In the