A Sudden Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

somehow forgot ever to write a letter home.
    Jack went over the road toward the south side of the harbour, and Grace walked back to the manse. It was the maid’s half-day off and the house was like a mausoleum. Somewhere upstairs, Lily Hunt Collins lay, or sat, behind a closed door, mourning her son. Her daughter walked half-way up the stairs, looked at Lily’s bedroom door, then went back down to the kitchen and picked up the telegram on the table. She waited for her father to come home.

Grace
CHAPTER TWO
    Y OU’VE WRITTEN THEM already? Given up your position?” Lily “ stood across the parlour from Grace; she wore a brown wool skirt and a beige linen blouse but in her mind’s eye Grace saw a breastplate over her mother’s bosom and imagined donning her own armour for this fight.
    “I did. I told you I would.”
    “And I told you not to! Not without your father’s permission, without mine. Now you’ve given up an excellent teaching position, and for what?”
    Grace had taught school here in Catalina for two years now, ever since getting her second-class certificate from the Methodist College in St. John’s. The best she could say about teaching was that she didn’t hate it. In fact there were parts of it she liked very much: she liked the children themselves, especially the ones who had trouble in school, who came barefoot from the poorest homes and huddled close to the stove for warmth. She wanted to follow those children home, put shoes on their little cold feet and cook a good dinner for their sick, overworked mothers, instead of staying in theschoolroom and dragging the rest of the class through one Royal Reader after another.
    “I’ve told you what I want to do,” she said.
    “And we’ve told you it’s not possible.” Lily was a formidable sight when laying down the law, which as far as Grace could see was all she ever did. She ordered the Sunday School teachers to stop letting the children run wild; she told the WPA their quota of socks for soldiers was unsatisfactory; she scolded the maid for burning the roast and explained how to cook it properly; she told Grace there was no possibility of her going overseas as an army nurse.
    Two months had passed since the news of Charley’s death. For the first fortnight Grace had thought her mother was broken. Lily spent hours, even whole days, barred in her room and Grace found the house empty and cold without that fierce energy she had spent her whole life battling against. Now, at the end of June, the WPA and the Sunday School still sailed on without Lily’s firm hand on the tiller, but here in the house the iron had returned to her spine with the news that Grace intended to leave off teaching, go to St. John’s, and train to be a VAD nurse.
    “I want to do my part!” Grace said—shouted, really. Lily never raised her voice, which made Grace sound hysterical when she wanted to sound firm and brave. Jack Perry had gone off to St. John’s to enlist: it was his turn, he said, to take Charley’s place. Before Charley died, Lily used to rally the WPA women whenever there was word of a deadly battle in France or a ship lost at sea. Send out the word: more men are needed to carry on the fight! Grace would enlist if she were a boy, but girls were going overseas too. She pictured herself on a battlefield, wiping the feverish brow of a wounded boy with a clean white cloth. The soldier in her dream had Jack Perry’s blue eyes.
    “You will do your part here at home. That is a woman’s part—to keep the home, to preserve the values the men are fighting for.”Lily sat down and picked up her embroidery, as if to illustrate how to preserve those womanly values, though she used her needle to point at Grace for emphasis rather than to stab the cloth. “Nursing is no job for a lady. You have romantic ideas about it—in real life it’s dirty and dangerous too, if you go overseas. It’s not a profession for a well-brought-up girl. Nursing is not what you