Behind the Scenes at the Museum Read Online Free PDF

girl of about nine years old, older than the boys, sits on a stool by the back door, apparently oblivious to the noise her brothers are making. This is Ada. Her long, pale gold hair falls in a mass of curls and is held back from her face by a ribbon which is limp with the heat. Around her feet a few chickens scratch aimlessly. She is crooning to a doll lying cradled in her arms and her face has assumed an expression of maternal piety rarely seen outside the Nativity. A farm dog sleeps in the shadow of a barn across the yard, and a black cat sits on a wooden plough lapping up the blistering heat and occasionally washing itself in a random, lazy way. Beyond the fence are fields, some with cows, some with sheep. Some empty. On the south side of the cottage a garden has been dug out of the unpromising chalky soil and rows of undersized cabbages and carrots can be seen, wilting in the dry earth. By the door of the cottage, marigolds and cornflowers droop in the bleaching glare of the sun.
    The whole effect is as if someone had taken an idyllic rural scene and set it slightly off-key – the sun is too hot, the light too bright, the fields too arid, the animals too thin. The cottage, although charmingly pastoral from the outside, has a suspicious gingerbread and walking-stick candy air about it. Who knows what’s inside?
    Suddenly, without modifying her Madonna-like expression in any way, the girl picks up a stone and throws it at her brothers, hitting the younger, Tom, on the head. They jump apart in a state of genuine shock and run yelling into the field, united in mutual disgust at their sister’s behaviour. Ada remains impassive, returning her gaze to the doll-baby. The sun stands at midday, white-hot with anger. In the kitchen of the cottage a woman is making bread, slamming down the dough onto a wooden table, picking it up, slamming it down again, picking it up, slamming it down. A child of, as yet, indeterminate sex is sitting underneath the table, hitting wooden blocks with a wooden hammer. (So it’s probably a boy.) It has the same angelic curls as its eldest sister.
    The woman, flushed with the heat from the kitchen range, pauses every now and then to straighten her back and run her hand across her forehead. She kneads the small of her back with her fists. She has a toothache. Her belly, swollen with the next child, keeps getting in the way of the breadmaking.
    This woman is Alice. This woman is my great-grandmother. This woman is lost in time. This woman has beautiful fair hair that is scraped and pinned into a sweaty bun. This woman has had enough. This woman is about to slip out of her life. One of those curious genetic whispers across time dictates that in moments of stress we will all (Nell, Bunty, my sisters, me) brush our hands across our foreheads in exactly the same way that Alice has just done. A smudge of flour powders her nose.
    Alice is thirty-one years old and pregnant with her seventh child (she has already lost one – William, Ada’s twin, dead of some unknown fever at three months). Alice came from York originally. Her mother, Sophia, had married a man much older than herself and her father was delighted at the good match she had made, especially as her elder sister, Hannah, had caused a shameful scandal by running away with a man who had been court-martialled out of the navy. At the time his daughters’ fortunes couldn’t have seemed more different – one living amongst wealth and privilege, the other in dishonour and poverty. Sophia’s husband’s money had come from buying and selling railway land, vast profits made quickly and, as it turned out (before he hung himself), fraudulently. So while Alice had been born in a gracious house on Micklegate, with a sunlit nursery and more servants than were necessary, by the time she was fourteen the family’s fortunes had tumbled and the family’s name was disgraced. Alice had been the only child, doted on by her mother, but Sophia never recovered