Campari for Breakfast Read Online Free PDF

before bed, when I’d much rather be read Winnie-the-Pooh . Rare are the moments when he allows me to stray from the path of great learning. But tonight a poor blackbird crashed into the window, and so we abandoned mathematics and went to bury it, scooping it up from where it had fallen to the ground. Father offered some words of comfort, for I was more than a little distressed. He said I was to try not to worry because he felt certain that the bird had been so stunned that the last thing it would have remembered was flying.
    When we had finished we had a little evening stroll around the grounds of Green Place. He told me what all the flowers are called and how the roses bloom one after another, so that there’s always one that is out. He said that the Michaelmas Daisies are so called because they are in full swing on the feast of St Michael. He told me that badgers dig for bees’ nests underground, and that squirrels catch fish from the pond. It is wonderful being with Father, even if he does turn life into lessons! I asked the name of the purple trees that line our borders and he says they are called buddleia. He said that they love to grow by the railways, where the speeding trains cast their seeds into the air, to be caught up on the wind and scattered afar.

Sue
Tuesday 3 February 1987
    F EBRUARY IS A MONTH that is all about the promise of the year to come, about the buds that haven’t opened yet, poking their tiny shoots out of the ground.
    At the Toastie, Joe and I are getting along, which is intriguing as I’d thought that I was going to get along with Nina Scrafferton, but it turns out she is a closed-in sort of a girl and not a ‘woman’s woman’. Perhaps she sees me as competition because she likes Icarus as well. You can tell because she simply thrives when he talks to her, and indulges all his jokes, then when he leaves the room it’s as if she suddenly ceases to exist. I understand the syndrome because I feel it too. One look from Icarus can keep me thriving for days.
    In an attempt to drum up business, we all came into work in fancy dress for Mrs Fry’s birthday last week and she took a photo of the Toastie personnel and gave us all a copy. So I got my hands on a picture of Icarus, even if he was mostly obscured by his mother’s horns. I put the photo up on the wall in the Grey Room, just level with my eye line as I was lying in bed, so Icarus’s face would be the last thing I saw when I went to sleep at night and the first thing I saw in the morning. Aunt Coral raised an eyebrow at it, because the photo predominantly features Mrs Fry in a tarty costume, but if you look twice you can just see Icarus’s right eye.
    I have spent many an hour gazing in that eye and so it is a hundred per cent distressing when Icarus is offish with me at the café. He isn’t a man of many words, but I’m afraid this only adds to his allure. I have been nearly a month at the Toastie and I can’t tell if my feelings are reciprocal, but I live in all the agonies of hope that they are.
    As I have said, Joe is the opposite of Icarus and always chats to me, as long as Mrs Fry isn’t looking. For some reason unknown to herself she does not approve of her boys fraternising.
    ‘What sort of things are you into?’ Joe asked me one morning last week, while he was on the frother.
    ‘I’m into writing,’ I said.
    ‘No way,’ he said, ‘because that coincides with me being into reading.’ He is an interesting boy, but quite square and with a collection of earnest shirts.
    After hours, I have been working hard on stories for my leading characters, the protagonists for my book: Cara, Pretafer, Fiona and Keeper. Cara is a skinny, simple farm girl and Pretafer is a beautiful seventeenth-century heiress and Cara’s nemecyst. Fiona is Cara’s servant friend, who is forced to dress in weeds, and Keeper is Cara’s spaniel.
Wednesday 11 February
    Something I so wanted to happen has finally happened. And something I didn’t