Connie’s Courage Read Online Free PDF Page A

health certainly won’t mend living here, Connie acknowledged cynically. That they were not used to the kind of surroundings they now found themselves in was obvious. Their clothes might not be fashionable but they were clean and pressed, the young girl’s apron immaculately starched.
    Did they believe they were the only people here to think themselves above such a place, Connie wondered angrily, as the mother lifted her skirt above the dirt of the yard.
    â€˜Oh, I am sure the house will be better inside, Harry,’ the woman murmured bravely.
    The young man was shaking his head and looking very unhappy. ‘Mother you cannot live here. We must find somewhere better.’
    Connie glared at them. Better was it! Well, good luck to them. Normally the only place a person moved to from one of these poverty-ridden slums was either a wooden box or the poorhouse. Which reminded Connie, her own landlord would be calling soon for his rent money, and she had no idea how she was going to pay him. She cast an anxious look toward the entry to the back alley, half-afraid to see him suddenly appear.
    One of her neighbours, making her way to her own house, gave her a curious look. Connie hadn’tmade any friends amongst the other women living in the court. She and Kieron hadn’t been there long enough, and besides she knew that they would shun her if they knew that she and Kieron weren’t married.
    Listlessly Connie made her way back to her room. She felt weak and light-headed, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten, but she wasn’t hungry anyway. Perhaps if she was lucky she might just go to sleep tonight and never wake up again.
    Self-pityingly she thought about how her family would react to her plight. They would be happy to see her dead, she was sure! Her aunts would not have dreamed of hiring a servant who lived in the kind of conditions Connie now did. Her grimy, darned clothes were shabbier even than those worn by her aunt’s scullery maid.
    She touched her concave belly, and turned her face into the grimy pillow to weep.
    Three doors away, Connie’s new neighbours were exploring their new home.
    â€˜Mother, you can’t stay here,’ Harry Lawson protested, as he looked around the shabby parlour.
    â€˜Harry, we’ll be fine,’ Elsie Lawson tried to reassure her son, but in reality she was as appalled by her surroundings as he was. Her elder daughter was yet to join them, so Elsie told Harry brightly,‘When Mavis gets here we’ll set to and clean it up.’
    It was only just a month since she had lost her husband. Thieves had broken into his grocery shop and bludgeoned him to death.
    Elsie was still in shock. The shop had been a rented property, as had the pretty house they had lived in, and her husband had only left her a small amount of money. Of her three children, only one was working, and Harry’s job as a junior schoolteacher at Hutton Grammar School paid him only a pittance.
    She had been told that property was much cheaper to rent down in this part of the city, and naively she had not fully understood why!
    â€˜You can’t stay here, Mother,’ Harry was repeating. ‘I’ll leave Hutton when my contract finishes at the end of next term, and I’ll look for another teaching job.’
    â€˜You will do no such thing, Harry Lawson,’ Elsie stopped him angrily. ‘What do you think your poor father would say if he could hear you saying that? He was that proud of you, Harry. Getting a scholarship and all! And there’s no better public school hereabouts than Hutton. You said when they took you on, that you were lucky and what an honour it was to be chosen to teach there. I know they don’t pay you much now, but when one of the older teachers retires, they’re bound to give you a promotion,’ she finished proudly.
    Harry shook his head. Everything she had saidwas true, but he couldn’t leave his mother