Daisy's Secret Read Online Free PDF

spare before, have you?’
    ‘And a macktosh,’ put in Trish, now bright eyed and filled with vim and vigour after her sandwich.
    ‘Mackintosh,’ Megan corrected. ‘Did you have to buy a new one, Daisy? We did. Well, new to us, that is. We got them on the flat iron market. Look, aren’t they grand?’ she said, smoothing down the lapel with pride.
    ‘And I’ve got a face cloth. A blue one,’ Trish added with some importance.
    Daisy admitted that she’d no idea what was in her suitcase since her mother had packed it, and the pair looked at her askance, evidently having taken great interest in the treasures their mother had collected for them.
    ‘D’you think we’ll see the sea? Mam said we might.’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Daisy shook her head and tried to smile in response to Trish’s bright gaze. The little girl was rallying, seeing it all now as the adventure her mother had promised. If only she could view it in the same light. Oh Percy, where are you? If only you hadn’t let me down. If only there hadn’t been a war. If only I hadn’t been so foolish as to get pregnant, or if only they’d let her keep the baby, then everything would have been so different. So many if onlys. If none of it had happened, she’d have been happy to steam away on this train into the unknown. It would’ve been a new beginning. Instead, she’d been ordered to shut all that ‘shameful’ part of her life away, just as if it had never happened and her baby boy had never been born. Daisy turned her face to the window so the children couldn’t see her tears.
     
    It had seemed, while they had waited interminably in London Road Station, as if the journey would never start, now they thought it might go on for ever. The train would chug along for a while, and then stop, back up into a siding and wait for seemingly hours until some express or passenger train had thundered by, before edging slowly forward again. Dusk fell and at each station after that the carriage lights would go out just as the train drew into a station which made it difficult to read the signs on the equally dark platform, and then twenty or thirty children would get off and troop out to the buses usually lined up on the street nearby.
    The ‘exodus’ seemed to be very well organised and just a little alarming. Daisy realised they were heading north, which cheered her and made her think of Aunt Florrie again, though they could end up in Scotland, which would be no help at all. When finally it was their turn to get off, they were released, late in the evening, onto a small, unknown, country platform seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Daisy felt stiff and nervous, certain they must have been travelling for days, though it was probably a little over seven hours.
    ‘You’re a very lucky girl to be here at all,’ was the frosty response when she dared to ask the woman in the green hat why it had taken so long. ‘Evacuee trains can’t be given priority over the normal service. People still have to get to and from work, you know. Now, more than ever.’
    This all seemed rather odd to Daisy. Why evacuate them at all if it wasn’t an emergency? And if it was an emergency, then why not give the trainload of children priority? As things stood, it not being a corridor train, desperate little boys had been peeing out of the window, and little girls quietly weeping over the state of their knickers. Poor little Trish had been in floods of tears since this was apparently the first time she’d ever worn knickers in her life and they were brand new. It had been a great relief to escape the stink of the stuffy carriage.
    Green Hat was speaking again, in an even louder voice this time as hundreds of confused, tired children milled about the rapidly darkening platform. She clapped her hands smartly together, to bring them to attention.  
    ‘Since we’ve arrived much later than expected, the dispersal officer isn’t here. Probably gone back home, assuming we’ll arrive