Dark Places Read Online Free PDF Page A

unpleasing and crusted beings. I felt how my cheeks puffed and popped with my humbug, I felt how the folds of fat around my neck glistened, I felt how the red blood surged under my skin, and I was ashamed.
    How I loathed them in my shame, and wished for the pavement to open under them, and make them vanish! I thought to give them what I had, all my humbugs and the half-crown and two threepences in my pants pocket, to make them disappear and leave me alone with my full stomach, but I thought then that if I gave them all I had they would not disappear, but follow me. I pictured them trailing after me all the way home, with the woman’s rough voice slicing my flesh with her words, and the silent children trudging, staring at my large buttocks moving up and down under the Norfolk jacket. They might stay then, sitting on the front steps or across the road, the woman’s voice coming in at the windows as we sat down to our saddle of lamb, Mother and Father looking at me as a fool for bringing them home with me.
    But the woman’s hand, shaking, was stretched out, almost touching one of my buttons, and she would not let me go now. I could not seem to turn away from her tight-stretched grey face, and could not have pushed past, for I could not touch that papery skin, those dingy bits of fabric, and I feared to touch the human body and soul within.
    Their eyes all watched like small animals as I felt in my pockets and came up with my fists full: humbugs in one hand and coins in the other. Their eyes were not on my face now, but on those fists, and I flung them open over their heads so there was a clattering and tinkling on the pavement, and they all dived on them, sprawling over themselves to grab and scrabble. While they clawed on the ground, I ran, straining against my clothes, bursting at the underarms of my jacket, feeling my chest tighten and my breath grow reedy, until I was safely home.
    â€˜Why have you been running, Albion?’ Mother wanted to know, coming out from the drawing-room all cool and smooth. ‘Have you been fighting again, Albion?’ In Mother’s cool fragrant presence, ravenous-eyed women seemed a blasphemy. I felt shame at even having such images in my mind; they were like a shameful bodily function. All words stuck in my throat, and I could not tell my serene mother that I had been ashamed, and afraid, and nearly sick with some feeling or other, and that the world had toppled from its tidy axis for a few minutes.
    But the image of that woman nagged at my mind, and ranged itself with the shuffling men lining up outside the church, and sitting along the gutter with their boots in the mud, chewing slabs of bread.
    I thought long and frowning over the idea of hunger, and decided to forgo my elevenses one morning so that by dinner-time I would know what it meant to be hungry. Under my jacket my stomach made petulant sounds, and there was a shaky sensation around my fat middle, and my mouth tasted of pennies, and I could not concentrate, and broke one of the masts of my best brig. I was glad, then, when I heard Manning hit the gong, and I could go down to the dining-room. That was hunger, then!
    But, as I ate through my plate of cold tongue with pickle, and my slice of cold pie, and my pile of bread-and-butter, and my glass of milk, I wondered. There was always food. I knew that some kinds of food cost more than others, of course, but there was always bread, there were always eggs and milk, and after all potatoes grew right there in the dirt: there was always food.
    I thought, then, to try to enquire of Father, in a man-to-man way, whether it was true that a person, or a woman, could be hungry, actually have nothing to eat, when, as I had established, there was any amount of food bursting out of the ground and being extruded from fowls and cows. As far as Father was concerned I was interested in an abstract question of political economy, and he was pleased to see me taking an interest at